He jerked a hand through his muddy, dirty hair. I ached to touch him, to kiss him. He wouldn’t even look at me. “I’m listening. Christ.”

“I’m the queen now, Nicholas.”

“Which explains why you’re wearing a crown.” He sounded exhausted. His hands were trembling. When he finally looked at me, he could only stare at the blood on my forehead.

“I need to know that you’re loyal to me.”

“My loyalties?” he shot back. There was a stake in his hand and a kind of mad serenity in his expression. “Are you kidding? After everything that’s happened? After what I just went through?”

“What did you go through?” I asked.

He still wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I got away, that’s what matters. They thought they broke me.”

“I need to know,” Solange insisted. “I need to be sure you’re on my side.”

“Then be sure.”

“I’m not just a princess anymore.”

“You’re an assh—” I managed to hiss out before she pushed harder with her thumb, and my trachea threatened to explode. I struggled not to pass out as black spots danced at the edges of my vision, then faded. My eyes rolled back in my head.

And then Nicholas was all fangs and fury. He attacked so fast I had no warning, wasn’t even sure my eyes could register motion that quickly.

But he still wasn’t quicker than Solange.

“Stop!”

A stake bit into the tree beside me, so close that a splinter grazed my cheek. It was a small scratch barely noticeable, but it bled. And the coppery scent of blood made the battle all the more fierce, all the more vicious. I could barely make out what was going on, and couldn’t jump in with a stake of my own since I might accidentally stake my own boyfriend. Or my best friend. And every time I moved, even an inch, Solange was there, shoving me back.

And then Nicholas brought his arm down with enough force to break her wrist. I heard the snap of the bones even as she released me so abruptly I choked and dropped to my knees. I hauled air into my bruised throat. My lungs felt as if they’d turned to paper.

Solange hissed in pain, cracking her wrist back into position. It might hurt but it wasn’t enough to stop her. I was pushing to my knees and Nicholas was reaching for me when she struck again. She kicked Nicholas in the chest with her boot. He staggered just out of reach, for barely a moment. She yanked my arm behind my back, hard enough that I yelled.

“An eye for an eye,” she said. “I’ll snap her bones and call it justice.”

Nicholas shrugged.

He shrugged.

I gaped at him. “She’s mine, broken or not,” he said darkly.

I felt like throwing up.

Solange was silent for a long moment. My elbow was bending the wrong way, shooting pain up my arm like rusty iron nails. Her fingers were so tight around my wrist that there were bruises already forming. It hurt enough that tears burned my eyelids if I so much as breathed too deeply against her hold. Rocks and tree roots dug into my knees.

Then she smiled. “Yes, I can smell the darkness in you,” she murmured.

“Can you?” His expression, his stance, the leashed violence in his smile; it was all wrong.

“Yes, and if you give into it, prove yourself to me, then you can come back to the camp. Lucy goes free.”

I really wanted to poke her in the eye with a sharp stick. Better yet, right in the heart, the undead cow.

She raised an eyebrow at Nicholas. “She’s your bloodslave, and yet I don’t smell her blood on you.”

Nicholas just folded his arms, as if the fight had never happened, as if this were all very normal, as if he weren’t bruised and battered. As if it didn’t hurt me just to look at him. “Yeah. So?”

Suddenly I didn’t know who I wanted to poke more.

“So, I believe you’ll drink her blood, right here and right now if you want to keep your claim on her. Otherwise, I’ll think you’re playing me, brother.”

I went cold. “You’re not serious.” I tried to jerk away again, but it was no use. Every muscle in my arm screeched. I tried to catch Nicholas’s eye, but he still wouldn’t look at me. He stepped closer. “Nicholas, don’t.”

When he finally looked at me, fear whispered through me, insidious and soft, making my bones watery.

We’d lost Solange. And now Nicholas wasn’t acting like himself. Was he drugged on her pheromones? Had she compelled him? Where had he been all this time? What had happened to him? He’d just broken her bones to protect me, but now I had to wonder, for the first time, if it was vampire possessiveness playing out, not love. Nothing made sense anymore.

Nicholas had never drunk my blood before. He’d never had to. He was the one who was always worried about what it might mean. But it had never really bothered me. I wasn’t lying when I told Jenna it was like donating at the blood bank.

But now I wasn’t so sure.

No needle or antiseptic or plastic blood bag held such menace, such hunger.

Solange shoved my frock coat off my shoulder, revealing my slip dress, which was really meant to be a nightgown. It was sleeveless, and goosebumps marched from wrist to collarbone as the snow began to fall again. It caught in my eyelashes, making prisms of colors when I looked at Nicholas’s pale skin, his gleaming fangs. I shivered, from cold or fear, I couldn’t say. Likely both.

He lifted my arm gently to his mouth, and for a brief moment I thought he’d use the leverage of our position to somehow free me from Solange’s grasp.