Mal snarled something unintelligible and was gone. Kohana cursed himself. Truth, he’d overlooked her reaction if Jeremiah was harmed, but since he’d known what Mal was working on, he’d been knocked off balance, hearing Elisa’s absolute certainty that she was being sent away. He’d thought Mal had changed course, and it had ticked him off something fierce.

“Men are total idiots.” Chumani snorted, steam practically coming out of her nostrils as he came back into the kitchen. With Elisa out of commission, she’d rearranged her shifts and was helping Kohana prepare dinner, chopping carrots so ferociously Kohana was thinking he should get the knife from her. She stopped, waved it at him. “Mal thinks Elisa will respond better to a grand gesture, days after he was so mean to her, rather than giving her a simple apology right away. And we can’t say anything. Why is it men think actions are better than words?”

A lock of hair had come loose and curled at her brow, drawing more attention to the line of her slim neck, the pout of her full lips and those long, long lashes. She was wearing a V-neck T-shirt, one that showed the hint of cleavage, the cotton molded to firm breasts. He hadn’t intended to let his gaze wander that way, but Chumani in a high dudgeon was hard for any man to resist. And a much younger man wouldn’t, right?

The hell with that. She noted the direction of his gaze a bare second before Kohana reached out, clasped her arm in one large hand and pulled her into him, hard enough she collided against his chest, the knife still gripped in her hand. He didn’t care about that. Cupping her face, he held her close with the other, sliding his arm around her waist to hold her fast as he kissed her, hard and long . . . deep. Her body stiffened, then eased, then fully melded into his, so close and hot that his need ran away from him and he dropped a hand to her waist and then farther, molding the hip and the taut, round buttock, pressing her against an erection large and aching enough to compete with a youth half his age, damn it all.

The knife dropped to the floor and her hands slid up under his arms, fingers digging into his shirt. When he finally stopped, they were both breathing hard, and he knew she was just as aroused as he was, a pure shot of adrenaline. His voice was thick when he spoke.

“Maybe because we’re better at action.”

She stared up at him. Her eyes were a little wild and astonishingly vulnerable. It made him gentle his hold on her neck, pass his thumb over her nape. “I didn’t just do that for the hell of it, you know.”

She swallowed. “I sure hope not. Because if you did, I will kick your ass, old man.” Then she rose on her toes and kissed him back, fitting every curve of her body to his, as if they were two saplings seeded together, trunks and roots inextricably and irrevocably intertwined.

For so long, he’d felt like an unopened can of soda around her, all shook up with nowhere for all that violent pressure to go. It wasn’t as good as he’d imagined—it was leaps and bounds better, because it was raw and unleashed, and quiet and constant as a river at once. He didn’t need a shaman’s blood to know this was as meant to be as anything in nature.

He was still worried about Elisa, but somehow, he knew it would be all right. Because Mal was like that unopened soda as well, and the little miss had just given it a good kick. Her vampire had blood in his eye, and the top was likely to explode right off. As he pulled Chumani closer, showing her just how steady a one-legged man could be, he thought that might not be a bad thing at all.

Women. Yes, maybe he had screwed up, not communicating with her, but she knew better than this. As Kohana had pointed out, she’d been a servant all her life. She knew there were lines you didn’t cross.

Unless she didn’t think she had anything left to lose. If you put her on that plane, you might as well kill her. Still, he wasn’t in a mood to coddle. He’d been dealing with all manner of bullshit this week, in order to give her . . . Yeah, she didn’t know about it, but damn it, she needed to learn to trust him. He embraced the irrational thought, responding to the kick of his heated blood that said it was time to set her straight.

When he pulled up in the Jeep and switched it off, he saw things were as Kohana described them, and that didn’t help settle him. It was too soon after a much worse scenario. Though they’d rinsed down the area thoroughly, he still smelled traces of the blood that had been shed here.

That, as well as this situation, wouldn’t be a calming environment for any of the fledglings, particularly the one to whom she’d positioned herself far too closely. Having three crossbows on him wouldn’t help.

She was trying to explain the same thing to the staff. He’d heard her through her mind on the way here. “He’s not going to hurt me, but you’re scaring him. Please stop; just put them down. You don’t even have to let them go, but you can lower them.”

You’d be a lot more effective at giving orders if you were better at taking them.

He sent her that thought just as his Jeep crested the hill. Everything in her tensed up. She hadn’t known what else to do. She’d thought he wouldn’t listen otherwise.

It pissed him off further. As he got out of the Jeep and strode toward the enclosure, Chayton was outside of it. When he stepped forward, his face set in that same disapproving mask Kohana had shown him, Mal peeled back his lips and snarled. He used enough fang to send Chayton skittering back in shock and self-preservation. Sometimes his employees needed to remember that he was no more a tame pet than the other kind they handled on the island.

As he moved into the communal enclosure, crossed the space between them, he spoke. “Would you like to tell me what the hell you’re thinking?”

Elisa blinked, rising to her feet, the manacle clanking against Jeremiah’s cell door. She was still tired enough from her ordeal that she hadn’t been able to remain standing as she’d hoped, proud and defiant throughout. Jeremiah squatted on the other side of the bars, catty-corner. While he didn’t meet Mal’s gaze, he tracked his movements through sidelong glances.

“You know what I’m thinking.” She wasn’t being impudent, but her voice held an edge.

“Yes. Which is why I asked, because this required no thinking at all.”

“I’m doing the only thing I could to keep you from sending me home.”

“If that’s your goal, defying me is the last thing you should be doing. And are you thinking about what’s best for them, or for you?”

That made her stiffen. “I help—”

“How does it help them to see you destroyed bit by bit by their loss of control, Elisa? How does it help them learn to be independent in a world of vampires by teaching them to be dependent on a human? If I tell you you’re getting on that plane, you’re going. That’s the way it works. No argument or discussion.”

“No.” Her chin lifted. A chin that had a slight quiver to it, her large blue eyes so full of appeal and pain. He remembered a week ago, when they’d been wide with arousal, her mouth bruised by his kisses, versus now, when it was a hard, thin, resolute line in the sand.

“You don’t have the right to ‘no,’ Elisa, and you damn well know it.” He looked toward Bidzil, who was properly expressionless. “Get the bolt cutters.”

She surged forward then, forgetting about the manacles so that they caught her up and rattled hard against the bars. He saw her wince from the still-tender ribs, but something else cracked in her expression then.

“Then what, in the name of God, do I have to do to have the right? I’ve done nothing but what I’ve been told my whole life. I had a man between my legs before I had hair there. I know what it’s like to get driven off from a garbage can like an unwanted stray dog, foraging for scraps. I’ve had my body ripped open, the man I love torn apart within feet of me, so my dress was soaked with his blood as I was raped. It was my favorite dress . . . one I wore for him.”

Her voice had become strident, hard and hoarse, a tone he’d never heard from her. He wasn’t sure she’d ever uttered it herself. This was from the well of the soul, where the darkest secrets and deepest angers were kept, and she was dredging them up brutally, as if she were using a steel gouge on her soul.

“I protect them. I watch over them. I’m the only one who truly listens to them, who sees the children they once were. Regardless of how old he truly is, Jeremiah needs that stuffed bear on his bed, because it means something to him. Miah and Nerida sing to each other when they go to bed in the morning. William wants to learn to play Chayton’s flute, which of course means that Matthew does, too. They are my purpose, my meaning. I have to protect them.”

He kept his voice low and even. “You’ve made them your purpose and meaning, Elisa. They keep you from facing the rest. You’ve invested a cost in them so dear, that if you turn away now, Willis’s death, your violation, you think it’ll have all been meaningless. Well, things like that are meaningless. That’s the point; that’s why they’re so awful.”

“I can’t leave them.” Elisa spoke in that same awful voice, only now it was quiet, an open raw wound. “They’re mine to protect. My charges.”

Mal’s frustration broke the reins then. With an oath, he stepped forward, backing her into the bars. Laying his hand on the chain connecting the manacle, he yanked. The link burst, with enough force that it jerked her to him.

“I’m done with this,” he snapped. He wrapped the loose chain around his other hand, tethering her to him. He’d drag her back to the house bodily if needed, but a strangled noise from her, an animal scream of rage and pain, stopped him. That, and the fact he was solidly punched in the face by a small, intensely concentrated fist.

He wouldn’t have given her credit for such strength, though of course she had a second mark’s enhanced ability. It was the coordination and accuracy of it that told him that, somewhere during her short life span, she’d been taught to fight. A pair of thin arms shot out from the cell, wrapped across her waist and chest, and drew her back against the bars hard enough that her body collided against them with a metallic thud, the chain pulled from his hand.