“Never again.” He hissed the words aloud. Never again, cara, will I allow this kind of defiance. He repeated the warning in her mind, meaning it, swearing it. He was frightened for her. Furious with her. Furious with himself. The emotions swirled and flared within him until the conflagration was nearly out of control.

She could feel his rage beating at her, in her. His arms were like steel bars as he held her.

“I am in your debt, Stefan,” he said simply, his voice, as always, calm and peaceful, at terrible odds with the rage like a living entity inside him.

He swung around and was gone, his supernatural speed blurring their movement to human eyes. Alexandria heard the bang of the basement door as they moved into the narrow stone hall leading to the sleeping chamber, but Aidan himself made no sound. None. Not even the sound of breathing.

Alexandria remained quite still. Her pain was tremendous, her blisters large and ugly. Aidan was careful not to jar her burns, careful not to hurt her. She was beyond caring. She knew something terrible was about to happen. Aidan, always so cool and calm, was a seething cauldron of black emotion.

The walls of the tunnel rushed by, a blur of granite, then Aidan was placing her on the bed and turning away from her. She sat up carefully. “You’re very angry with me,” she said softly.

He didn’t reply, instead busying himself crushing herbs in a bowl made of agate. She could smell their fragrance rising. Then he lit candles, and a smoky aroma mixed with the scents of the herbs.

Alexandria swallowed hard and lifted her chin in defiance. “I’m not afraid of you, Aidan. What can you do? Kill me? I believe I’m already dead. Or at least living some kind of life I don’t want. Will you take Joshua away? Threaten him? Harm him? I’ve been in your mind, and I don’t think you are like that,” she said bravely.

He turned his head slowly, his golden eyes resting on her face. A chill went down her spine. Those eyes were soulless, ice-cold.

“You do not know the first thing about me, Alexandria. Nor have you taken the trouble to learn. Do not presume to fight me. You are a mere fledgling, I one of the ancients of our people. You have no conception of the power I wield. I can make the earth move beneath your feet and the lightning crack above your head. I can call the fog and become invisible.” There was no boasting in his tone, just fact. Just black velvet. “I can do things you cannot imagine.”

Alexandria felt the permanent link he had forged between them, and she could feel his rage, black and terrible, seething below the surface. “What I did today, I did to myself,” she whispered.

He moved toward her, looming large, towering over her, an invincible figure, powerful beyond imagining. “You betrayed me. You betrayed Joshua. I told you what would happen if you went out into the sun. You pretended to yourself that you would see if I was telling the truth. But you already knew it was the truth. You took a chance on destroying yourself, leaving Joshua to strangers, to an uncertain future without protection.”

“You would protect him.”

“Without you, myexistence is no more. We are linked, in life and death. If you choose death, you are choosing death for both of us.”

Her hands were trembling as she swept back her hair. “That can’t be.”

“You do not wish it to be,” he corrected her, and he took possession of her right arm. “But it is so. I do not lie to you, Alexandria. I have allowed you a certain amount of resistance, but only because this is all new to you.”

The gel he began smearing over her arm was cool and soothing. “You’re saying I don’t have a choice. That I’ve never had a choice,” she ventured.

“Your body and mine made the choice for us. Your soul is the other half of mine. My heart is your heart. Our minds reach for the reassurance and intimacy of the other. We are not complete when we are alone. We are two halves of the same whole. That is the truth, Alexandria, whether you like it or not.”

She swallowed hard, wanting to press her fingertips to her pounding forehead. “It isn’t true. It can’t be.” She denied it out loud because she didn’t want it to be true, because she would not believe in him and his nightmare world.

“Why do you think I can touch your burns as I do without causing you agony? I am blocking the pain for you. This treatment would be torture for you without me.”

“It isn’t true,” she repeated in a small whisper.

“I am angry enough with your stupidity to prove my words, cara. Do not argue with me. My body cries out for yours. Not with a mere human need, but with the need of the Carpathian male for its mate. I burn for you, night and day. My only relief is when I sleep the sleep of my people, unaware. Do not tempt me to prove my words, because there will be no going back.”

She hunched her shoulders, averted her face from him. Aidan could feel hot, seething rage swirling in him, mixing with the urgent demands of his body and the Carpathian male’s need to control. He bent closer to her, reckless now, not choosing his words or actions carefully as he so often tried to do. “You are unable to allow a human male to touch you. You feel revulsion, not pleasure, and you know it. I have been in your mind; I have seen your thoughts. You hunger only for me.”

The images he reflected back to her were her own. Hot, erotic things she had no real knowledge of. Things she found humiliating to have even thought of. Her kneeling at his feet, touching him, her mouth moving over him; his body atop hers, commanding hers, taking hers, hot and furiously. He knew, and he was taunting her with her own private fantasies of the two of them together.

“You really are a brutal animal with no thought for anyone but yourself,” she whispered, pressing her hands to her burning face. “And I care nothing for you. I feel nothing for you.”

His hand caught and spanned her throat, his thumb forcing her chin up so that she met his blazing golden eyes: “I couldmake you my slave, Alexandria, teach you to please me in far more ways than you envisioned.” Deliberately his thumb feathered across her trembling mouth.

Alexandria could feel tears burning in her eyes even as her body burst into flame, into need. Aidan was right. She had no thoughts, no resistance, when he touched her; she was only a body drowning in desire, going up on flames. There was nothing left of her, of who she was or what she stood for. Never had a man been able to control her before. Whatever Aidan Savage had made her, she was no longer Alexandria Houton.

Aidan’s mind sought hers, and instantly the anger in him melted away. She was sliding toward shock. Too much had happened too quickly in the last few days for her human mind to assimilate. He cursed his own body, raging for release, causing him to say and do things he would never ordinarily consider. He wanted her with every cell in his body, and just now he hadpushed aside her needs for his own. No self-respecting Carpathian male would ever do such a thing. In that moment he realized just how close to turning vampire he really had been. He felt contempt for himself, for his own selfishness and weakness, when she was having such a difficult transition. “ Cara,I am sorry. Please do not be afraid of me, of us.” The words were spoken in his most beguiling voice, but they seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Her mind shut down, protected her, spared her from any further ordeal. She turned her face away and slumped onto the bed, curled up in the fetal position. Aidan stood over her, angry with himself, unsure what to do to repair the damage he had caused with his stupidity. He had been so afraid he had lost her in that moment, etched for all time onto his soul, when she had flung open the door and gone willingly into the killing sun.

He could withstand the light, the burning, because he had conditioned himself to do so over time. Now, after centuries of study, he had nearly unlimited powers. One of them was healing. So he closed his eyes and sent himself out of his own body and into hers, finding the terrible burns so deeply seared into her skin, repairing them from the inside out. He was careful and precise, and when he was finished, he moved through her to once more enter her mind.