He is coming. She feels his approach.

He is so powerful!

It is what first drew her to him. She’d never encountered anyone like him.

She was awed that he chose her.

She is awed every day that he continues choosing her.

The stuff of him explodes through from the Court of Shadows, telling her he comes, filling her home (prison) where she lives a fabulous life (a sentence not of her choosing) surrounded by everything she wants (illusions, she misses her world, so far away and all of them long dead) and waits for him with hope (ever-growing despair).

He will carry her to his bed and do things to her until his black wings open wide, so wide, eclipsing the world, and when he is inside her, nothing else will matter but the moment, their dark, intense lust, the endless passion they share.

No matter what else he is—he is hers.

What is between them is without blame.

Love knows no right or wrong.

Love is. Only is.

She (I) rushes down the dark, warm, inviting hall, hurrying to his (my) bed. We need our lover. It has been too long.

In her chamber, I behold the duality of which I am carved.

Half the concubine’s boudoir is dazzlingly white, brilliantly illuminated. The other half is a dense, seductive, welcoming blackness. It is split evenly down the middle.

Light and the absence of light.

I savor both. Neither disturbs me. I suffer no conflict over things upon which a simpler mind would be forced to bestow labels such as Good and Evil or embrace madness.

Against one frosted crystalline wall of the white half of the room is a huge round bed on a pedestal, draped in silks and snowy ermine throws. Alabaster petals are scattered everywhere, perfuming the air. The floor is carpeted with plush white furs. White logs, from which silvery-white flames pop and crackle, blaze in an enormous alabaster hearth. Tiny diamonds float lazily on the air, sparkling.

The woman hurries for the bed. Her clothing melts away and she (I) is naked.

But no! This is not his pleasure, not this time! His needs are different, deeper, more demanding tonight.

She spins and we gaze, lips parted, at the black half of the room.

Draped in black velvet and furs, covered with soft ebony petals that smell of him, that crush so softly beneath our skin, it is all bed.

From wall to wall.

He needs it all. (Wings unfolding, no mortal can see past them!)

He is coming. He is near.

I am naked, wild, ready. I need. I need. This is why I live.

She and I stand, staring at the bed.

Then he is there and he gathers her up—but I can’t see him. I feel enormous wings closing around us.

I know he’s there, she’s enveloped in energy, in darkness, wet and warm like sex is wet and warm, and I’m breathing lust. I am lust and I strain to see him, strain to feel him, when suddenly—

I am a simple beast, on crimson sheets with Barrons inside me. I cry out, because even here in this boudoir ofduality and illusion, I know it is not real. I know I have lost him. He is gone, forever gone.

I’m not back there in that basement with him, still Pri-ya but beginning to surface enough to know that he just asked me what I wore to my prom, and shutting it all down, racing from reality back into my madness, so I don’t have to face what happened to me or deal with what I’m beginning to suspect I might have to do.

I’m not standing there a few days later, looking back at his bed with those fur-lined handcuffs, contemplating climbing back in and pretending I hadn’t recovered so I could keep doing it—every raw, animal thing we’d done in my sexually insatiable state—fully aware of what I was doing and who I was doing it with.

Dead. Dead. I’ve lost so much.

If only I’d known then what I know now …

The king lifts the concubine. I see her sliding down a body I cannot discern in the darkness, and (I straddle Barrons and slam him home inside me; God, it feels so good!) the concubine strains, arches her neck, and makes a sound that doesn’t come from our world (I laugh as I come, I’m alive, so alive), and when his vast wings spread wide, when they fill the blackness of his boudoir and pass beyond, he knows more joy in this moment than he has ever known in his entire existence, and the bitch queen would deny him this? (And I know more joy in this moment than I’ve ever known, because there is no right, no wrong, only now.)

But, wait—Barrons is vanishing!

Moving away from me, melting into the darkness. I will not lose him again!

I lunge to my feet, get tangled in sheets for a moment, then I am hurrying to catch him.

It grows colder, my breath ices the air.

Ahead I see only black, blue, and a white that is bled of all light.

I run toward the black as fast as my feet will carry me.

But hands are on my shoulders, turning me, forcing me away, fighting me!

They are too strong! They drag me down a black corridor, and I beat at the body that dares interrupt us!

No others are allowed here!

This is our place! The intruder will die! If only for gazing upon us!

Cruel hands push me, slam me into a wall. My ears ring from the impact. I am dragged, shoved again, and again. I bounce off wall after wall, until finally it stops.

I shudder and begin to weep.

Arms band me, hold me tightly. I press my face to the warmth of a hard, muscled chest.

I am too small a vessel to survive on a sea of such emotion! I grip his collar and cling. I try to breathe. I am raw, aching with need, and I am empty, so empty.

I lost it all, and for what?

I can’t stop trembling.

“What part of ‘if you see a black floor, turn back immediately’ didn’t you understand?” Darroc growls. “For fuck’s sake, you went straight to the blackest of them all! What’s with you?”