Our sex is fierce. We will both be bruised.

“I want it to always be like this,” I tell him.

His nostrils flare, obsidian eyes mock. “Try holding on to that thought.”

“I do not need to try. I will never feel differently.”

“Ah, Mac,” he says, and his laughter is as dark and cold as the place of which I dream, “one day you will wonder if it’s possible to hate me more.”

My beast adores music. He has a pink thing he calls an eye-pod, although it does not look to me as if it was ever a pod for eyes, and with it he makes many sounds. He plays songs over and over and watches me carefully, even when I do not dance.

Some of the songs make me angry and I do not like them. I try to make him stop playing them, but he holds the eye-pod over my head and I cannot reach it. I like hard, sexy songs, like “Pussy Liquor” and “Foxy, Foxy.” He likes to play peppy, happy songs, and I am beyond sick of “What a Wonderful World” and “Tubthumping.” He watches me, always watches me, when he plays them. They have stupid names and I hate them.

Sometimes he shows me pictures. I hate those, too. They are of others, most often a woman he calls Alina. I do not know why he needs pictures of her when he has me! Looking at her makes me feel hot and cold at the same time. Looking at her hurts me.

Sometimes he tells me stories. His favorite one is about a book that is really a monster that could destroy the world. Boring!

Once he told me a story about Alina and said she died. I screamed at him and wept, and I do not know why. Today he showed me something new. Photos of a man he calls Jack Lane. I tore them up and threw the pieces at him.

Now I have forgiven him because I have him inside me, and he’s got his big hands on my petunia—I do not know that word, or where it came from! — rump, and he’s doing that slow, erotic bump and grind so smooth and deep that makes me purr to the bottom of my toes and kissing me so hard I cannot breathe around it and I do not want to. He is in my soul and I am in his, and we are in bed but we are in a desert, and I do not know where he begins and I end, and I suppose if his peculiar madness is music and photos and stories that chafe, it is a small price to pay for such pleasure.

He comes hard, shuddering. I match him, bucking with each shudder. When he comes, he makes a noise deep in his throat that is so raw and animal and sexual that I think if he merely looked at me and made that noise, I might explode in an orgasm.

He holds me. He smells good. I drowse.

He starts with his stupid stories again.

“I do not care.” I raise my head from his chest. “Stop talking at me.” I cover his mouth with my hand. He pushes it away.

“You must care, Mac.”

“I am so sick of that word! I do not know ‘Mac.’ I do not like your pictures. I hate your stories!”

“Mac is your name. You are MacKayla Lane. Mac for short. It is who you are. You are a sidhe-seer. It is what you are. You were raised by Jack and Rainey Lane. They are your parents and love you. They need you very much. Alina was your sister. She was murdered.”

“Stop talking! I will not listen.” I clamp my hands to my ears.

He pries them away. “You love pink.”

“I despise pink! I love red and black.” The colors of blood and death. The colors of the tattoos on his beautiful body that cover his legs, his abdomen, half his chest, and twine up one side of his neck.

He rolls me over beneath him and traps my face between his hands. “Look at me. Who am I?”

There is something I have forgotten. I do not want to remember. “You are my lover.”

“I was not always, Mac. There was a time when you didn’t even like me. You have never trusted me.”

Why does he tell me lies? Why does he seek to ruin what we have? It is now. It is perfect. There is no cold, no pain, no death, no betrayal, no icy places, no terrifying monsters that can steal your will and turn you into something you cannot even recognize and make you feel ashamed, so ashamed. There is only pleasure here, endless pleasure.

“I trust you,” I say. “We are the same.”

His smile is sharp as knives. “We are not. I’ve told you that before. Never make that mistake. We meet in lust. But we are not the same. Never will be.”

“You worry about things of no importance. And you talk too much.”

“You got me a birthday cake. It was pink. I smashed it into the ceiling.”

I do not know “birthdays” or “cakes,” so I say nothing.

“You like cars. I let you drive my Viper.”

Cars! I remember those. Sleek, sexy, fast, and powerful, all the things I like. Something nags at me. “Why did you smash this ‘birthday cake’ into the ceiling?” I wait for his answer and am struck by a violent sense of déjà vu—that I have waited for many answers from my beast, and have gotten few, if any.

He stares down at me. He seems startled that I have asked such a question. I have confused myself with it. I do not ask questions. I have little interest in talk. There is only now. I met my lover the day he became my lover. What do I care of things called cakes and birthdays? Yet I seem to want his answer very much and feel oddly deflated when he does not give me one.

“I am Jericho Barrons. Say my name.”

I try to turn my face away, but his hands clamp like a vise on my skull and hold it immobile, preventing me from looking away.

I close my eyes.

He shakes me. “Say my name.”

“No.”

“Damn it, would you just cooperate?”

“I do not know that word, ‘cooperate.’ “

“Obviously,” he growls.

“I think you make up words.”

“I do not make up words.”

“Do, too.”

“Do not.”

“Too.”

“Not.”

I laugh.

“Woman, you make me crazed,” he mutters.

We do this often. Get into childish arguments. He is stubborn, my beast.

“Open your eyes and say my name.”

I squeeze them shut more tightly.

“It would make my cock hard to hear you say my name.”

My eyes pop open. “Jericho Barrons,” I say sweetly.

He makes a pained sound. “Bloody hell, woman, I think a part of me wants to keep you this way.”

I touch his face. “I like how I am. I like how you are, too. When you are … What is that word you used? Cooperating.”

“Tell me to fuck you.”

I smile and comply. We’re back in territory I understand.

“You didn’t say my name. Say my name when you tell me to fuck you.”

“Fuck me, Jericho Barrons.”

“From now on, you will call me Jericho Barrons every time you speak to me.”

He is a strange beast. But he gives me what I want. I suppose it will not kill me to do the same.

And so we begin a different way of being. I call him Jericho Barrons and he calls me Mac.

We are no longer animals. We have “names.”

I dream of his “Alina” and wake up weeping. But there is something new inside me. Something cold and explosive beneath the tears.

I do not know what to call it, but it makes me pace. I stalk the room like the animal I am, smashing and breaking things. I scream until my throat is raw.

Suddenly I have new words.

Rage.

Anger. Violence.

I am all the fury that ever was. I could scourge the earth with my grief and madness.

I want something. But I do not know what it is.

He watches me in silence.

I think it must be sex. I go to him. He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls me to stand between his legs.

My hands hurt from hitting things. He kisses them.

“Revenge,” he says softly. “They took too much. You give up and die, or learn how to take back. Revenge, Mac.”

I cock my head. I try the word on my tongue. “Revenge.” Yes. That is what I want.

He is gone when I wake, and I have a bad moment, but then he is there and has brought many boxes and some of them smell good.

I no longer resist when he offers me food. I anticipate it. Food is pleasure. Sometimes I put things on his body and lick them off, and he watches me with dark eyes and shudders as he comes.