Burn me in Hell if you have a problem with that.

He’ll be there with me.

We won’t care.

As the orgasm ebbed, flashed red-hot then ebbed again, he leaned back and slid me down the front of his body, eyes glittering crimson, face half transformed into beast. He was two full feet taller than he had been before, shoulders massively wider, skin darkened to burnished mahogany. I could feel talons on my skin. Low humps of horns were sprouting on his skull.

I was shaking with aftershock, and still, fresh lust blazed through me, sanctifying my blood, opening a floodgate I’d not even realized I’d closed. I was breathless for a moment, stunned by the sudden unsought awareness that I’d once again been repressing all emotion for months. Every single bit of it. Just like I did after I believed I’d killed him on a cliff with Ryodan. Skimming the surface, a flat stone skipping across a bottomless loch, grateful to be a dispassionate observer, the invisible narrator of everyone else’s life. I’d hungered to be unseen. I’d wanted to disappear long before it happened. I have a critical fault line of a defect and it’s not the Book inside me. And it’s not something I can fix. At least not any way I’ve been able to figure out. The relentless, unsolvable clusterfuck in my own head made me choose to deaden myself rather than contend with the uncontendable.

Yet one carnal touch from Barrons and I was alive again. Awake and so very damned alive. And my problem that couldn’t be fixed would be as ever present and unmanageable as always when we were done. May as well savor the now.

He dropped his dark, misshapen head forward and long matted hair brushed my back. “I taste Unseelie in you,” he murmured thickly into the hollow of my neck around teeth much too large for a human mouth. I felt his tongue trace my jugular. Felt my heartbeat in my neck, pulsing against his fangs. His next words were guttural, violent, barely human, “Just how hard do you want to play?” He shook me a little then, like a dog with a rabbit in its teeth.

“How hard can you take it?” I purred into his chest.

He raised his head and looked down at me and laughed like I’ve never heard him laugh as a man. Oh, yes, Barrons prefers the beast. There’s something so sure and uncomplicated in that form. As if there, a prehensile creature, he’s free in a way I can’t begin to understand. I want to explore what he feels wearing that primal ebon skin, how life tastes to him on those killing fangs, cozy up to the basest he has to offer, meet it in kind.

I slammed my palms into his chest, knocking him backward. He crashed into the wall of the bathroom so hard his head went down, and when it whipped back, his smile was feral, exultant. “You want to fight or fuck, Mac?”

I bounced from foot to foot, wired with fury and sexual energy. I may never understand why I always feel them together around him but I sure as hell can enjoy it. “Both.”

“Think you can take me?”

“Going to damn well try.”

“Think you’ll survive it?”

I stabbed a finger in his chest and smiled up at him. “I think I’m gonna own it. Jericho.”

He growled low in his chest. “Bring it the fuck on, Mac.”

I brought it.

7

“I’m gonna walk before they make me run…”

I stretched, supremely satisfied, rolled over on my side, and looked at Barrons. He was in human form again, flat on his back, chest not moving, and I knew if I lay my ear against his skin, I’d hear no heartbeat thudding behind his breastbone.

Barrons doesn’t sleep. He drifts and was in what I’d learned to recognize as a deep meditative state. It wouldn’t be long before he disappeared into the night to do whatever he does that makes his body electric and his heart pound again.

I raked a hand through my hair, trying to push the wild mess out of my face, and succeeded only in getting my fingers tangled in knots matted with spray paint. I gave up and shoved it to one side. We were both smeared with oil-based lacquer and if I wasn’t…enhanced, and he wasn’t…whatever he was, I’d worry about all those nasty chemicals on our skin. We’d slipped and slid all over the store, thrown each other around in the wreckage, painted our skin crimson, not all of it paint, some of it blood.

We were currently wedged between half a shot-up broken chesterfield and a shattered bookcase, I had hard-cornered books digging into my ass, was using a crushed lamp shade as a pillow, and one of the many baubles in the store was gouging the small of my back.

I felt incredible. Released. Open. I made a mental note to jump on him the next time I found myself feeling uncertain or shutting down. Barrons is antitoxin for the venom poisoning me.

I tipped my head back and looked around the room.

If the bookstore hadn’t been completely decimated before, it certainly was now. Something bizarre had happened to us while we were fighting and fucking, taking out everything we felt on each other’s bodies because words don’t work for either of us anymore. As if possessed by a unified prime directive, we’d abruptly stopped having sex and devoted our focus to finishing what the men had started. We smashed, slashed, and crushed.

Those few things the Guardians had left unbroken we’d destroyed ourselves. My iPod had actually still been working in the sound dock. It wasn’t now, ground to smithereens beneath a heel. The rugs shredded by Barrons’s talons. Bookcases that had been standing were now on the floor, contents dumped across the garishly stained floors.

I understood on an intuitive level. Someone else had desecrated our home. By participating in its destruction, we’d said goodbye to its current incarnation. We’d given the bookstore a proper burial. We’d grieved in fury. We’d torn down the Phoenix to ash so it could rise again.