I locked gazes with him. You’re my sun—

Hush. You think I don’t know that? I have a bone to pick with you, Ms. Lane.

I arched a brow. Uh-oh. I was Ms. Lane. That was Barrons: the man of few words could get downright loquacious with his criticism. “What?” There was a note of truculence in my voice, but I’d had a rough twenty-four hours and I was tired.

There was a moment back there in the White Mansion. You didn’t move. I wouldn’t have minded if you had.

He opened his arms.

Truculence dissipated like a bubble bursting. When I bounded over the couch, sped across the bookstore, and flung myself into them, he caught me up and swung me around and I threw my head back, laughing just like a heroine in one of those romantic movies.

“Sun, moon, and stars,” he growled against my ear.

I punched him in the shoulder. “Hush. You think I don’t know that?”

Then his mouth was on mine and we were on the floor, ushering in the night in time-honored fashion.

By the crimson and silvery light of the moon shafting in the front windows of my bookstore, on a hard floor that felt soft as clouds, I made love to Jericho Barrons. Took my time, slow, lingering, and tender. Poured into my hands every ounce of reverence I felt for this man who understood me like no other, saw straight to my tarnished soul and liked every bit of it, waited patiently while I did dickhead things until I found my way through them, never changed, never stopped being beastly but was capable of enormous loyalty and great tenderness. This lion that I’d sauntered up to wearing my flashy peacock feathers hadn’t snapped the head off my skinny, brilliantly colored neck, he’d only licked me and waited for me to grow claws.

I had neither flashy feathers nor claws now. I’d become yet another thing.

A steel fist inside a velvet glove.

Strong enough that I was no longer afraid to be gentle. Powerful enough that I could be vulnerable. Scarred enough that I could understand and tread lightly around the deepest scars of others.

Then Barrons’s steel was inside my velvet glove and I thought no more.

Later, when I lay stretched on top of his big hard body, I raised my head and looked into his eyes. “Did you see me when I was the Book?”

Yes, his dark gaze said.

I didn’t want to know, yet I needed to know. There was a new part of me that never wanted to hide from anything again. It demanded all truth all the time. If I’d done something, I wanted to know every detail, own it completely and deal with it. I’d learned that not knowing is so much harder than knowing, no matter how bad the truth is. Whether it’s worse or not, the unknown always looms larger and more terrifying because the doubt it creates undermines our ability to move forward. “Did you see me kill Jo?”

I saw you after the Book had. There’s no question you did it.

The others I killed?

He shook his head. I wasn’t there. I did, however, see a few disturbing things on the way to the White Mansion. I terminated each of them. Quickly.

I inhaled sharply and tears sprang to my eyes. He’d cleaned up after me. When I’d first returned to Dublin this morning I’d wanted desperately to find those terrible things the Book had shown me: the inside out twins, the castrated man, the child, but I’d realized it had been thirty-five days, and although they surely lingered in agony, it had likely been a matter of hours or days and it was far too late for me to be merciful. Barrons had prevented them from suffering. Been the mercy killer for me. I drew back and looked at him through the tears, wondering if this was what he had meant about the grain of sand. “Your feelings about whatever you’d done that was unforgivable got polished into mercy.”

Mercy from a beast like me? he mocked.

Yes, from you.

He said nothing but I knew it was true.

The silence stretched, then he lightly touched his hands to my temples and drew my head into the hollow of his neck.

Suddenly I was in another place and time, a desert of sand, a hot wind gusting over me, tangling my hair. Watching Barrons toss his son up onto a horse. The beautiful little boy laughed with excitement as his father stared impatiently up.

I made him come with me that day because I was in a hurry. I didn’t want to waste the few minutes it would have taken to return him to his mother. There was no reason to hurry. Those few minutes cost him his entire life, condemned him to an eternity of hell.

I swallowed.

The thing that ate at me the most about containing you with the stones was that it appeared my choices were: don’t do it and let you destroy the world; do it and lock you away in Culsan’s chamber, incurring the risk that the world got destroyed by the black holes anyway, leaving you to suffer there forever because I would be gone and unable to come back and free you; or kill you so you would never suffer my son’s fate. I can’t tell you if it appeared the world would end, I’d not have done the latter.

“Thank you,” I said simply.

He inclined his head gravely.

“Was I horrific when the Book was in possession of me?”

“No worse than many humans I’ve known. Where the corporeal Book was a vast, philosophical, brilliant homicidal maniac with enormous power of illusion, the one within you seemed a smaller, egotistical psychopath. Cruce postulated that the Book didn’t copy itself, it had to split, thereby lost many of its parts in the process. I suspect the twenty-some years it lived inside you changed it further. Its time inside your body must have been the most visceral, tangible experience it had ever had, connected to your senses.”

“You think I humanized it.”

“To a degree.”

“Did you know I was in there?”

He smiled faintly. “I felt you early on. You were furious.”

“You felt that? But I wasn’t in control of it then!”

“Your rage was enormous and told me what I needed to know. You were in there, fighting. Later the Book tried to pretend it was shifting back and forth between you and it, and I played along but I could sense only the Book at that time. The only other time I felt you was when I came to you.”

“And told me to become it.”

His dark eyes gleamed. Which you did superbly. My little monster.

I gasped. “You could feel me when I was like that—stripped of all emotion?”

You were a woman who knew her own strength. Powerful. Resolute. Beautiful.

I dropped my head back down into the hollow of his neck, glowing inside. Beneath me lay the only man that could probably ever understand what I’d become at that moment, and could admire it. It would have terrified most men, to watch a woman strip away everything that made her human in order to get the job done. He found my strength beautiful. My monster and his beast; they liked each other.