She’d smiled faintly, bitterly amused by the irony of it: how not giving a shit about anything came off looking like confidence. It occurred to her that perhaps she should try interviewing with TT&T again.

But she didn’t, because change was more than she was capable of dealing with at the moment.

Besides, at Little & Staller, she’d developed a routine that kept her nicely numb.

And if, on occasion, a sneaky little memory of a stunningly gorgeous Fae prince perched on the wall of her cubicle slipped past her tightly erected defenses, she quashed it immediately.

Filed another case. Asked for more work. Became a veritable arbitration machine.

She slogged through the days, pretending they weren’t made of wet concrete and she wasn’t wearing lead boots. Pretending that each step didn’t require Herculean effort. Pretending it wasn’t taking all her will merely to force herself to eat, to shower, to get dressed each day.

She lost weight and, in an effort to kill time she might have otherwise been tempted to spend thinking (there would be no thinking, no, none of that at all!), she used some of her suddenly superfluous escape-the-fairy fund to refurbish her wardrobe. She bought new clothes. Got her hair cut, started wearing it in a sexy new style.

A part of her knew she was only staving off the inevitable. Knew eventually it was going to catch up with her.

Knew that at some point she would have to face one of two inescapable facts:

A) The queen had let Adam die.

B) Adam had used her.

Bottom line was, she intended to avoid facing either of those two heartbreaking options for as long as she possibly could.

24

Adam was in a vile temper.

Not only had the queen let him get shot—and he’d suffered every ounce of burning agony involved in it, the bite of each and every bullet—she’d yanked him out of the human realm, tossed him back to Faery smack into the middle of the Tuatha Dé Danaan’s High Council chambers, healed him but not restored him, then confined him to those chambers until she’d returned.

And when she’d returned—what felt like a bloody aeon later—he’d been forced to sit through the entire blasted, infernal, formal hearing, to testify to all he’d seen and all Darroc had done, to answer the most minute and ridiculous questions, all the while seething with impatience to get back to Gabrielle and do what he now understood had to be done.

“Bloody hell,” he hissed, “are we finished here yet?”

The heads of eight High Council members turned to regard him with imperious, offended stares.

It was impermissible to speak out of turn in council. An unspeakable insult. An unforgivable breach of ritual court manners.

Screw the council. Screw court manners. He had things to take care of. Urgent matters. Not piddling courtly crap.

Adam shot an irritated glare at Aoibheal. “You said I could decide his punishment and that you would restore me. Get on with it already. Restore me.”

“You speak with a mortal’s impatience,” Aoibheal said coolly.

“Maybe,” he growled, “because I’m stuck in a mortal form. Fix me already.”

She arched a delicate brow, shrugged. Spoke softly in a rush of Tuatha Dé words.

And Adam sighed with pleasure as he felt himself changing. Becoming himself again.

Immortality.

Invincibility.

A veritable demigod.

Pure power thrumming through his . . . well, he no longer had veins. But who needed veins when there was splendid, glorious, intoxicating power at his very core? Energy, heat, prowess, strength. All the possibilities in the universe at his fingertips.

And, bloody hell, it felt good. He felt good. There were no aches, no pains in Tuatha Dé form. There was no weakness, no hunger, no weariness, no need to eat or drink or piss.

Absolute power. Absolute control.

The world again at his disposal, again his favorite toy.

“Now you may cry sentence, Adam,” Aoibheal said.

Adam pondered Darroc in silence.

Aoibheal whispered a soft command and suddenly the Sword of Light, the hallowed weapon capable of killing an immortal, the blade with which he’d long ago scarred Darroc, appeared in her hand.

And he knew that she expected him to demand Darroc’s immediate soulless death. It was what he, too, had believed he would claim.

But suddenly that seemed far too merciful. The bastard had tried to kill his petite ka-lyrra, to extinguish the life of his passionate, sexy, vibrant Gabrielle.

“Do it,” Darroc snarled, staring fixedly at him. “Get it over with.”

“A soulless death by blade is too good for you, Darroc.”