“Over my dead body,” he said roughly. “You’ve got my dick in your hands.” He told me where it was going to be next and my bones turned to water, tried to spill my body across the floor and let him do anything he wanted to me.

“Not you. Her.”

“Her who?”

A hand tugged at the sleeve of my jacket, and I knew without looking that it wasn’t his. “Kiss me and she’ll go away.” I needed him inside me so badly I hurt from it. I was hot and wet and nothing mattered but this moment, this man.

“Who?”

“Kiss me!”

But he didn’t. He pulled back and looked past me, and I knew from the look on his face that I wasn’t the only one who could see her.

“I think she’s me,” I whispered.

He looked at me, back at her, and at me again. “Is that a joke?”

“I know this house. I know this place. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

“Impossible.”

It is nearly too late. Come NOW.

It was no longer a wisp of a plea. It was a command, and the hand was implacable on my arm. I could not disobey, no matter how badly I wanted to stay here and lose myself in sex, no matter how desperately I needed him inside me again, needed to feel we were joined in the most primal way, that I was in Jericho Barrons’ arms and mouth and under his skin.

And, God, did I need it! So much that I resented it. I never wanted to want a man this much—so much that not having him was physical pain. I never wanted to feel that any man had so much control over me and my life.

I pushed up from my knees and shoved past him.

He grabbed the sleeve of my coat; it ripped as I pulled away. “We need to talk about this! Mac!”

I dashed down the corridor, running after her like a dog chasing its own tail.

The concubine’s white half of the boudoir was carpeted in dewy petals and lit by a thousand candles. The winking diamonds that floated on the air were tiny fiery stars. Those few that passed through the enormous mirror to the dark king’s side were instantly extinguished, as if there wasn’t oxygen enough to support flame, or the darkness there was too dense to permit light.

The concubine sprawled nude on piles of snowy ermine before the white hearth.

In the shadows on the far side of the bedchamber, darkness moved. The king watched her through the mirror. I could feel him there, immense, ancient, sexual. She knew he was watching. She stretched languidly, slid her hands up her body into her hair, and arched her back.

I’d expected to find the other end of the rubber band here, ending with the concubine, but it tugged me still. It stretched invisibly on, through the massive black Silver that divided their bedchamber in half.

I wanted to step through and join that immense ancientness.

I never wanted to step one foot closer to those shadows.

Was the king himself summoning me? Or was part of the king standing behind me, even now? I had to know. I’d called Jericho a coward but could too easily be accused of the same.

I need … the voice summoned.

I understood that. I did, too. Sex. Answers. An end to my fears, one way or another.

But the voice hadn’t come from the woman on the rug.

It had come from the dark side of the boudoir, which was all bed because he required that much bed. It was a command I couldn’t refuse. I would slip through the mirror and Barrons would lay me back on the Unseelie King’s bed and cover me with lust and darkness. And we would know who we were. It would be okay. It would all be out in the open finally.

As I stared into the Silver that I knew was a killing mirror for anyone who wasn’t the king or his concubine, I was suddenly five again. More details of my Cold Place dream crashed over me and I realized there were many I still didn’t remember.

I’d always had to pass through this chamber first: half white, half dark, half warm, half cold. But numbed and frightened out of my childhood wits by the nightmarish things that followed, I’d always forgotten how the dream had begun. It had always been here.

And it had always been so hard to force myself to go through the enormous black Silver, because I’d wanted nothing more than to stay in the warm white half of this chamber forever, to lose myself in endlessly replaying scenes of what had once been but was now lost to me and I could never have again, and grief—oh, God, I’d never really known grief at all! Grief was walking these black halls and knowing they would be haunted for eternity with the residue of lovers too foolish to savor what time they’d had. Memories stalked these corridors, and I stalked those memories like a sad ghost.

Still, wasn’t illusion better than nothing?

I could stay here and never have to face that my existence was empty, that emptiness was all my life had ever been about: dreams, seduction, glamour.

Lies. All lies.

But here I could forget.

Come NOW.

“Mac.” Jericho was shaking me. “Look at me.”

I could see him distantly, through sparkling diamonds and ghosts of times past. And behind him, through the mirror, I could see the monstrous dark shape of the Unseelie King, as if he was casting Jericho as his shadow on the other side, on the white half of the room. I wondered if the concubine’s shadow was different, too, through the king’s Silver. Did she become like him on his half? Large and complex enough to mate with whatever the king was? Over there, in the blessed, comforting, sacred dark, what was she? What was I?

“Mac, focus on me! Look at me, talk to me!”