2. The Sinsar Dubh is closed and tricking me. It’s not wishy-washy at all, just playing me like a maestro. Making me underestimate it. Granting my wishes, trying to make me think it’s already open. Why? So I might reach for one of its spells myself, believing I’m in control. And when I do, it’s all over. Hello psycho-Mac.

3. My sidhe-seer gifts are far more enormous than I realize. I can do all these things without the Sinsar Dubh and that’s why it wanted me for a host. Because together we’d be unstoppable. It’s possible much of the magic I’ve used comes from the part of the lake that is my heritage, not the Book at all, and it’s just trying to make me believe that power belongs to it, not me.

“You’re still trying to label things, Ms. Lane,” Barrons said, reading over my shoulder.

“I knew you were there,” I said irritably. I always do. He’d walked in the back door of BB&B about twenty seconds ago. Every cell in my body comes to hard, frantic, sexual life when he’s near. I hadn’t expected to see him. It was barely noon and he’s a night owl, not an afternoon one.

Between withdrawal that made me feel all my nerves were raw, flayed, and twitching on the surface of my skin and the many frustrating, slinking hours it took me to get back from the water tower to Chester’s—all so I could dependently ask Barrons to get a Hunter to take me back into the bookstore—I was in a sour mood. But I’d also been in no mood to risk running into the Unseelie princess, her army, and her human guns. I couldn’t outshoot or Voice all of them at once.

For being so bloody powerful, I couldn’t even walk home by myself. It pissed me off. Asking Barrons for things drives me crazy.

“Makes two of us, Ms. Lane.”

“Well, do something about it,” I said pissily.

“There you go, asking me for things again.”

I stretched on the love seat I’d dragged from his study into the rear of the wrecked bookstore and peered up at him over my shoulder. I couldn’t find him for a second. He was motionless, fading beautifully into shadow, existing in that seamless, not-quite-there way he existed only around me and only when we were alone.

“Okay. I give up. What am I doing wrong?”

“At the moment? Not fucking me.”

He yanked my head back with a fistful of my hair, arched my neck at a hard angle, and sealed his mouth over mine, tongue going deep, kissing me so hard and raw and electric that my mind blanked and I dropped my journal, forgotten.

Can’t breathe with this man. Can’t breathe without him.

“Where do you feel most free,” he murmured against my mouth.

I bit his lip. “With you.”

“Wrong. You know why you fuck so good?”

I preened. Jericho Barrons thought I fucked “so good.” “Because I’ve had a lot of practice?”

“Because you fuck like you’re losing your sanity and can only find it again on the far side of depravity. Not by taking a shortcut. By taking the very long, lingering way around. You look like a pretty, soft, breakable Barbie. You fuck like a monster.”

That pretty much summed it up. “Do you have a point?”

“Don’t be afraid of the monster. She knows what she’s doing.”

“Why are you still talking?”

“Because my dick isn’t in your mouth.”

“That can be remedied.” I was over the love seat and on him, taking him down hard to the floor beneath me, and he was falling back, laughing and oh, God, I love that sound!

I ripped his zipper open as we went, then my hands were against his hot skin and my mouth was on his dick and nothing could rattle me, nothing could touch me, because I was rattling Jericho Barrons’s cage and, as always, while it lasted, I would be whole and perfect and free.

—

Later he said, “You think of the Sinsar Dubh as being an actual book inside you.”

“And?” I said drowsily. Apparently sex with Barrons was the cure for everything, including the tightly wired tension of withdrawal. I’d been shooting furtive looks at my fridge, with its lovely baby food jars of canned Unseelie all day. Clenching hands and jaw, refusing to let my feet walk me over to it. But Barrons in my mouth pretty much makes me stop thinking about anything else in it.

“I doubt it’s either open or closed. Stop thinking of it so concretely.”

“You mean it’s embedded in me, inseparably, and my ethical structure is the proverbial cover? And I need to stop worrying about the Book and think about me. What I can live with. What I won’t live without.”

He propped himself up on a shoulder, muscles rippling and bunching, and looked down at me, smiling faintly.

I touched his lips with my fingertips. I adore this man’s mouth, what it does to me, but I most especially adore the rare occasions he smiles or laughs out loud. In the low light, the dark, harsh angles of his face seemed chiseled from stone. Barrons isn’t a classically handsome man. He’s disturbing. Carnal. Base. Forbidding. Big and powerful, radiating primal hunger. His eyes are blades, slicing into you: dark, ancient, glittering with predatory intensity. He moves like a beast even in his human skin. A woman takes one look at him, her stomach drops like a stone and she runs like hell.

Which direction she goes is the defining point: she’ll run away—or toward him—depending on her ability to be honest with herself, her hunger for life and willingness to pay any price at all to feel so damned alive. “What? Why are you smiling?” I said.

He bit my finger. “Stop fishing for compliments. I give you enough.”

“Never enough. Not when it comes to you. Do you think I used it? Do you think I brought Alina back from the dead?”

“I think neither of those questions signify. You’re alive. You’re neither insane nor psychotic. Life goes on, and in the going, reveals itself. Quit being so impatient.”

I pushed my hands into his thick dark hair. “I love how you simplify me.”

“You need it. You, Ms. Lane, are a piece of work.”

“I’ll show you work. I want this.” I leaned forward and murmured into his ear. “Right now. Exactly that way. And this and this. And I want you to keep doing it until I’m begging you to stop. But don’t stop then. Make me take it a little longer.” I wanted to feel no responsibility. No control.

“And bloody hell, woman, there you go, asking me for things again.” He stood and tossed me over his shoulder, one big hand clamped possessively on my bare ass, to take me to that place we sometimes went when I had a serious kink in my already seriously kinked chain.

“Hard life, Barrons.”

“I’ll show you hard.”

Of that I had no doubt. Every possible way.

Damn, it was good to be alive.

—

Much later with a voice that was raw from—well, let’s just leave it at raw—I said to him when I was fairly certain he was meditating deeply enough that he wouldn’t hear me, “I should have gone after her.”

“Dani,” he murmured.

Well, shit. He was aware after all.

“Always.”

“Yes, Dani,” I said.

“Analyze the odds. You know she’d have kept running.”

“But Barrons, she made it out, losing virtually zero Earth-time. Maybe I could have caught up with her, somehow. Maybe she would have gone to a safer world if I’d chased her through, with a quicker way home. Maybe she wouldn’t have had to be alone in there the whole time and she and I would have battled our way back to Dublin together.”

“Maybes are anchors you chain to your own feet. Right before you leap off the boat into the ocean.”

“I’m just saying. I think I know what I did wrong.”

“What’s that?”

“I didn’t believe in magic. I’m living in a city of it, jam-packed with dark magic, evil spells, twisted Fae, and I have absolutely no problem believing in all of them. But somehow I stopped believing in the good magic.” I prodded him in the ribs, where black and red tattoos stretched across his hard stomach and trailed down to his groin. “Like Bewitched. Or The Wizard of Oz—”