“I’ll give you a clue,” she says, and somehow she’s smiling while she’s sucking and for a second I think I see rows of tiny needle-sharp shark teeth. Not what a man wants to hallucinate with a woman’s hot wet mouth on his dick. I blink and wipe sweat from my eyes. Trick of the light. She has perfect teeth, movie-star white, framed to perfection by smears of crimson lipstick, most of which is all over my dick and stomach. Oh, yeah, I’ll take a blonde with cherry red lipstick every day of the week that ends in y. Life is sweet. I laugh.

She cuts me a look then shoves me back on the desk and I’m cold where her mouth was burning, then she’s on top of me, slamming down onto me, and I’m pushing up into her. I’m a grenade, pin out. Feels like my whole body is going to hit it, blow apart, come from head to toe. Bloody hell, sex has never been like this. I’m on fire, so frigging hot I’d swear the desk is burning.

Wait a second, it is.

Orange flames are licking up around us, like my sweat is some kind of gasoline sloshed across the lacquered ebony. We must have spilled some tequila. Must’ve been a candle on the desk. I’m sprawled on my back in fire and can’t even feel it. She leans into me, joins me in the flames, fists her hands in my hair and we kiss.

It’s unfucking real.

I half expect celestial trumpets to blare. I feel like my skin is melting and we’re merging into each other. Strange shit. But my dick has never felt better.

“Who am I? Is it so difficult to give me such a tiny thing? A little respect. That’s all I’m looking for, honey. I can give you so much in return.”

Christ, she sounds just like me, right down to her inflection on the word “honey.” I always get them to call me whatever I want. I’m always in control. Isn’t much I like more than a beautiful woman tied to my bed while I make her come till she passes out. So what’s my problem? Like she says, it’s a small thing. What can one word hurt? It isn’t like letting a woman have the power for a change can bring about the end of my world as I know it, for fuck’s sake.

I open my mouth and suck her tongue deep, grinding in, sliding out. I feel my dick inside her, and I also feel what she’s feeling: me filling her, giving her all she wants except for this one tiny little thing that is so important to her for some reason. Maybe some man treated her like shit and now she needs to be called mistress to get back some of her own. Maybe I’m part of the healing. Maybe it’ll make her come as violently as I know I’m going to. I like women. I want them to feel good. It’s practically been my mission in life.

“Who am I?”

I try to shape the word twice and still fail. I’d honestly like to give her what she wants but submission just isn’t the stuff I’m made of.

She clamps down on me and … aw, shit, she squeezes! She has muscles that could milk a herd of Holsteins dry. I buck and nearly get off but then she’s soft again and I get the feeling she could do this all night if she wants. And this crazy babe might just want to.

“Mistress,” I manage to growl. “Now make me come or get the fuck off me ’cause I’m jacking off.”

“Tell me you want me more than life itself,” she croons, all soft and sultry.

“Sure, honey.” I’ve gone this far. If Ryodan ever finds out I called some babe mistress, I’ll never hear the end of it.

“Would you die for me?” she asks breathlessly.

I’m beginning to see no matter how hot this woman is, despite her plentiful talents, she has serious-ass issues. Looking for some big strong man to play hero for her. Who the hell isn’t? Every woman downstairs. I excel at the role. And I need to come. Simple enough exchange.

I grab her ass, grind up and drive deep. “Protect you. Rescue you. Guard your frigging honor if you have any left by the time I’m done with you, woman. Now squeeze.”

“But would you die for me?”

I don’t tell her I might kill her if I don’t come soon. I might turn. She’s kept me on the brink too long. I’m getting edgier than is safe with a woman. “Sure, honey. Whatever.” She doesn’t know I can’t. She doesn’t even know my name.

She pulls back and smiles down at me with rows of needle-sharp shark teeth.

Blond hair darkens to blood-black.

Red lips fade to white. Then ice-blue.

Flames leap up around us. Takes me a second to process — also blue.

Aw, fuck.

I stare up, a little slow to get it.

I’m too close to coming to think real fast. Hell, her tits are too far in my face for me to think real fast.

Unseelie. The bitch is Unseelie. I can’t believe I didn’t pick up on it. I’m not easy to fool. Well, sans blond hair and curves enough to happily smother a man.

She’s dark Fae. Twisted buggers, one and all, some more than others.

And she wanted me to call her Princess …

Unseelie. Princess.

I narrow my eyes, staring up at her.

Nah.

The dark king never got around to making them. They’re a myth. They don’t exist. Damn good thing, too. The Unseelie Princes are problem enough.

Oh, honey, she purrs in my mind, we certainly do. Trapped in a library for a small eternity. One of yours let us out. Good thing, too. Men have too much power on this world. We will fix that.

“Get the fuck off me.”

You called me mistress. You said you would die for me. I own you.

I laugh. “Yeah, right. Try pursuing that thought.” I shove her off me but my hands go the wrong way, fly up over my head, and abruptly I’m slammed flat on my back, with both wrists manacled to one end of the desk.

Links snake around my throat.

My waist. My ankles.

Fuck me.

I’m chained.

I lunge up, testing the links, snarling. Magic doesn’t work on me. Neither does glamour. Yet both seem to be. What the hell is going on?

We are a singular recipe. His final creation. Improved by the Sweeper. She smiles and there are those frigging shark teeth again.

I’m immobilized, pants at my ankles, dick sticking straight up, and this bitch has shark teeth. I’m beginning to think this might not be one of my finer nights.

“Say it again,” she says, but now she’s all icy, imperious princess. “Who am I?”

No way I’m saying it again.

Ever.

My mouth opens and it says, “Mistress,” offending every goddamn fiber of my being. I think my balls actually shrivel.

She slaps me. Hard across the face.

“I’m going to kill you, you crazy motherfucking bitch,” I say tenderly. My kind doesn’t get loud when we’re about to annihilate. We go soft and gentle. See us like that: worry. She doesn’t know I’m one of the few in existence that can actually make good on that promise. She doesn’t know who or what I am.

She’ll be calling me master before she dies.

“Who am I?” she says.

I clamp my mouth shut and strain against the Fae compulsion, and still my vocal cords grit, “Mistress.”

Oh, yeah, definitely killing her. Ten different ways, and slow.

“That’s a good boy, Lor.”

What the hell, she knows my name?

“Now we’re really going to play,” she purrs.

An hour into our meeting, we’ve got more problems on the table than I knew we had. Despite the bloom on New Dublin, our city has deeper shadows in which to die than ever before.

It’s been an enormous test of self-restraint, negotiating concessions with the two Unseelie Princes that raped me; a Seelie Prince that’s been shooting me looks like he wants to; Ryodan, whom I’ve never been able to get along with for more than a few sentences of conversation — oh, wait, I can’t even do that; and the first cousin of the mobsters that put a price on my head. The Sinsar Dubh has been attempting to make its voice heard at every turn, but I pump up the volume on my seventh-grade recitation and drown it out.