Oh, the pain.

The agony that came from my desire to hurt him was sharp and immediate, and I embraced it. I bathed in it, rolled in it, grabbed it with both hands and stuffed it down my throat.

That pain was preferable to the gaping chasm of despair the incubus had left behind when he’d stolen everything else.

So I chased him. I chased the master.

Amias was trying to wear me out. He made sure I never lost sight of him, but he stayed just out of reach. He began to help me defeat the incubus, and he hadn’t even had to touch me to do it.

Yet.

I kept the thought of him touching me in the forefront of my mind. If I concentrated on the horror of the master’s touch, I could almost forget the darkness of the demon’s kiss.

When three vampires rushed out to attack me, Amias stood back and laughed as I killed them. They weren’t infecteds, but neither of us cared.

Blood exploded from the vampires and showered me in scarlet rain, and I cried because I felt something other than desolation.

The moonlit ground swirled with colors so thick it was an effort to slog through them, but that was only in my mind. I chased Amias deeper and deeper into the woods, until those colors painted the night air and shone like delicate beams all around me.

I was in the midst of a terrible, savage beauty. I was in the midst of the vampires.

Amias led me, and I followed with the knowledge that when I caught him, I would not be the one in control. It should have made me run screaming into the night.

It didn’t.

There were worse things than facing the master. There were worse things than fear.

Worse things, even, than allowing the one who’d killed my family to save me now.

He stepped suddenly out in front of me, and unable to stop my wild rush, I careened into him. He wrapped me in his arms.

“Fight if you will,” he whispered, “but this is where you belong.”

Oh, did I fight.

I fought him. I fought the darkness the demon had left inside me. I fought the memories of dead people, people I’d loved, strewn broken and bleeding around me.

Silverlight brightened so fiercely we were cocooned in a silver spotlight, but I didn’t care about the dangers of being so visible and distracted. The influence of the incubus left no room for fear of death, and I cared about only one thing at that moment—defeating the horrific despair. Amias reached down inside me and ripped emotions up through the blackness. He freed the rage.

So I fought, because Amias made sure I could.

He didn’t simply stand there and take my assault—Silverlight would have slashed him to ribbons. He was strong, and he was fast, and he was vicious.

And not even Silverlight could kill the master. She couldn’t kill him because I held her. If she could have killed him, he’d have died a thousand deaths that night.

That didn’t stop me from trying, though.

And God, it hurt.

I fought through the pain because the incubus lingered, but with each slash of Silverlight, each kick or punch or bite, the pain increased. The darkness of the incubus didn’t stand a chance. The weight of the pain and rage and grief and resolve was just too heavy.

In the end, after I’d been savaged and broken and beaten and had nothing left but agony, I released the past.

I was free.

I opened my numb fingers and let Silverlight fall the ground, where she darkened regretfully without my touch. My legs gave out and I would have joined her, but Amias caught me, gathered me to his chest, and waited quietly for my surrender.

Abruptly, we were no longer encircled by light or caught in a ring of viciousness, but surrounded by a heavy, silent darkness.

Both of us were bloodied and battered and wounded, but he was the immortal undead.

I was not.

And I did not want to die.

So I turned my head and bared my neck. He would give me back what I’d lost, and I would let him.

“My love,” he murmured. “You are so very strong.”

The second I gave up my need to hurt him, the pain stopped. Just…stopped. In its place grew a relief so profound it was almost as overwhelming as the agony had been.

He encircled my throat with his fingers, then brushed my cheek with his lips in a barely there kiss before lowering me to the hard ground.

Something changed in that instant.

And even the moon dimmed, unable, perhaps, to watch.

Part of me stood back and stared, aghast.

“What are you doing?”

“Life. I’m doing life.”

I pulled the silver chain out of my shirt and ripped it from my neck, then tossed it away. “Help me,” I whispered.

He took his time. “I’ve been waiting,” he murmured, his voice full and soft and filled with something I couldn’t name, “for such a very, very long time.”

I didn’t think he was talking about the last six years, but I didn’t ask. I couldn’t.

I had surrendered myself to the master, and I could only lie in my defeat, and in my victory, and let him bring me back to life.

He reached for my bloody, tattered clothes, and I closed my eyes as he undressed me. It was perhaps even more erotic with my eyes closed, because I felt everything. Everything.

When I was completely naked, he sat back on his heels and I opened my eyes to watch him watch me. His gaze was like a physical touch. Everywhere he looked, I felt the caress of his stare.

“Mine,” he whispered. “My woman.”

He leaned forward and grasped my bare feet, rubbing his thumbs over my sensitive soles, then running his hands slowly and with the barest of touches up my legs. He parted my thighs, and as I lay sprawled and exposed before him, my body began to awaken.

I could barely move on my own. I was damaged and exhausted and heavy, but still, I tried to lift my hand to touch his face.

He took my hand and lowered it back to the ground. “You have only to lie there and feel what I can do. I gave you pain. Now I will give you pleasure.”

My heart began to thump.

“Submit to me, Trinity.” His eyes glittered in the weak moonlight, and his face appeared carved and almost unreal.

I nodded, and closed my eyes, but shot them open once again when I realized the rage had gone. I’d surrendered that to him, as well. But only for that night.

Perhaps later I would beat myself up.

Perhaps much later.

It was brutal and depraved and forbidden. I should not allow a vampire—especially not that vampire—to touch me. But I would. And I would allow much, much more.

“Mine,” he whispered, and for that moment, it was true.

I was his.

He parted the lips of my sex and ran his thumb over the soft bit of slowly swelling flesh he found waiting, and I shuddered and cried out.

Pleasure? Oh yes.

He stretched out on the ground between my legs, slid his hands beneath me, and lifted me to his mouth.

The movements of his tongue were long and slow, languid and heavy as he lapped and played. He dipped the end of his tongue inside me, then ran it up over the sensitive nub of flesh, again and again.

And I could have lain there like that forever.

He pushed a finger inside me and began moving it in sync with his tongue, and I moaned as the pressure and the pleasure built with torturous, relentless slowness—when I wavered on the edge of orgasm, he stopped all movement until the orgasm receded. Then he began again. My body was his and he knew exactly what to do with it.

“You may come for me once,” he said, “and then I will bite you before I fuck you. And you will understand true pleasure.”

And finally, when I was throbbing and dripping and swollen and so close there was no going back, he allowed me to climax.

The orgasm shook my entire body.

Before it had faded away, he pierced me high on my inner thigh with his needle sharp teeth.

The pain was immediate, but before I could open my mouth to shriek, he put his lips over the wounds, and he began to suck.

It was as though his mouth was on my entire body. I couldn’t tell that his lips weren’t covering the center of me, the part that still throbbed and thudded like an urgent heartbeat.

He pulled the blood from my veins and I felt him kissing my lips. He scraped his tongue over the punctures and I felt him sliding inside me.

There was magic in the bite, and rapture in the feeding.

No wonder they were so hated, so feared, and so very irresistible. Once a human had been taken, she would never want to be released.

I floated in bliss and drowned in euphoria, and even after he stopped drinking me, I remained high. He slid into me and he filled me up, and I came again and again. Climaxes such as I’d never felt, never imagined, and never would have believed.

Vampire sex was inconceivable and very nearly unendurable.

When I was completely drained and emptied of everything, when I floated and drifted, unbelievably content, Amias kissed my throat, then whispered into my ear. His voice vibrated throughout me, and the sweet beginnings of a soft orgasm began to grow.

“Masters do this for our servants, sweet Trinity. For our hearts. Not for all humans. From them, we take only our survival.” He kissed my lips, then continued. “You will forget the hugeness of it.”

“No,” I managed. “Never.”

Then he left me there, naked and alone, and I was aware of only the lingering bliss and wonder inside me until Angus roared into the area, dragged me off the ground, and hauled my satisfied, giddy ass home.