“He likes me too much to kill me for such a small transgression.” Still, he didn’t move. “Why are there so many shadows in your eyes, Ashwini?”

It startled her each time he used her given name—as if every utterance bound them tighter on a level she couldn’t see. “Why are there so many secrets in yours?”

“I’ve lived over two hundred years,” he said, his voice as sensual as the magnolia-scented night. “I’ve done many things, not all of which I’m proud of.”

“Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.”

He didn’t smile, didn’t even breathe, still, so still. “Talk to me, my Blade.”

“No.” Not yet.

“I’m very patient.”

“We’ll see.” Even as she spoke, she knew she was laying down a challenge, one Janvier wouldn’t be able to resist.

He leaned in close enough that their lips could’ve touched, his breath a hot burn, his almost-immortality a living beacon in his eyes. “Yes. We will.”

Stepping into the shower, Ashwini turned it to freezing. “Yikes!” Her libido sufficiently dampened by the ice-cold shock, she switched it to superhot.

As her skin sizzled under the delicious heat, she supposed she should’ve been giving serious thought to the lunacy of what she was doing playing with a vampire, who was, for all his charm, as lethal as a stiletto across the throat. But then again, most of her friends already thought she was half a nut short of a fruitcake. Why disappoint?

She grinned against the pounding spray.

Rules and regs, the intricacies of living an “ordinary” life—she’d tried it for the first nineteen years of her existence, and had almost paid with not only her sanity, but her life itself.

A flash of memory and she was in that white-on-white room again, the straps biting into her arms, cutting into her flesh. The smell of disinfectant, the soft hush of rubber-soled shoes . . . and always, always—the screams, screams only she could hear. Later, them sitting there, judging her, as if they were gods.