To Lor, I say, “He thought I wasn’t—wait, I don’t understand.”
“Just go to him, honey,” Lor says. “He’s in his suite. Never comes up. Spends most of his time as the beast. Ain’t eating, ain’t sleeping, ain’t fucking, and it’s getting ugly around here.”
I surge to my feet before he even finishes speaking, lope up the stairs, taking them three at a time, dash onto an elevator and tap my foot impatiently as it descends. How could he not know I was coming back? I don’t believe Y’rill would lie to me. I frown, remembering her exact words: I adjusted it so he would receive it at the proper time. Okay, so what was the mysterious being’s idea of “the proper time”?
When the door whisks aside, I explode from the elevator, freeze-frame down the hall, and blast through the door into the anteroom of Ryodan’s suite.
It’s still trashed. He never cleaned it up. Broken glass crunches beneath my heels as I stalk to the hidden panel that conceals the doorway to his true suite and push it open.
As I step into the room, I inhale sharply. This room, too, is trashed, every piece of furniture demolished. Savage claw marks scar the paneled walls, the chandeliers are torn from the ceiling, wires dangling, exposed, crystal splinters glistening on the floor. The bed is a collapsed jumble of wood, with slashed velvet pillows, shredded linens, pulverized mattress.
I narrow my eyes, letting them adjust to the gloom. He’s here, I can smell him; that spicy, darkly exotic scent that always clings to his skin, animalistic, druggingly masculine, blatantly sexual. I can feel him, every nerve ending in my body electrified by his presence.
There’s more in this room. Rage. Fury. Grief. It’s embedded in every demolished item, gouged into each panel, carved in deep gashes across the floor.
He grieved me. Believed I was never coming back. But why?
All my senses are cranked up to full volume. This is my night. My choice, my long-denied, deepest desire, and I feel achingly, incredibly alive. I hear him inhale, as if questing the air, catching my scent. Then a rough laugh floats from the shadows near the fire where he sits in a tall armchair.
“Not again,” he says, with a rasp of agony in his voice.
I wince. I know the power and persuasion of hallucination. I lived it in my cage. I’d wake from a tortured slumber smelling food, certain Mom had come home and I was going to open my eyes to a heaping bowl of my favorite creamed corn, topped with a crispy helping of fried chicken and green beans only to find there was nothing there for me to gnaw on but my own knuckles.
Again.
I knew the despair of the moment the brain processed the deceit, that hope crumbled to ash. That the thing you wanted so desperately wasn’t there, and maybe never would be again.
He smells me and thinks I’m a dream.
I intend to fulfill every one of his wildest ones tonight.
I step carefully into the room, skirting bits of debris and broken glass, trying to decide what to say, how to convince him I’m real. Some of my hallucinations had been so extreme they’d nearly unhinged me. I’d actually eaten imaginary meals. Starvation messes with your head. Sustained deprivation of anything you desperately need does.
He desperately needed me. I like that. I feel the same about him. I decide the best approach is to simply touch him. Let our bodies do the talking.
As I skirt the shattered coffee table and approach his high-backed armchair, I inhale sharply, butterflies fluttering from my stomach to my throat. I’m…nervous? No. I’m exhilarated. Okay…a little nervous and have no bloody idea why. Just that this man has always rattled me.
God, this is it! He’s here, I’m here, my skin is flawless ivory, we’re free to be together, to be everything I’ve ever hungered to be with him. I know I’m real; yet even I almost can’t believe this moment has come. I’d thought it would never happen. That I’d lost us forever.
Still, I was quickly disabused of my grief. He’s been grieving me for months.
I clear his chair and circle to stand in front of him.
He tips his head back and stares at me with narrowed silver eyes, stained with crimson streaks. “I’m getting better at this,” he mocks. “Christ, you look so fucking real. So fucking sexy in that dress.” His gaze rakes me from head to toe, heat floods my body, fire ignites in my blood. “I never told you. You define beauty for me, Dani O’Malley. Copper flames and emerald ice. The snow and rose of your skin. Those insanely powerful legs. The steel in your spine. The unquenchable fire in your spirit.”
Well, fuck, he’d silenced me. I’d stand unspeaking for an hour if it meant he’d keep talking like that.
“You’re unbreakable, woman. None of it ever broke you. You’re my fucking holy place. Do you know that? Why the fuck didn’t I ever tell you?”
I swallow hard, tears stinging the backs of my eyes. His holy place. That’s exactly how he feels to me. He’s my temple. I slip into his presence and the world melts away and I’m safe and together we can face anything, do anything, survive anything, always find the next way to be together. I think that’s what love is; holding someone sacred, honoring them, protecting them, living up to the very best of them. The grief, the pain, the fury in his gaze slays me. Humbles me. I will never doubt the depth of this man’s emotion. It’s evident in every too-tightly drawn line of his body, the stony set of his face, the half-wild look in his eyes.
I drop to my knees before him. Holy hell, he’s beautiful. I’ve never seen him like this, dressed only in a pair of low slung, faded black sweats, skin poured over rippling muscle, glistening gold in the firelight. This is Ryodan slumming. His face shadowed with beard growth I’ve never seen that makes him look diabolic, dark, fascinating. He smells like beast and feral fury and no shower in a long time and I don’t give a damn. He smells exactly right to me. Danger. Edges sharp enough to cut myself on. And I know he’ll heal my every wound if I do. His perfectly cropped hair is long, messy as if he’s been running his hands through it. He’s too lean, skin tight against bone, and I know he hasn’t fed in a long time.
I reach out and place a palm flat to his hard, chiseled chest.
No heartbeat. He definitely hasn’t eaten recently. “You might want to,” I tease. “I plan to wear your ass out tonight. Babe.”
He cocks his head, eyes glittering, nostrils flaring. “Even if I were starved you couldn’t wear my ass out. You’re an illusion. I let you get away. Hell, I fucking threw you away and I shouldn’t have. I should have fought for you. I should have told you everything. I should have persuaded you to reject what was happening.”
I slide my palm from his chest, down over his six-pack abdomen, trailing my fingers lightly over his velvety skin. “You didn’t throw me away. You did the hardest thing possible, sacrificed your own desires for my best interests. Trying to keep me here, almost completely black, unable to ever use my power again would have destroyed us both. Neither of us is wired that way. We push the limits. We adapt. It’s what we do.”
“And my illusion offers absolution,” he says with a snort. “I am getting better at this.”
I drop onto his lap, slinging my legs, one over each side of the chair, and take his face in my hands, stare into his beautiful eyes, fire and ice, blood and steel. “Do I feel like an illusion to you?” My dress is hitched up nearly to the top of my thighs. I lower myself, slowly, firmly, against him. He’s hard. He’s so fucking hard. And I’m so fucking, painfully alive and starved to have him inside me. I don’t need foreplay. Not this time. I just need it done. Him. In. Me. Over and over. Maybe the next time I get to be human we’ll bother with foreplay. Maybe I’m not much of a foreplay kind of woman.
His hands close on my waist tightly, fingers digging in with anger, with grief. “You never do. I’ve spent hours touching you, holding you, days fucking you in my mind.”
I say lightly, “Do it again. But it’s me. I get to be a woman ha
lf the time. Dragon the other half. Still, I only have a week. Y’rill helped me change so I could come back and tell you I was okay, spend time with you until I learn to transform myself.”
“That’s the most lucid, coherent explanation you’ve offered yet,” he says dryly, gaze fixed on my lips.
“Because it’s the true one. Kiss me. See how real I am.”
I drop forward, brush my lips to his and my hands are at the top of his sweats and I’m so damned wet, it’s glistening on my thigh.
He inhales sharply, pulls back, glances down. Then his hand is on my thigh and he’s tracing the slick heat up my leg. He groans, “I don’t recall it ever being quite this real. Fuck!”
“Yes, please,” I say with a half laugh, half growl. “Now.”
Then he’s surging to his feet and he’s pushing me back on the floor on a thick fur rug, and I’m sprawling with my legs spread and his mouth is on my thigh, as he shoves my dress up over my hips, then his mouth closes, warm and wet between my legs and he’s licking and sucking and I hear someone screaming and realize it’s me and holy hell orgasm for me is a full mind-body explosion, my brain flies open and shatters into starry pieces and my body is electrified and I buck against his face as I writhe beneath him, then I’m surging up, still coming, desperate to get him inside me, because I’ve come too many times by my own hand thinking of him and this is real and I want it all and I’m launching myself on top of him, shoving him back to the floor and slamming down on him with violence and lust and need, and his eyes are flying wide and flashing bloodred as he snarls, “Fuck, you’re real!”
I have no idea what convinced him and I don’t care and I throw my head back and half laugh, half roar as I take Ryodan Killian St. James inside me and clench every muscle in my lower body that I’m so bloody grateful to have and I don’t have to be careful with him because I can never break this man in any way, and I can vibrate—
“Bloody hell, woman, don’t do that yet!”
But he’s on his back beneath me and I’m riding him and I’m in control, and I’m vibrating and goddamn, yes, he’s losing control and this is the only way I ever want to see this man lose his hold on reality.
“Paybacks are hell,” he snarls as he explodes inside me.
And all I can think is, I hope so. I hope he pays me back over and over again, my entire immortal life.
Then he’s shuddering and his head is back and he’s laughing up at me as he comes and I cup his face, that beautiful, sexy, familiar, challenging, stubborn, human skin poured over a beast face I will never tire of looking at and I catch his joy in my hands and it blazes inside my heart.
* * *
π
Later, I thumb up “Magic Man” on my cellphone and crank up the volume.
Later, I dance naked for him in the firelight and I tell him that I know it’s not a spell—but it’s truth that this woman-child-dragon has been waiting for him all her life.
Exaltation blazes in his eyes as he takes me down to the floor and he gets the top this time, the bastard, and he tells me something I file away but don’t ask about just then because my mouth is busy and I like it being busy in precisely that way.
He tells me he’s been waiting for me much longer than a lifetime. I have no idea what he means. I don’t care. He’s inside me and I’m inside him and the future is as vast and enormous as the starry skies that are half the time my home now.
* * *
π
Much later, I demand to know what happened at the abbey, and he tells me that Kat and the Shedon survived but we lost one hundred and forty-two sidhe-seers that day. I’d indeed killed Balor with my final blast and after I’d vanished, Ryodan scratched a long-chafing itch: Papa Roach was dead, slain at last by that lethal black blade Ryodan had been threatening him with for so long. AOZ was in the battle, too, but escaped and lived to torment us another day. Still, I was back, I was powerful, and one day that cooing little leprechaun would be mine.
Roisin had joined the women at the abbey, although she had no sidhe-seer gifts and was working with Enyo, recruiting other displaced, disenfranchised humans, molding them into an army, giving them purpose, a cause to fight for, a raison d’être. God knows we can all use one in times like these.
Mac and Barrons were still gone. No sign of the Fae in our city for months.
Yet I knew, although neither of us said it—
“Fuck that,” Ryodan says tightly. “I’ll say it. And we’ll print it in the Dublin Daily because the world needs to know and prepare. Our greatest battle is yet to come. It’ll be the Fae, not the old gods. Those bastards are going to turn our world into a war zone, and soon. There’s a scarce-contained violence in the earth, I feel it rumbling beneath my boots, a darkness on the wind, I can scent blood on the breeze. They’re planning, conspiring to seize this planet for their own. War’s coming, and if Mac doesn’t gain control of her power, it’s one we’ll lose.”
“Then we need to make sure Mac has enough time.”
He growls assent.
“Any news of Christian?”
“Same. Kat’s been spending time at Draoidheacht Keep, working on Sean. Still no progress there. He destroys every living thing he touches.”
“People?” I gasp. I know the horror of that.
“No. As Famine, it’s only living plants and crops. People and animals are exempt. Those are Christian’s specialty.”
“Any trouble from other gods?”
“Not yet. But I suspect we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg there. Humans and gods will have to unite to have a chance against the Fae.”
Somehow, I vow silently, we’ll make that happen. “Bright side, we now have a Hunter on our side. And who knows, maybe I can rustle up reinforcements.”
He laughs. “If anyone can persuade the unpersuadable entities, it’s you.”
Then he’s on me again and we’re battling for dominance because we always will, that’s the way we’re wired and I lose myself in passion and think no longer of this world or anything in it.
He’s my ground zero, my mecca, beast to my dragon. Always.
* * *
π
When I was fourteen years old, I watched Ryodan having sex on level four at Chester’s; the subclub devoted to providing the carnal excess necessary to keep the Nine’s beasts under control.
I smile faintly. I’m Ryodan’s carnal excess now.
That day, so long ago, I marked him as mine.
There it is. The truth.
Crucify me for it, if you want. I don’t care.
I was never a normal fourteen-year-old.
I’ve never been a normal anything.
At fourteen, I’d vowed, one day, I’d be the woman making him laugh, making joy blaze from his face, so tangible it seemed I might catch it in my hands. I would trace the imperious, regal, stubble-shadowed planes of his face, close my hand around his cock and take him inside me. I’d be the one responsible for the firestorm of lust in his heavy-lidded gaze, for the savage rumble deep in his chest, the guttural, raw sounds he made when he came, half roar, half laughing, erotic purr.
Not with my fourteen-year-old body. I wasn’t ready for sex then.
But one day.
With a woman’s body.
The man was mine.
It wasn’t just lust I’d felt the afternoon I’d watched him fuck. And yes, I’d been capable of lust at that age—for life, for the sex I would one day have, for chocolate, for being alive. I’m made of lust. We all are. Savor it. Burn with it. Never apologize for it.
It’s what makes life worth living.
I know a truth: We fuck like we live. Timid people fuck timidly. Uninhibited people fuck uninhibitedly.
He’d fucked with one thousand percent focus, with savage devotion and lust. Staggeringly alive, elated to be.
It’s
the way I’ve always lived. Fully engaged, all senses ablaze.
I recognized, that day, that he and I were the same kind of people. I hadn’t thought to ever find someone else in the world like me.
I’d been wandering the city, on my own, for six years by then. I’d seen and done far more than any child should. (When I think of Rae, I know how wrong my life was and I’ll do everything in my power to keep her childhood pure, not that Kat needs my help, but I’ll be there. Watching over her. Always.) I’d paid prices few adults ever have to pay. I’d carried sins that cut me to the core of that soul I used to pretend I didn’t have. Sins that had forced me to find creative ways of rearranging myself so I wouldn’t self-destruct.
Ancient eyes had stared out of my fourteen-year-old face at Ryodan, and I’d thought: This man will understand me. This man can withstand me.
That’s something for a woman of my complicated ilk.
He’s a pain in the ass. Stubborn, controlled, controlling. So am I.
He’s done unspeakable things. So have I. And I suspect we’ll easily speak about them with each other.
He’s fascinating, brilliant, hungry for more life all the time.
So am I.
He’s life and death, joy and grief, mercy and ruthlessness. So. Am. I.
It was hard for me to move through those years between us.
I resisted what I knew I wasn’t ready for. I resented every woman he took to his bed in a dark, possessive corner of my mind, including Jo. Even though I understood.
Then life unexpectedly gave me a man I was ready for.
And Ryodan had understood.
But…always, endlessly, I’d been pointed at this man like a beast-seeking missile, waiting for the day I was—not merely locked and loaded—but fully ready to take him on, woman to man.
That’s what Dancer had always sensed in me.
And loved me anyway.