“If you haven’t surrendered your body and soul by midnight, I will begin amusing myself in earnest with your father’s suffering. Physically, at first, and progressing from there. I will push my fingers into his psyche and create excruciating new realities for him. Realities where you are dead and gone, through some negligence on his part, and he drowns in guilt and grief for eternity. Realities where he watches his beloved daughter suffer offenses and indignities beyond human endurance, over and over again while he screams in vain for your freedom and, eventually, for the mercy of your final death.”

My skin crawled. “Stop.” My eyes closed in horror and my voice carried no sound, which was just as well, because it would have made no difference anyway.

Tod rolled the desk chair closer and took my hand, and Nash sank onto the end of my bed, his eyes swirling with angry, despairing shades of green and brown.

“He will have twelve hours of such agony, while you further consider your choices,” Avari continued. “And if you are not in my possession by noon in your human time zone, I will end his life and deliver his soulless corpse—whatever is left of it—into your possession.”

My heart went still, and its last beat echoed the hollow length of my body. “You’re going to kill him?”

“Yes, of course. Unless you are willing to trade yourself for him. And if you have not surrendered by that next midnight—thirty of your human hours from now, if I understand your maddeningly consistent method of keeping time—I will begin to torture his immortal soul.”

“Torture?” I heard the word, but I couldn’t process it. Not truly. My mind was a maelstrom of chaos and fear, rapidly sucking me into a pinpoint of darkness from which I was afraid I might never return.

“It’s a general term, of course. It reveals nothing of my true intent, or the specific levels of pain I can achieve in one so...attached as your father. You are his weakness, you know. You are the thing he would die for. The thing he would suffer for. The thing he will suffer for. And when his sanity starts to slide, he will not be able to differentiate between reality and the mental projection of his worst fears and imaginings. I believe your cousin saw the result of that particular technique when she met Addison in the Nether.”

Sophie met Addison?

“She’s a clever little thing, your kin. More like you than you think. And when your father sinks too far into insanity to suffer for me—for  you—I will move on to your cousin.”

“You won’t get that chance,” I said, and Avari laughed out loud.

“She isn’t a pure-blood bean sidhe, and her wail is largely pointless, but the pain that sound could carry... She will be my consolation prize while I wait to acquire you. Her screams will whet my appetite for yours. A most appropriate substitute for however long you are willingto let her suffer. Do you have an estimate of how long that might be? It would really help with my planning....”

“Hang up,” Tod said. “We’ve heard more than enough.” Avari had officially delivered his horrifying ultimatum.

“Well, if it isn’t the knight in tarnished armor. How is that breastplate fitting these days? Has Ms. Cavanaugh discovered how readily you shed the costume of honor when ethical compromise produces faster results—or greater profit?”

Tod glared at the phone, fists clutching the sides of the rolling desk chair like they were the only thing holding him there. “She knows everything I’ve done.”

And I knew that everything he’d done—supernatural drug trafficking and feeding certain criminal elements to the Netherworld—had been done to protect someone else. Tod’s methods may have been flawed, but his heart was in the right place. Always.

“How large is my audience?” the hellion said. “Is the other Mr. Hudson listening? The one with the bruised soul and wounded eyes?”

Nash didn’t answer. None of us did. We only stared at the phone, and with each new word my hand inched closer, my finger hovering over the button that would end the call.

“I look forward to resuming our business relationship. I’ve always found you to be the most pragmatic of your peers,” the hellion continued. “The one who best understands business and is least likely to let emotions interfere.”

“Not gonna happen,” Nash said so softly I wasn’t sure Avari could hear him. “We won’t be doing any more business.”

“Oh, I think we will. I think you and your older, fairer, deader brother will do just about anything to provide for the care and comfort of your lovely mother....”

Nash reached for the phone, but before he could pick it up, the screen flashed black, then the words “call ended” appeared. “Bastard!” Nash shouted, and I grabbed his phone before he could reach it because I could see his intent in his eyes. “He has our mom!” Nash turned on Tod. “How can you just sit there, knowing he has our mother?”

“He doesn’t have her.” Tod’s voice sounded calm, but I could see tension in every line of his body. In the way he sat perfectly still, as if he might lose control of his temper—just like Nash—if he moved at all. “If Avari really had her, he’d come right out and say it, so there could be no doubt. But he didn’t say it. He only implied it, because that’s as close to lying as a hellion can get. He hasn’t found her yet, Nash.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said, and Tod nodded. “That’s probably why he hung up so fast—so we couldn’t start asking about her.”