Barrons picks me up and is carrying me again. We pass through luxurious rooms, down stairs and more stairs, and I realize there are more than three levels beneath his garage. He has a whole world down here. I usually hate being underground. But this is different. There’s a sensation of expansiveness, of space not being quite what it seems. I suspect he has more Silvers in here, many ways in and out. It’s the ultimate survivalist fantasy. The world could be nuked, and life would go on down here, or we could pass through to some other world. With Barrons, I suspect, no catastrophe is ever final. He always goes on.
Now, so will I.
I don’t like that. I’ve been reprogrammed, changed in so many ways. This one is going to be the hardest to deal with. It makes me feel less human, and I was already feeling detached. Am I part of the Unseelie King, now nearly immortal? I wonder if this is a loop. Are we reborn over and over again, to repeat the same cycles?
“Would it be so bad?”
“Are you reading my mind?”
“You’re thinking with your eyes.” He smiles.
I touch his face, and the smile vanishes. “Do it again.”
“Don’t be a jackass.”
I laugh. But there’s no amusement left in his face. It was swiftly erased.
He looks at me with cold, hard eyes. I see what’s in them now. To the rest of the world, they might seem empty. I remember thinking a few times myself that they were void of all humanity, but that’s simply not true.
He feels. Rage. Pain. Lust. So much emotion, electric beneath his skin. So much volatility. Man and beast, always at war. I know now it’s never easy for him. The battle he fights is nonstop. How does this man go on every day?
He stops and lowers me to my feet. He moves through the shadows, turns on a gas fire, and begins to light candles.
We are in his bedroom. It’s like the Unseelie King’s lair: opulent, luxurious, with an enormous bed, draped in black silk, black furs. I can’t see past it. All I can see is myself there, naked with him.
I’m trembling.
I’m awed that I’m here. That he wants me.
He lights more candles near the bed. He picks up pillows and pushes them into a pile I remember from being Pri-ya.
In that long-ago basement, he mounded them beneath my hips. I sprawled over them with my head on the bed and my ass in the air. He would rub himself back and forth between my legs until I was begging, then push slowly into me from behind.
He places the last pillow on the pile, and looks at me. He jerks his head toward the pile of pillows.
“I watched you die. I need to fuck you, Mac.”
The words slam into me like bullets, taking my knees out. I lean back against a piece of furniture—an armoire, I think. I really don’t care. It holds me up. It wasn’t a request. It was acknowledgment of a requirement to make it from this moment to the next, like I need a transfusion, my blood has been poisoned.
“Do you want me to?” There is no purr, or coyness, or seduction in his voice. There is a question that needs an answer. Bare bones. That’s what he’s after. That’s what he offers.
“Yes.”
He strips his shirt over his head and I catch my breath, watching those long, hard muscles ripple. I know how his shoulders look, bunched, when he’s on top of me, how his face gets tight with lust, as he eases inside me. “Who am I?”
“Jericho.”
“Who are you?” He kicks off his boots, steps out of his pants. He’s commando tonight.
My breath whooshes out of me in a run-on word: “Whogivesafuck?”
“Finally.” The word is soft. The man is not.
“I need a shower.”
His eyes glitter, his teeth flash in the darkness. “A little blood never bothers me.” He glides toward me, in that way that barely displaces air. A velvet shadow in the darkness. He is the night. He always has been. I used to be a sunshine girl.
He circles me, looking me up and down.
I watch him, holding my breath. Jericho Barrons is walking naked circles around me, looking at me like he’s going to eat me alive—in a good way, not like his son. As I watch him, emotion staggers me and I realize that I never completely thawed from what I’d done to myself back there on the cliff, when I’d believed he was dead. I’d stripped away so much of me in order to survive. When I’d realized he was alive, there were so many other things going on and I was angry because he hadn’t told me, and I’d shoved the messy tangle away, refused to look at it. I’d walked through the past few months refusing to let any of what was happening really touch me. Refusing to accept the woman I’d become, denying that I’d even become it.
Now I thaw. Now I stand and look at him and realize why I never turned it all back on.
I would have destroyed the world for him.
And I couldn’t face that. Couldn’t stand what it said about me.
I want to slow this moment down. Once before, I ended up in bed with him inside me, but I was Pri-ya—it happened so quickly and without conscious choice that it was over before it began. I want this to happen in slow motion. I want to live every second like it’s my last. I’ve chosen this. It feels incredible. “Wait.”
His demeanor changes instantly, his eyes haze with crimson. “I haven’t waited long enough?” His chest rattles. His hands are at his sides, curling, flexing. He breathes hard and fast.
In the flickering light, his skin begins to darken.
I stare at him. Just like that, lust to fury. I think he might launch himself on me, take me down, shredding my clothes as we go, and shove inside me before we even hit the floor.
“I’d never take it.” His eyes narrow. Crimson stains the white, bleeds into them with tiny rivers. Suddenly his eyes are black on red, no whites at all. “But I won’t tell you I haven’t thought about it.”
I inhale deeply.
“You’re here. In my bedroom. You have no fucking idea what that does to me. If a woman comes to this place, she dies. If I don’t kill her, my men do.”
“Has a woman ever come to this place?”
“Once.”
“Did she find her own way in? Or did you bring her?”
“I brought her.”
“And?”
“I made love to her.”
I jerk, turning with him, staring into his eyes. That he says those words about another woman makes me feel like launching myself at him, tearing off my clothes, and slamming him home inside me before we reach the floor. Erasing her. He wants to fuck me. He made love to her.