I am grief.

I dream my parents, but they’re not. Alina and I were born to others, but I have no memory of them, and I wonder for the first time if someone took those memories from me.

I am betrayed.

I dream Dublin and the first Fae I ever saw and that nasty old woman, Rowena, who told me to go die somewhere else if I couldn’t protect my bloodline, then left me alone without offering me the smallest bit of help.

I am anger. I didn’t deserve that.

I dream Barrons and V’lane, and I am lust wed to suspicion, and those two emotions together are poison.

I dream the Lord Master, my sister’s murderer, and I am vengeance. But no longer hot. I am cold vengeance, the lethal kind.

I dream the Book that is a beast, and it speaks my name and calls me kindred.

I am not.

I dream Mallucé’s lair. I eat the flesh of immortal beings and I am changed.

I dream Christian and Dani and the abbey of sidhe-seers. O’Duffy, Jayne, Fiona, and O’Bannion, the Hunters, and the monsters invading my streets. Then the dreams come darker and faster, blows from a world-class boxer bruising my brain, pulping my heart.

Dublin goes dark! The Wild Hunt! The smell of spice and sex!

I am in the narthex of the church, and there are Unseelie Princes all around me, and they slice me open and rip out my insides and scatter them all over the street, leaving a shell of a woman, a bag of skin and bones, and the horror of it, God, the horror of watching yourself from the outside as everything you know about yourself gets stripped away and demolished, not just the loss of power over your body but power over your mind, rape in the deepest, most hellish sense of the word, but wait—

There’s a spark.

Inside that hollowed-out woman, there’s a place they can’t touch. There’s more to me than I thought there was. Something that no one and nothing can take away from me.

They can’t break me. I won’t cease. I’m strong. And I am never going to go away until I’ve gotten what I came for.

I might have been lost for a while, but I was never gone.

Who the fuck are you?

With an explosive inhalation, I snap upright in bed, and my eyes fly open—like coming alive after being dead and interred in a coffin.

I am Mac.

And I’m back.

One of my college Psych professors claimed that every choice we made in life revolved around our desire to acquire a single thing: sex.

He argued that it was a primitive, unalterable biological imperative (thereby excusing the human race our frequent idiocy?). He said that from the clothing a person selected in the morning, to the food they shopped for, to the entertainment they sought, at the very root of it all was our single-minded goal of attracting a mate and getting laid.

I thought he was a jackass, raised a manicured hand, and told him so with lofty disdain. He challenged me to rebut. Mac 1.0 couldn’t.

But Mac 4.0 can.

Sure, a lot of life is about sex. But you have to pull up high and look down on the human race with a bird’s-eye view to see the big picture, a thing I couldn’t do when I was nineteen and pretty in pink and pearls. Shudder. Just what kind of mate was I trying to attract back then? (Don’t expect me to analyze Mac 4.0’s predilection for black and blood. I get it, and I’m perfectly fine with it.)

So, what’s the big picture about our lust for sex?

We’re not trying to acquire something. We want to feel something: Alive. Electrically, intensely, blazingly alive. Good. Bad. Pleasure. Pain. Bring it on—all of it.

For people who live small, I guess enough of that can be found in sex.

But for those of us who live large, the most alive we ever feel is when we’re punching air with a fist, uncurling our middle finger with a cool smile, and flipping Death the big old bird.

—Mac’s journal

I was mad as hell.

I had so many grievances that I didn’t even know where to begin listing them.

I was pissed-off walking. Or rather pissed-off sitting, tangled in crimson silk sheets that smelled like somebody’d been having a sexathon.

That would be me.

And that made me even madder.

Just when you think your life has gotten as crappy as it can get, it goes and gets crappier. Gee, Mac doesn’t get to have a choice about having sex with someone. Good-bye: dating, flirting, and building up to that special romantic moment. Hello: I’m getting screwed senseless, and then, when I’ve gotten about as low as I can get, I’m getting screwed back to my senses—although I wouldn’t in a million years admit any such thing to the man who was no doubt feeling impossibly smug that, by the power of his sexuality alone, he’d rescued me from the mindless state it had taken multiple Unseelie death-by-sex Fae to drag me to, kicking and screaming.

If I knew Jericho Barrons, he was walking around feeling like his dick was the most huge, magnificent, perfect, important creation under the sun.

Which—I winced—I vaguely recalled telling him a time or two.

Well … maybe several times.

I yanked the sheets up over my breasts with a snarl. The animal I’d been recently hadn’t left me. She was still in me and would be forever. I was glad. I welcomed her feral nature. Pink Mac had needed a good dose of savagery. It was a savage world out there.

I was coldly glad to be alive, glad that I lived another day, no matter the methods by which it had been accomplished. I was also seething, furious at everyone I’d met and everything that had happened to me since the moment I’d left Ashford, Georgia.