His lips move from my ear; he brushes kisses across my cheek. But he stops and waits for me to turn my head that last inch. To choose.

I turn to vomit hatred all over him. He claims feelings for my sister and tries to seduce me, too! Can what he felt for Alina be so easily betrayed? I hate him for seducing her. I hate him for not being faithful to her memory.

Neither of those emotions is anything Barrons would have called “useful.” I have a memory to live up to. Two ghosts to bring back to life.

I focus on the here and now. What can be used. What can’t.

Beyond his shoulder, I see where we are. If I felt anything anymore, I’d double over, fist in my stomach.

Clever, clever ex-Fae. The bastard.

We’re in the alley, catty-corner to Barrons Books and Baubles. He hid a Silver in the brick wall of the first building in the Dark Zone across from my bookstore.

It was right out back, all this time. In my backyard. He was always watching me. Us.

When I was last here, even though I knew I was leaving to walk straight into a trap, there was buoyancy in my step. Barrons had just told me that when I came out, with Darroc dead and my parents alive, he was going to give me BB&B, deed and all.

I’d had no doubt that I was going to get that deed. I was so cocky, so sure of myself.

Darroc watches me carefully.

The games here are treacherously deep. Always were. I just never saw things as clearly as I do now.

He has called me on my hatred of him and done something probably only a being that had been Fae for a small eternity could do—he has accepted it and offered a full pardon. He has proposed far more than a mere business arrangement and waits for my response. I understand his game. He has studied my race with his coldly analytical Fae mind and knows us well.

By agreeing to be intimate with him, I expose myself on two levels: physically I get close enough to him that he could harm me, and emotionally I run the risk that every woman runs when she’s intimate with a man—where the body goes, a tiny piece of the heart tries to follow.

Fortunately for me, I have no heart left. I’m safe on that score. And I’ve grown damned tough to injure.

My ghosts whisper to each other across me, but I can’t hear them. There’s only one way I’ll ever be able to hear them again.

I turn my head for Darroc’s kiss.

As his lips close over mine, the duality inside me threatens to tear me in half, and if it succeeds, I will lose my best chance at accomplishing my mission.

I hurt.

I need punishment for my sins.

I bury my hands in his hair and channel all those feelings into passion, pour them into my touch, kiss him hard, violently, with explosive feeling. I turn us both around and slam him up against the wall, kissing him like he’s all that ever existed, kissing him with a full measure of humanity. It’s a thing a Fae can never feel, no matter the form they wear—humanity. It’s why they crave us in bed.

He staggers for a moment, draws back, and stares down at me.

My eyes are wild. I feel something inside me that terrifies me, and I just hope I can hang on to the edge of this cliff I’m on. I make a sound of impatience, wet my lips, and shove at him. “More,” I demand.

When he kisses me again, the last part of me that could stand myself dies.

It took me a bloody fucking month to get back.

I died three times.

It was worse than the 1800s when I had to book passage on a steamer to cross the bloody ocean.

Fragments of Fae reality everywhere, took down every plane I took up.

I consider the possibility that, by the time I return, he will have caught her, cut my brand off her skull, and made her impossible to track.

Then I begin to feel her.

She is alive. She still wears my mark.

But what I sense is incongruent with her situation. I expect grief. The woman killed me and, in humans, familiarity breeds a certain emotional bond.

But lust? On the heels of murdering me, who does she lust for?

I entertain myself with thoughts of searing my brand from her skull.

When I finally arrive at the bookstore, what do I see in the alley behind it?

The woman that summoned me to save her, then stabbed me in the back at the first opportunity, isn’t lost in the Silvers, in need of saving.

She’s standing in my alley, kissing the bastard that had her raped and turned her Pri-ya.

No, let us be perfectly precise: She’s grinding herself against him and shoving her tongue halfway down his throat.

My monster rattles its cage.

Violently.

“Mac! Hey, Mac! Din’t’cha hear me? I said, ‘What the blimey feck you doing?’ ”

I stiffen. I’m drifting in a dark place where I feel nothing, because if I did, I’d kill myself. No right, no wrong. Just distraction. “Ignore her,” Darroc growls against my mouth.

“Mac, it’s me! Dani. Hey, who the feck you kissing?”

I feel her zinging from side to side behind me, stirring my hair with the breeze she creates, trying to see who I’ve got up against the wall.

She’s seen him twice before and would recognize him. The last thing I need is her carrying news back to the abbey: Mac’s teamed up with the Lord Master, just like her sister! Just like Ro said! Feckin’ traitor—must run in the feckin’ blood!

Rowena would exploit it ruthlessly, send every sidhe-seer she has to get in my way and try to take me down. The narrow-minded bitch would put more effort into hunting me than she’d ever spent hunting Fae.

A sudden gust ruffles my shirt, and my hair flies straight up in the air.

“That ain’t Barrons!” Dani snaps indignantly.

The name goes through me like a knife. No, it ain’t Barrons and, unless I’m convincing, it never will be again.

“It ain’t V’lane, neither!” Anger mixes with bafflement in her voice. “Mac, what’cha doing? Where the feck you been? I been looking all over for you. Been a month. Maaac!” she wails the last part plaintively. “I got scoop! Pay attention to me!”

“Shall I get rid of her?” Darroc murmurs.

“She’s a little tough to shake,” I murmur back. “Give me a minute.”

I step back, smiling up at him. No one can accuse the Fae of lacking in the lust department. It blazes in his not-quite-human eyes. Banked in that heat, I see surprise he tries but fails to mask. I suspect my sister was a little more … refined than I am.

“I’ll be right back,” I promise, and turn slowly, buying time to brace myself for dealing with Dani. I’m going to have to hurt her to get rid of her.

Her face is bright, eager. Her unruly mass of auburn curls is tamed beneath a black bike helmet, lights ablaze. She has on a long black leather coat and high-top black sneakers. Somewhere under that coat is the Sword of Light, unless Darroc sensed it and took it, too. If it’s still there, I wonder if I could draw it swiftly enough to impale myself before she managed to stop me.

I have goals. I focus on them. No time to indulge my guilty conscience and even less point. When I’m done with what I plan to do, everything that happens in this alley tonight will never have taken place, so it doesn’t matter that I hurt this Dani, because she won’t have to live through it in the future I create.

The enormity of freedom that grants me makes me suddenly breathless. Nothing I do from this moment forth will ever come back to bite me in the ass. I’m in a penalty-free zone. I have been since the moment I decided to remake it all.

I study Dani with strange detachment, wondering how much I should change for her. I could keep her mother from being killed. Give her a life that would never harden her, that would let her be open, soft. Let her have fun like Alina and me, play on a beach, not be out in the streets hunting and killing monsters by the tender age of … however old she was when Rowena turned her into a weapon. Eight? Ten?