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He ripped the photo out of her hands. “You’re right. I’ve been pursuing a vision for years. And now the vision has changed. I don’t know who I am or who you are.” He advanced on her, forcing Deirdre to back up until her legs bumped the throne. It started sweating at her proximity. She was too hot for the Winter Court, and only getting hotter. “Do you want me, Tombs? Or what I represent? Are you using me, like Rhiannon, or are your motives purer?”

“Back to last names, huh?” Deirdre asked.

He slammed her into the throne, hands braced on either side of her head. “What do you want?”

She pushed him. He slapped her hands away.

He hadn’t hit her hard, but the faint sting of his hands on her arms made her bitterly angry.

“I’m not Rhiannon,” Deirdre said. “She wants power more than she wants progress. You know what I’d pick in her position? Do you know what my priorities are?” She clutched his hide cloak in both fists. “Not only am I nothing like Rhiannon, I’m far better than she ever was. I’m a better person. And I’m better for you, too.”

Stark gripped her hands. Her bones creaked. It hurt.

“Better for me?” He scoffed. “You don’t know anything. You don’t know
me
.”

“I know a hell of a lot more than you think,” Deirdre said.

She smashed her lips to his in a graceless kiss, forcing him backwards. She only got away with it because he was surprised. He yielded to her an inch—only an inch.

As soon as Stark realized what he was doing, he tangled his fingers in her hair and ripped her away.

“I’m better than Rhiannon,” Deirdre said. “I’ve seen your worst and chose you anyway. I’ve got your back.”

Stark glared. “You’re not backing me. You haven’t listened to a damn thing I’ve said for weeks.”

“I am, even if you don’t recognize it. I know what’s good for you better than you do.”

“Difficult woman,” he said.

But he kissed her again, even harder than before, crushing her against his body. He molded Deirdre’s hips against his. He gripped the curves of her back as though trying to squeeze her into himself, as though he couldn’t touch enough of her to satisfy himself.

Stark was greedy in his movements, acquainting himself with all of her parts. Deirdre didn’t try to stop him. She wanted him to get to know her body and know that she was the best thing he could ever hope for.

She wanted him to know that she was the
best
.

Gods, but she wanted him to love her so much that he would come back to Earth and piece back together everything she had broken.

Stark was graceless and confident and harsh, tongue stroking against hers, invading her mouth the way his hands invaded her body. He shaped the cheeks of her rear, squeezing them until it almost hurt.

Deirdre climbed him. She pressed his back against the wall and spread her legs over his and climbed his body as though she couldn’t get enough of his touch.

When he drew back for air, he was still breathing hard, and some of the consciousness had gone out of his eyes. All shifters had a duality to their nature—man and beast—and Stark had always seemed a little closer to his beast than to his man. But now he was closer to beast than ever.

“And what do you think is good for me?” Stark asked.

“You’re smart,” Deirdre said. She nipped his jaw with her teeth, tracing a line to his earlobe. She sucked it into her mouth. “You’re ruthless. If you put your mind to it, you could play the system from the inside without having to kill a single person.”

Stark turned his head to capture her lips with his. “Everyone plays the system. People act like they agree with me while working against me from behind my back. You can’t ensure loyalty unless you extract it with blood.”

“There are other ways to get what you want,” Deirdre said, scraping her nails down his hairy chest.

He responded by kissing her again. It was as though he couldn’t taste her enough, couldn’t bring her close enough to his body. He was as addicted to her as she was addicted to the drugs he supplied.

“Charisma, Stark.” Deirdre’s lips brushed against his as she spoke. “You’ve got charisma. You can make people loyal without violence.”

“You want me to be weak.”

“I want you to be stronger than your fists.” She fisted his hair. “You don’t have to settle for being a radical. You could be a revolutionary. You’ve just gotta come back to Earth with me and fix everything. We can fix it together.”

“Woman, you don’t know when to shut your mouth,” Stark said.

He tried to silence her with a hard kiss, shoving his tongue between her lips, consuming the breaths that she exhaled.

“Don’t you want your daughters to live in a world that’s safe?” Deirdre asked.

“I want them to live in a just world.” He shoved her against the throne of ice. The icicles dug into her back through her shirt. “Safety is never more than an illusion.”

Deirdre had always been vulnerable to cold, as though she were a flickering flame that would only take a few drops of water to quench. But now the cold didn’t make her ache as it once had. Her fire was more powerful than that. She wasn’t a candle fluttering in the wind.

She was a blazing wildfire, and Stark was the wind to make her consume entire cities.

He spun her around. His arms clamped around her, curving around the heavy curves of her breasts.

“Now shut up, woman,” he growled into her ear. “I’m done talking with you.”

Deirdre arched back against him. “Don’t call me woman. That’s ‘Beta’ to you.”

Stark’s growl could have been annoyance or appreciation. It was hard to tell.

He pushed her face-first into the throne, hands fumbling around the front of her hips to find the buttons. Stark ripped them off. Tried to wrench her pants down to expose her body.

Deirdre drove her elbow backwards into his gut. The blow was hard enough that it sent him stumbling.

She wouldn’t be taken like that—like they were animals.

Stark slipped on the ice and landed on his back. When he tried to get up, she planted a foot on his chest.

“Don’t even think it.” She shimmied out of her pants, tossing them aside. She stood over him in her underwear, exposed to the cold, but untouched by it, blazing with the fire of her phoenix.

His hungry eyes roved over her body.

“You’re so damn difficult,” Stark said.

“I know,” Deirdre said.

She pulled her shirt off over her head and dropped it.

The moment she was unbalanced, Stark leaped out from under her foot. He was almost as fast as when he was shapeshifted. Funny what lust could do to a man.

He pushed her onto the throne of ice. It grew slick with her body heat, melting instantly, leaving a crystalline puddle underneath her.

The cold couldn’t touch Deirdre. She was fire.

She wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him tight against her. Stark was erect and straining. It seemed like it must have been painful.

But he didn’t try to relieve the pressure, nor did he kiss her again. He braced his hands on either side of the throne and glared at Deirdre from inches away.

“I don’t like being manipulated,” he said.

Her body was burning in more ways than one. She pushed against him harder, digging her heels into his back. “Is it manipulation if I’m telling you exactly what I want?”

“Yes,” Stark said. “You think you can get me to obey you by taunting me with…this.” His hand raked down her breast, her ribs, clutched her hip. He groaned when she writhed against him.

Deirdre nipped his bottom lip. “What I want you to do for our people and what I want you to do to me are two separate things. Trust me on that.”

“Would you kill me afterward, the way that you killed Gage?” Stark asked.

The name was a shock of pain, colder than any ice.

“I need you alive,” Deirdre said. “And I need you on Earth. I’m not going to kill you.” She shoved the stolen skins off of him, exposing his flesh to the chilly throne room, to the heat of her burning arms.

Stark buried himself deep inside of her, his teeth sinking into her neck, as though claiming her from all sides.

It shouldn’t have felt so good.

It shouldn’t have felt so
right
.

He was inside of her, as he had been inside all along, owning her body as he’d owned her mind for too long.

She dragged her fingernails down his back, digging deep, unafraid of hurting him. She
wanted
him to hurt. She wanted him to know the pain that she felt, that she had been feeling for years.

Judging by the sharp intake of breath, Stark felt it.

He turned his head, biting at her chin. She caught his bottom lips between her teeth and pulled it back, stretching as far as she could go.

Stark liked that.

He kissed her harder. They tasted faintly of blood, and it was hard to tell if they were fighting or making love because there was no real difference.

Everything that built inside of Deirdre—the tension, the need, the pain—it was the same either way.

Her back and legs were soaking. Her leaping flames were melting the throne of ice around them, and it left them drenched, but not cold—warm as blood. When their bodies collided, they slapped together wetly, not unlike the sounds made when knuckles met face.

Deirdre scratched at every inch of him, squeezed him between her knees, maybe hard enough to crack ribs. She wouldn’t hold back. Not with anything.

He didn’t hold back either. If she hadn’t been a shifter—a powerful shifter, a phoenix—he might have been capable of breaking her pelvis.

The hurt was good.

Great, actually.

She was doing this. With
him
. She was actually screwing the terrorist who had made her kill Gage and walked her through the murder of Dr. Landsmore and broken Rylie Gresham’s neck.

Crazier still, she liked it.

Deirdre was so far beyond the point of return that she wasn’t sure that point existed. She didn’t want it to exist. She lost herself in his embrace, finally taking on the last bit of Stark that she had yet to possess. She had taken his lethe habit. She had taken his thirst for violence. She had taken his pack. And now she took him inside of her as his spine arched and his muscles tensed and he came with an ear-splitting roar.

He slowed for a moment—only a moment.

Stark had met his climax, but he wasn’t done. He kept moving within her.

It didn’t take long.

When Deirdre came, it was with a scream like she had never made before—so loud that it must have been audible throughout the entire Winter Court, echoing over the frozen landscape and shaking ice off of all the trees.

Her orgasm was also accompanied by a pillar of flame.

It flared around her, oven-hot, like being tossed into the incinerator below the asylum again.

In an instant, the throne was gone.

Stark screamed.

That was not a scream of pleasure.

He wrenched away from her, splattering in the puddle that used to be the throne.

“Oh my gods!” Deirdre fell beside him. The shock had made her fire go out again. She was suddenly very cold, naked without her fire, but the cold was the farthest thing from her mind as she ran her hands over his scorched chest. “Stark! Everton! What the hell am I supposed to call you? Are you okay? Are you dying?”

His chest heaved. He made a horrible gasping sound.

Was he dying?

Gods, that would be a hell of a way to assassinate someone. On accident. During sex.

“I’ll find Vidya,” she said.

But when she tried to stand, he grabbed her knee.

Stark wasn’t making sounds of pain. He was laughing.

He pulled her down by the hair, kissing her harder than ever before, with fierce delight. “You,” he said, “are incredible.” He tasted a little bit like barbecued ribs.

“And you are
insane
,” Deirdre said, tracing her fingers over his face. The top layer was peeled and black. The skin exposed underneath glistened crimson. Half his beard was nothing but blackened curls.

“Everton is fine, if Everton is what you like,” he said, dragging her down to lie on his wounded chest. She didn’t want to rest on him. It looked like it must have hurt, with all the wounds mottling his chest. But his arm locked tightly around her, and the healing fever swept over him, so he was repairing from the damage quickly. It was too cold
not
to cuddle herself against him. “You can call me Taye Diggs for all I care.”

“Taye Diggs? You know who Taye Diggs is?”

“Terrorists live in caves, not under rocks,” Stark said.

A nervous laugh slid out of her, and with it went the fear, the tension. “Oh my Gods. No, I’m not calling you Everton. You can’t make me. It’s weird.”

He gripped her breast in one hand and her hip in the other. “Suit yourself, Tombs. I couldn’t care less.”

Deirdre wasn’t sure how long they rested there, the two of them gazing up at the stars of the Winter Court, warmed by nothing but her leaping flames.

Now that the orgiastic reverie was gone, she couldn’t believe what she was doing, where she was,
whom
she was with.

It was stranger than her wildest dreams and more frightening than most of her nightmares.

Stark.

She felt no affection for the man she rested against, but the deep, comfortable sense of satisfaction was impossible to deny. They had been moving inexorably toward this for weeks, and now she had crossed that line. If she’d been a feline shifter, like Colette had been, she would have been cleaning her whiskers with pride.

Gods, she really was as bad as Stark.

“I have a house in South Africa,” Stark said. “Well below the ethereal plains, near the tip of the continent. It will be good there.”

“Huh? South Africa?” For a moment, all Deirdre could summon to mind were her fantasies of living on warm savanna, roaming the wilderness with lions and elephants. “Why do you have a house there?”

“My family,” he said. “Part of my trust. We will kill the servants, of course. I won’t allow them to report back about us.” As though murdering servants to keep their affairs private was a normal thing to do.

Deirdre lifted her head to study Stark’s profile. He was resting his head on one arm. His skin had healed from the scorching, though it was dusted with the ash of the earlier damage and his beard was still blackened at the tips. “Why would we go there?”