Then I focused on my sidhe-seer center and forced it to relax.

A muscle worked in his perfect jaw. Oh, yes, he’d been brushing up on his human gestures. “Punching me was not necessary.”

Oops. I’d forgotten they were only frozen when I Nulled them, not oblivious. Oh, well. “But it sure felt good.”

“Well done, MacKayla,” he said tightly.

“For freezing you? I’ve done it before.”

“Not that.” He looked down at my hand.

I looked down at it, too. Then past it, to my feet.

I was over the ward line. I’d stepped right through it without even realizing it. Not only that, I was holding a Seelie Prince by the collar and I wasn’t remotely aroused. No matter the form V’lane had donned in the past, I’d never stood so close to him without having to battle the irresistible impulse to have sex with him, right then and there, even when he’d been toned down as far as—according to him—he could go.

I leaned into him, pressed myself against his perfect Fae body. He molded to me instantly, slid his arms around me, dropped his face to my hair. He was hard, ready.

I felt nothing.

I drew back and looked up. There was that minute contraction and widening of his eyes again. Astonishment. Why? What had astonished him when he’d first seen me? That I had recovered from being Pri-ya? Or something more—a thing virtually inconceivable to him?

I stretched on my toes, pulled his head down, and kissed him. His response was instant and held every bit of one hundred and forty thousand years of sexual expertise—but not one ounce of that elusive, deadly death-by-sex Fae quality.

I pushed back and stared at him. I could feel intense sexual arousal rolling off him, but no more so than I would coming off any man. There went that muscle in his jaw again. Was it possible he wasn’t muting himself? I’d heard that if you took certain poisons but didn’t die, you acquired immunity. Had I drunk enough Poison de Fae? “Unmute yourself,” I demanded.

“I. Am. Not. Muted.”

Did he ever sound pissed! “You’re lying.” Could it really be true? Had everything I’d gone through made me immune to Fae sexual compulsion?

“No, MacKayla.”

“I don’t believe you.” I would not be lulled into stupidity again, into believing something that wasn’t true, so it could be used against me.

“I would not have believed it, either. No human has ever come back from being made Pri-ya, and, although I am pleased that you have recovered from what was done to you, I am not pleased that I must now compete for you with no glamour, without the glory of my birthright. They were Unseelie, MacKayla, the foulest of the foul, the darkest of my race, the abominations. I am Seelie, and we are vastly different. I had hoped that one day, when you trusted me, you would let me share with you the ecstasy of being with one like me. With no pain, MacKayla, and no price. Now that can never be. You have no idea how exquisite the experience might have been and now never will.”

“Bullshit,” I said. Games within games. That was all my life was anymore. Was he lying just so he could ambush me when I least expected it?

“You suffered the full, undampened power of three Unseelie Princes. They were inside you. It is impossible to predict all it might have done to you.”

“Four,” I snarled. “And don’t remind me where they were. I’m acutely aware of it.”

His eyes narrowed to slits and sparked with inhuman fire. “Four? There were four? Who was this fourth? Was it Barrons? Tell me!”

I flinched. The thought had never occurred to me. The fourth one who had kept himself concealed from me had been the fourth Unseelie Prince. Hadn’t he? The fourth was Fae. Wasn’t he? All my sidhe-seer abilities had been completely deadened from eating Unseelie flesh the night before, to gain Fae-heightened strength to escape the riots and make it to safety. In all honesty, I couldn’t swear the fourth was Fae. I could only say he’d been intensely sexual.

Why had he kept his face hidden? All I’d ever seen of him was a glimpse of skin, muscle, tattoo.

Tattoo.

“It couldn’t have been Barrons. He was in Scotland that night.”

V’lane’s anger iced the air. The temperature dropped so sharply that my next inhalation burned my lungs. “Not the entire night, MacKayla. The Keltar ritual to maintain the walls between realms was sabotaged. The circle of stones in which the sacred rites have been performed since the day the Compact was negotiated between my queen and your human Keltar was destroyed, supplanted by a Fae realm. Barrons was last seen at midnight on Samhain. He could easily have been in Dublin before dawn.”

Ouch! Then why hadn’t he come for me immediately? Why hadn’t he tracked me by the brand he’d stamped at the base of my skull and saved me? For that matter, how long had it taken for him to rescue me from my hell at the abbey? My memory of those early days was badly blurred. “Barrons doesn’t hang out with the Unseelie or the LM. They don’t like him any more than you do.”

“Indeed.” V’lane’s iridescent eyes were mocking.

“Remind me,” I said with acid sweetness, “why is that, again?” He’d never told me, and I didn’t think he would now. But I would find out, one way or another. I was going to find out everything, one way or another.

I had to consider what V’lane was saying. In my unpredictable, frequently inexplicable world, I had to consider everything. Not only did Barrons have some kind of agreement with the Shades, he knew a tremendous amount about the never-before-seen-by-humans-because-they’d-always-been-incarcerated Unseelie half of the Fae race. He was much older than a human could be, and I’d recently caught him stepping out of the Unseelie Silver he kept in his study at the bookstore, carrying a woman who’d been brutally killed.

What possible reason might Barrons have to turn me Pri-ya, then bring me back? For the opportunity to play the hero? To storm in and save the day, in hopes of securing my blind faith once and for all? Not only hadn’t it worked, but why wouldn’t he just keep me Pri-ya and use me? He could have stopped in his efforts to restore my mind halfway through, left me hanging in a mentally impaired yet functional Pri-ya state indefinitely, and I’d have done anything he’d asked, to keep getting sex. I’d have traipsed all over the world, hunting the Dark Book, slave to his every command.

But he hadn’t. He’d brought me all the way back. Freed me.

“What does Barrons want, MacKayla?” V’lane said softly.

Same thing as V’lane and everyone else I’d met since I’d arrived in Dublin: the Sinsar Dubh. But neither Barrons nor I could touch it. I could track it, and he believed I had the potential to get my hands on it eventually, with the right training.

I didn’t believe Barrons had been the fourth. That wasn’t his way. But might it have been his idea of “the right training”? How far would Barrons go to get what he wanted? He was mercenary to the core, constantly pushing me, trying to make me tougher, stronger. Trying to make me what I needed to be in order to do what he wanted me to do.

I was now immune to death-by-sex Fae. I could walk through wards. I was more powerful in ways that could have been accomplished only by putting me through something that would either kill me or make me stronger. A proving ground: die or evolve.

It was too awful for me to contemplate. “Maybe the fourth was you, V’lane. How do I know it wasn’t?”

My skin frosted. When I shivered, crystals of ice fell in a small snowstorm to the sidewalk. “I was with my queen.”

“So you say.”

“I would never harm you.”

“You constantly manipulate me sexually.”

“Only to a pleasurable limit.”

“According to who?”

His face tightened. “You do not understand my race. Seelie and Unseelie do not suffer the other to exist. We do not consort. Even now we battle, as we did before, so long ago.”