I felt his presence as he neared and sat by my feet. There were no other chairs. I would have felt better had he stood instead of seating himself on the floor below me, a gesture that placed him lower than I, made him even more vulnerable to me.

My eyes lifted from my perusal of the floor, met his, and flicked away. I couldn’t say what I had to say to him while looking into those unshielded eyes.

“Dontaine.” Just his name for a moment, so lovely upon my lips. Then came the blow. “We cannot be lovers.”

He didn’t say anything, so I rushed to fill in the pregnant silence. “I care for you. You know that.” It was a truth that he’d seen in my eyes. “But you also know that there is something very, very wrong with me. You’ve asked no questions.”

“There has been no time. No opportunity.”

“There is now. Do you have any questions for me?”

A strained silence. Then he asked not what I would have asked after all that confused madness that had occurred two nights ago, but what was most important to him. “Why can we not be lovers?”

His hands, long-fingered and elegant, an aristocrat’s hands, were folded neatly around his bended knees as he sat there on the wooden floor. I focused on those hands, remembered how they had felt on me, in me, caressing me, and looked blindly away.

“You and I know that it was not my beast’s hunger that almost overwhelmed me at High Court.” Though that was what we’d told everyone else. Even Tomas, my other guard who’d been there that night, believed it to be true. “It was bloodlust, Dontaine. Demon bloodlust.”

“It is because of Halcyon, the Demon Prince. When you accompanied him.” Dontaine’s words, more of a statement than a real question, referred to the time when I had returned with Halcyon to Hell. When my Demon Prince had been so severely injured because of me…always because of me, it seemed…that he could not make the trip safely home by himself. Hell was a dangerous place, even for its ruler.