Five years later…

"Lucas Rollings is the best chance you've got, Elena." Candice caught her wrist. In her urgency, pink-painted fingernails lengthened into claws. "He's the best chance any of us have."

"Maybe he is." Elena Livingston pulled away and rose from the sitting room couch to move restlessly to the French doors. A decorative wrought-iron grill covered the glass with lacy, fanciful shapes—leaves, unicorns, wolves, stags. Almost pretty enough to disguise the grill's real purpose: bars on Elena's gilded cage. "But this isn't his fight. Do I have the right to involve him?"

Candice made a frustrated sound and raked both ringed hands through her fine hair. She'd dyed it cotton-candy pink to go with her leather pants and cropped top. It was the kind of thing a rebellious teenager would wear. Candice James was twenty-nine, but like a teenager, she was trying to make a declaration of independence. Unfortunately, pink leather was the best she could do. "Don't be so damned noble. Do you like living like this? Locked up for a month every year like a horny French poodle so the neighbor's mutt can't get to you?"

"No, I don't like it." Elena ground her teeth, barely suppressing the urge to throw herself against the iron grill and rip it right off the door. She could do it. She had the strength. Unfortunately, it would set off every alarm in the house. "I'm twenty-seven years old, dammit. I should have a career. I could be married to a man who loves me, raising babies. Instead I'm a chess piece in Daddy's ongoing game with the Chosen." Letting her forehead rest against the door, she stared blindly through the grill at the forest behind the house. "And I've run out of time."

Candice rose from her chair, concern on her pretty, narrow face. "You think your father's really going to give you to Stephen Bradford?"