“She told me you were coming for her! That she was afraid you wouldn’t let her out of the country! She wanted to come home!”

His lids lifted. He looked startled. On a human face, I would have called his expression pained. “She said that?”

“She was crying on the phone, hiding from you!”

“No.” He shook his head. “Not from me, MacKayla. I do not believe she thought it was me. She knew me better than that. Yes, she’d found me out. Discovered what I was. But she didn’t fear me.”

“Stop lying to me!” I lunged to my feet. He’d killed her. I had to believe that. In the huge sea of unknowns that had become my existence, there was one certainty, and it was my life raft. The Lord Master was the bad guy. He’d killed Alina. That was my absolute. My unwavering truth. I couldn’t let go of it. I couldn’t survive in a state of complete paranoia.

He reached into his coat, took out a photo album, and tossed it on the couch. “I expect you to give this back to me. It is mine. I came in peace today,” he said, “and offered you one more chance at an alternative to war between us. The last time you refused me, you saw what I did. Three days, MacKayla. I will come for you in three days. Be ready. Be willing.” He glanced out the window. He reached into his coat again and this time pulled out the amulet on its thick gold chain. It glowed at his touch. He looked at it for a moment, then at me, as if debating testing it. I was a sidhe-seer and a Null, impervious to Fae magic. Would it work on me? Expect the unexpected, I reminded myself. I could make no assumptions.

“I will let you keep the child, today. She is a gift from me to you. I can give you many, many gifts. The next price I call due will not be … as you say … refundable.” He rapped sharply on the window and nodded.

The princes were gone.

Dani slumped into a puddle of mud.

The LM vanished.

“They made me throw away my sword, Mac,” Dani said, teeth chattering.

I dabbed gently at the blood on her cheeks. “I know, honey. You told me.” Seven times in the past three minutes. It was all she’d said since I helped her up from the puddle, dug out a metal teapot, opened two bottles of water, heated it over the fire the LM had left burning, and began cleaning her up.

“Dunno how you survived,” she said, and began to cry.

I wiped at her cheeks some more, pushed at her hair, fretted and fussed like my mom and Alina had fretted over me whenever I wept.

She didn’t cry pretty. She cried like a storm breaking loose, a storm that had been brewing for a long time. I suspected she was crying for things I knew nothing about and might never know. Dani was an intensely private person. She cried like her heart was breaking, like her soul was in those tears, and I held her, thinking how strange life was. I’d thought I was fully engaged in life back in Ashford, Georgia, 100 percent invested.

I’d had no idea what life or love was.

Life didn’t explode in the sunshine and pretty places. Life took the strongest root with a little bit of rain and a whole lot of shit for fertilizer. Although love could grow in times of peace, it tempered in battle. Daddy told me once—when I’d said something about how perfect his relationship with Mom was—that I should have seen the first five years of their marriage, that they’d fought like hellions, crashed into each other like two giant stones. That eventually they’d eroded each other into the perfect fit, become a single wall, nestled into each other’s curves and hollows, her strengths chinking his weaknesses, her weaknesses reinforced by his strengths.

I began telling Dani about my parents. About what life had been like growing up in a happy home in the Deep South. About magnolia-scented days and sultry heat, slow-paddling fans and pool parties. She stilled in my arms. After a while, she stopped crying and leaned back on the couch, staring at me like a stray cat with its nose pressed to the window of a restaurant.

When she took off for the abbey, I carefully tucked the photo album the LM had tossed on the couch into my backpack, unopened. I knew without cracking the cover I was going to need time to pore over the pictures, a luxury I didn’t have now.

I headed off into the gray drizzly day for Barrons Books and Baubles.

I detoured past Chester’s on the way there, hoping the Gray Woman might be in the vicinity. I was going to spend a lot of time loitering in the streets outside Ryodan’s club. “Inside his club” might be under his protection, but that didn’t mean the surrounding area wasn’t free range.

I walked quietly, tensed for battle, prepared to slam my palms into the hag: Null and stab her and do a victory dance on her gruesome body. But the only Unseelie I encountered on the way to the bookstore were Rhino-boys. Half a dozen of them. And what they were doing confounded me so thoroughly that I ended up walking down the cobbled street, spear sheathed, hands in my pockets, staring at them while they stared at me. I think we all had big what-the-fucks plastered all over our faces. It’s kind of hard to tell with those beady eyes and tusks, but I know I did.