Right up until you’re dead.

The devil in a businessman’s suit, he bides his time, gathers information, processes it, and when he makes a decision, the gavel falls and everyone that pissed him off or offended him or just breathed wrong dies.

She won’t be given a stay of execution. No one gets one. The only things that matter to him are others of his kind.

She thinks he’s not an animal like Barrons. That he’s more civilized. She’s right, he is more polished. But it only makes him more dangerous. With Barrons you expect to get fucked up royally. With Ryodan you don’t see it coming.

He’s treating her like she’s fourteen and he’s a normal adult, acting like he’s taken her under his wing. Like he needs her detecting skills, same as Barrons did to Mac, and she’s falling for it, same as Mac. He’s lining up his dominoes, so they fall more easily when he feels like pushing them over, conserving energy so he doesn’t have to hunt her when he’s ready to kill her.

A bastard like him has one use for women. And she’s not old enough. Yet. I can’t decide which would be worse, if he killed her before she was old enough or waited and made her one of his endless string of women.

She’s not that kind of girl, the endless string type. You get a shot at something like her once in a lifetime. And if you screw it up there’s a special place in hell for you.

She breaks away from him suddenly and stomps off ahead. She’s pissed. I smile.

I pull out my knife, twist my arm over my shoulder and scratch my back with it. Blood trickles. I sigh with relief, but it doesn’t last long. Sleeping is a real bitch. My back itches all the time and human drugs don’t work on me. I twist to get a better scratch.

My blade hits bone with a dull clunk. I saw at it with the serrated tip of the blade but can’t get the angle right. I don’t have any friends that are glad to see me, nobody to lend a helping hand. I tried to get Dad to cut them out of my back. He said they’re attached to my spine and it would kill me. I don’t believe that. Nothing kills me. They itch. I want them gone almost as much as I’m beginning to want them.

Fucking wings.

Funny how things work out. Dani killed an Unseelie prince to save Mac, and I end up turning into the replacement for the prince Dani killed. But it’s not the lass’s fault. It’s Mac’s. For needing saving. Later, for forcing me to eat something I would never have eaten if I’d been in my right mind.

I wonder if my wings will get as big as Cruce’s. I wonder what it would feel like to fly the night sky with him and the other two. I see a vision in my head sometimes of the four of us, swooping down over the city, black wings beating air, filling the sky, owning the world. I can hear the sound we make as the four of us chime deep in our bodies. There’s a special, bloodcurdling song the Unseelie princes sing, sometimes it plays in my head while I sleep. The call to the Wild Hunt burns in my blood.

I back up to the corner of a small brick building on the roof that houses heat pumps, lean against it and drag my back from side to side across the edge, scratching, watching as they move toward a metal door in the ground.

He catches up with her and they walk together again.

She glides through the night. He punches into it, a boxing glove with razor blades for knuckles. When she passes, the world is a better place. He leaves bloody footprints in a graveyard of bones.

He lifts the door, light blazes up from a hole in the ground, and she descends, my angel into a sordid hell.

He squats at the edge and watches her go and, for a split second, I see an unguarded expression on his face.

It chills even a creature as cold as me.

I know that look. I’ve seen it on my own face.

Then the son of a bitch looks up at me and, this time, there’s no question in my mind that he sees me. He looks straight at me and inclines his head with a mocking smile. I return it coolly. My nod says, “Yes, yes, I see you, too. Be very careful.”

I can’t decide if what he just let me see was real—or another of his games. They don’t call him the master of manipulation for nothing. Barrons breaks heads. Ryodan turns them inside out. Barrons fucks you up. Ryodan makes you fuck yourself up. He pushes buttons and rearranges things according to his own private, coolly sociopathic plan.

I liked it better when I thought he was going to kill her.

I stop scratching.

I want those wings. They’ll make the fight that’s coming easier.

He’s a walking dead man.

If he wasn’t serious about what he just showed me, and he’s gaming me, he gamed the wrong Unseelie prince. I’ll kill him long before he gets around to killing her. I know how men like him work. I’m becoming one.

If he was serious about what he just showed me, he showed it to the wrong Unseelie prince. Because what he showed me is that he sees the same things in her I do.

He knows she’s worth waiting for.

And when it’s time, he intends to be the one. That’s why he’s keeping her close. To those of us who live forever, a few years isn’t long to wait.

Not for something worth waiting for. Not for a once-in-a-lifetime girl.

A few years are a mere blink of an eye to men like us, for whom women crush sweetly like rotting pumpkins after Halloween. Sex isn’t easy for me anymore. I’m always holding back. Human women are breakable.

Not this one.

He sees her like I do: at seventeen, twenty, thirty. Superimposed over the fourteen-year-old, he sees the woman she’ll become.