“You’ll keep me?” He gave her a look that she suspected was intended to be intimidating, but a faery who’d grown up with the Hunt and the King of Nightmares as playmates wasn’t easily browbeaten.

“For now.” She suppressed a smile at the sliver of arrogance in his voice. “You’re not nearly as boring as you pretend, and considering my family, that’s high praise.”

“Indeed.” He put his hand on the passenger door of what was currently an ostentatious red Lexus.

Ani walked around to the driver’s side and looked over the roof at him. A part of her insufficiently used conscience warned her away from him, but for one of the only times in her life, it wasn’t just hunger driving her interest. She liked Devlin.

Devlin chastised himself as they sped along the freeway. He was becoming far too close to Ani. He’d lived forever, and she’d had barely a blink of existence. She was a Hound unlike any other, a faery unlike any he’d known.

And she’s vulnerable.

And she really shouldn’t even be alive.

And losing her would destroy me.

He didn’t believe in inescapable fate. He’d watched both of his sisters sort through threads of possibilities frequently enough to know that few things in the world were certainties. He’d seen threads himself, watched their fluidity, and marveled at their transience. Where Bananach saw the threads that could further discord, Sorcha saw the threads that could further order. Devlin often saw both, but as he looked at Ani, he realized that he saw nothing. Her entire tapestry was blank to him.

Some fragment of a memory of Ani’s life niggled at his mind, but he couldn’t focus on it. Rae. She knew something. He remembered that. What’s the rest? His head throbbed as he tried to make the memory come clear. Why I was sent to kill Ani? If the threat was to Sorcha, he’d have been willing to kill Ani, but despite what Bananach intimated, Devlin didn’t believe that Ani would help Bananach. Ani wouldn’t give her blood to War or kill Sorcha.

Because she isn’t that cruel.

Devlin wondered if the threads had changed because of his actions, if his telling Ani what he’d done had changed her path. Have my choices changed things, or were these choices already ordained? There was no way to ask Sorcha what she had seen before Ani was tied to Devlin, and there was no way to tell if Bananach had interpreted the possibilities truly. The thinnest thread of possibility was enough for War to embrace as fated truth. Her desires clouded her interpretation. It was a perverted sort of hopefulness.

The one truth that was inevitable was that Sorcha had stopped seeing Ani when her life was tied to his and to their lives. He realized it in an awful moment of clarity: Sorcha had known then that Ani’s thread was to be entwined with his.

The insight became so clear to him so suddenly that he felt sick with it. He had no doubt at all that both of his sisters were jealous or cruel enough to change his life for their interest. That’s who they were. Sorcha reshaped the world to bend to her will; Bananach manipulated faeries to bring about destruction. Perhaps it wasn’t ever that Ani was meant to be entangled in their lives, but always in his. Was that how her blood would kill Sorcha? By his refusing to shed it? By his not killing her? Such interpretations would not be out of character for Bananach.

But her blood is different. I tasted it. She is different.

“Are you okay?” Ani’s voice startled him. “You’re, ummm, locking down your emotions again.”

“Tell me what exactly Bananach wants from you.”

“Kill Seth. Kill Niall. And to give her my blood because”—Ani took a deep breath—“if you tell anyone what I tell you next, Irial will want you dead. So you can’t. Ever.”

He nodded.

“Irial’s overprotective, but… he…” She paused, took another breath, and continued, “I can trust you?”

He hesitated. The weight of that decision was unexpected. Devlin had never willfully chosen to put another before his queen.

Until now. I would. For you.

“You can trust me,” Devlin assured her. He considered telling her then that he’d spoken to Irial about her, but mentioning that Irial had given consent for him to take Ani wasn’t something he wanted to do. The premeditation might anger her, and that wouldn’t help matters.

It would also lead to more things I don’t want to discuss. The former Dark King’s taste of Devlin’s emotions apparently had revealed enough of his concern to convince Irial that Ani was safe in his care. Devlin would get her to safety and then find a way to extricate himself from her life. It was the logical choice, the appropriate path.

“Tell me,” he prompted Ani.

“So you know how I can feed off your emotions?” She paused only a fraction before saying, “That’s a Dark Court thing.”

“I know.”

“But I can do the same with mortals.” She accelerated the car, whether consciously or not. “I really shouldn’t be able to do either.”

Devlin struggled to keep his own emotions in check. The more Ani revealed, the more he realized how rare she was. If Sorcha realizes Ani lives, she will hunt her. The chances of Bananach telling Sorcha, of letting slip that he was with Ani, were strong. War needled. It was her way.

Neither sister will rest until one of them possesses or destroys Ani.

Ani didn’t look his way. She drove the car faster still. There were things she was not saying, things she obviously worried that she should not say, so he waited.

After several quiet minutes, she continued, “You know, Hounds don’t feed like that anyhow. We aren’t about emotions. They’re what we evoke, not what we consume.”

“Hounds need touch, not emotion,” he said, realizing then what she hadn’t said earlier, what she was admitting now: she required touch. He reached out and covered her hand where it was on the gearshift. “I’ve been insensitive. Forgive me?”

She sped up faster still. “What do—”

“Skin hunger. Hounds have skin hunger.” He slipped his fingers between hers. “That’s why you were wanting near me. It makes sense now. I should’ve thought of that. I apologize.”

He watched her draw several breaths as if she were afraid. Hounds typically had skin hunger, not emotional appetites, and in all of his looking at her as a mortal and as Dark Court, he hadn’t been thinking about her father’s lineage. Few Hounds so young could handle it well enough to hide it all. They didn’t travel without their pack because of it, and Devlin had assumed—erroneously—that her independence meant she did not carry that trait.

“I won’t take advantage,” he whispered. “You can hold my hand or… embrace me as you did if you are in need of nourishment. I should’ve—”

“I didn’t want to touch you for that reason.” She blushed a little.

It was so out of character that it made him falter. “Oh. Should I remove my hand?”

Ani laughed. “Gods, no. I’m afraid. I’m hungry as hell. I’m wondering if I’m going to die. Hounds need touch…. I’m not sure if it usually gets easier with practice, but for me nothing seems quite right. I’m getting worse.”

Devlin looked out the window, not at her, but he lowered his control so some of his emotions were there for her to taste. He let her in further.

“Dev?”

He looked over, but he couldn’t speak. The rules he’d lived by for all of eternity were all vanishing. He’d nourished his need for blood over the years, reveled in fighting. He’d taken other pleasures that he knew weren’t High Court. But at the core of himself, he chose to live as if High Court was his instinct. Every day, he had made that choice.