“Too bloody much,” Ryodan said curtly.

“Seriously.” I looked at Barrons. “How much?”

He regarded me in stony silence.

“I’m not letting this one go,” I said. “You felt my rage, even when the Sinsar Dubh was in control. That means you can sense a great deal more than you’ve ever admitted to me. How much?”

“A great deal,” he finally said.

I met his gaze and held it. Big, beautiful, dark, hard-to-handle man. I was proud to call him mine. Didn’t mean I wasn’t going to still have ferocious arguments with him. And no doubt the occasional knock-down-drag-out fight. But now wasn’t the time. You and I are going to talk later, I said silently.

He smiled faintly, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

I smiled back. It didn’t reach my eyes either. I notched my chin down that same warning bit he was throwing my way, perfectly able to give as good as I got.

Ryodan glanced between us and murmured, “She became what you thought she would. Lucky man.”

Barrons inclined his head, and his eyes said to me, I am.

And just like that the tension between us was shelved for later. Assuming we had a later.

I felt a brisk breeze and suddenly Jada was there, standing in front of me.

“What’s up, Mac?” she said, eyes bright.

And faintly red-rimmed. She’d been crying recently, maybe no one but me would notice but I know Dani. Her face was pure alabaster tension, freckles on snow. I pounced on her quickly, before she could get away from me, enveloping her in one of my daddy’s bear hugs, holding tight. She felt so slender and slight in my arms, so…fragile somehow. If anyone needed a hug, it was Dani. Whether she wanted it or not. Who knew how much time we had? I wasn’t wasting any of it. When she tried to break free, I said fiercely in her ear, “I love you, Dani, and I am going to hug you every now and then. Get used to it.”

I let her go, and she backpedaled instantly, but much of the tension in her face was gone and there was a flush of color rising in her cheeks. That was a start. Later I was going to make her talk to me, tell me if she’d been crying about Dancer or Shazam and exactly what was going on inside that brilliantly, defiantly curling-in-the-rain head of hers. So much had happened so quickly that it was difficult to remember it had only been two days since her meltdown at the abbey.

For a split second I felt almost as if I was hovering, out of my body, above us, looking down.

Me, Barrons, Ryodan, Dani.

And I had the oddest feeling of…rightness in the universe while looking down at us. I’d had lunch with my family. Now I was solving world problems with my other family. I glanced at Ryodan, who was observing me with a faint smile. When he nodded minutely, I realized that while Barrons could happily go off and be solitary for the rest of his existence, Ryodan wanted family. What Barrons said to him that night I’d been spying on them was true: Kas doesn’t speak. X is half mad on a good day, bugfuck crazy on a bad one. You’re tired of it. You want your family back. You want a full house, like the old days.

I nodded back. We would keep it intact. Protect it. Always have each other’s backs. Whatever it took.

“What the bloody hell happened to this hole?” Jada demanded, staring up at the sphere. “It wasn’t this big yesterday!” When Ryodan told her about the mass suicide, she said, “Once the ergosphere appeared, the gravitational pull increased, didn’t it?”

Ryodan nodded grimly. “That’s why we haven’t tried to tarp it. It’s strong enough that it may suck the tarp in.”

“Ergosphere?” I prodded.

“The outer, spinning rim is called the ergosphere,” Jada said. “Imagine having a sheet spread flat while you use a rotating drill on it. It’ll catch up the fabric as it spins, twisting it in. Whatever matter approaches the ergosphere will get caught and be subject to what astronomers call spaghettification, pulled thin as spaghetti before being sucked in. As the sphere increases in mass and density, the pull will grow even stronger, distorting space around it.”

“Christian is meeting us here to see if he can use his druid skills to remove earth from beneath it,” Ryodan said, “but this fucking rain has got to stop.”

To Jada, I said, “Summon Cruce.”

“Why?”

“He’s Fae and can stop the rain. That’s why I asked you to meet me here.”

“Cruce,” Jada said instantly.

He appeared, scowling as usual. And vanished again. So did Jada.

They wasted a good three or four minutes yanking each other from place to place until Cruce finally remained long enough to pierce me with a stare and demand, “Does this mean you have accepted my offer?”

“Stop the rain, Cruce.”

“Fuck you, MacKayla. Oh, wait, I have already done that. Repeatedly.”

Barrons’s dark head whipped instantly to mine, teeth bared in a snarl, fangs sliding down.

Ah, shit, shit, shit. I’d hidden that one from him. I’d only discovered it myself a month and a half ago, my time, when the king whisked me and Cruce off to another world for a private conversation and I’d seen “V’lane’s” true form for the first time.

I’d never told Barrons that I learned who my fourth rapist had been, the one who’d given me the elixir. He’d once suggested it might have been Darroc. I don’t fully understand why I didn’t tell him when I found out. Partly because I hate talking about it and partly because Cruce had been iced by the king immediately after I found out. There’d been little point that I could see. Knowing Barrons, he might have broken Cruce out just to kill him, and I’d been hungry for a time of peace.

Not that I’d actually ended up getting it.

The way Cruce had just worded it hadn’t defined the occasion. Barrons might have been carved of stone, given how still he’d gone. He was no doubt standing there wondering if one of those times I’d slipped off to the beach with V’lane and come back tan, we’d been having sex all day.

“Get Cruce out of here,” I murmured to Jada.

Barrons exploded the instant I said it, and I realized my mistake. Merely by saying those words I’d confirmed that it had indeed happened. If it hadn’t, I’d never have tried to get Cruce out of there; it made me look both guilty and protective of him. Barrons had only gone so still because he’d turned one thousand percent of his focus on me, waiting for the slightest, subtlest sign of confirmation. It spoke volumes about how much I’d changed and how well I could guard my secrets that I’d had to actually say something for him to read me.