I realize if she came for Lor to eliminate her competition, rather than Dani or me, she must not know about the spear and sword. “This world belongs to us,” I say. “If you try to take it from us, it will be war.”

“A war you will lose.”

“Try me.”

Nude, she begins to pad a slow, predatory circle around me. I turn with her and she laughs.

“No, you most certainly do not wish one such as we unseen behind your back.”

“Nor do you wish me unseen behind yours,” I purr.

She laughs again and it’s a caress to my ears. She’s amped up her death-by-sex Fae heat. I feel it expanding around her, yet it doesn’t touch me.

When I don’t respond, her eyes widen, her mouth shapes a perfect, lush O of surprise. The sexual energy she’s channeling pulses hotter. On the desk, Lor bucks and strains against the chains.

I wonder if I could somehow accept the energy she’s so generously (foolishly?) throwing off, while rejecting the sexual component. As I consider it, she pads to a stop in front of me. We’re the same height. She leans in as if to kiss me.

“Oh, what are you, you delicious thing,” she says, and wets her lips. “Not like them, not like us yet like us. You smell of …” She trails off and stops in front of me, sniffing deeply, leaning into my neck. I don’t move. I feel her snuffling at my throat. “Oh, yes, I like that smell very much but there is … something … it is most …”

She’s definitely unaware I have the spear. I wonder if she even knows such weapons exist. She seems oddly out of the loop.

She recoils like a cobra, drawing up to her full height, back arched away, eyes narrowing, and hisses, “Oh! You smell of them. We will not go back. It finished with us. It said so. We will never go back.”

She vanishes.

“About fucking time you got rid of her.” Lor recovers his voice with a snarl. He sounds hoarse, from hours of yelling.

I stand, blinking at her sudden, unexpected disappearance.

She shouldn’t have been able to sift out of the club. Then again, she shouldn’t have been able to get inside in the first place. Either Ryodan’s wards aren’t working or she’s beyond their compulsion.

I frown, trying to decide what she thinks I smell like that drove her away so completely. There are multiple possibilities. The stain of her brothers’ rape lingering on my soul? The green goo of the Gray Woman I butchered? Perhaps she detects the sworn enemy of the Fae, my sidhe-seer sisters on my skin, in my blood. Or maybe the oily residue of the Unseelie that stalk me who—as if summoned by that last thought—swiftly begin popping, one after another, into the room with me, crushing close, giving Lor wide berth. Apparently it was the princess they were avoiding. I wish I knew why. I’d make Eau d’Unseelie Princess perfume of her flesh and spray myself with it if I thought it might work.

She said “them,” so obviously it wasn’t the singularity of the Book she sensed inside me, and that she would not go back. Go back where? And who’d put her there to begin with?

On the desk, Lor makes a sound of such raw sexual need that I shiver. “Mac,” he growls. “I need. Get your ass over here.”

Pri-ya is a hellish thing to be. It reduces you to a whimpering, broken, pathetic sex addict that will do anything for anyone at any time. I have memories I’ve interred deep. Places in my mind I’ll never visit again.

Whimpering and broken are the key words there.

“What do you need, Lor?” I say dryly.

“What the fuck do you think I need? Sex. Constantly. I’ll die if I don’t have it all the time. I’m Pri-ya.”

“Hm. Pri-ya.”

“Sure as shit, the bitch made me Pri-ya. You saw her. I had an Unseelie Princess on top of me. My dick hurts so bad it’s gonna explode. I need sex. I can’t live without it. This is torture. So either get on it, or find me a hot blond babe that will. Which is any hot blond babe in the club,” he adds cheerfully.

I like Lor. He’s aggressive, domineering, and part caveman, but he doesn’t have a cruel bone in his body, and he flat-out adores women and children. I sometimes think if the other eight weren’t around, Lor would be a very different man.

Leave it to him to try to capitalize on the princess’s visit, use it as an excuse to spend the next few months in bed, receiving a steady stream of women whose sole purpose is to have sex with him 24/7.

I know what Pri-ya looks like—and he’s not it. Though part of her magic somehow worked on him, the Nine are apparently impossible to turn Pri-ya. I wonder if they’re too basely sexual to begin with. Perhaps the charge they throw off cancels out her sexuality, or at least dampens the full effect of it. I decide I’ll stick close to Barrons until I figure out how to get rid of her and if there are others out there. She might not have turned Lor into a permanent slave, but a temporary one is bad enough. Deep in my sidhe-seer center, I activate an antenna of sorts to listen at all times for the gothic, dark march of the princess.

I move toward the door. Ryodan can unchain Lor. I’m not getting close to the man while he’s naked. He told me once he prefers a club over a woman’s head because charm wastes energy better spent fucking, and I believe him. Although I see no club in the office, there are other heavy objects.

“Aw, c’mon, Mac,” he says, sounding aggrieved, “would it really kill you to let them think I’m Pri-ya? What have I ever done to you? Tonight was traumatic. Bitch actually made me call her ‘mistress.’ I need some good old-fashioned fucking to ease my pain. Maybe a sexy ‘Yes, master’ or two. Or two hundred. What’s wrong with that?”