Chapter One

Topside: Fairbanks Ranch, San Diego, California, November 9th

Pandra Parthen crumpled to herknees with a hiss, clutching at the bloody slash in her stomach, pain burning through every vein in her body. Her hands shook as she grappled to shove her intestines back into her belly, but the slippery ropes were uncoiling faster than she could push them back in. A scream slammed up her throat and battered at the backs of her teeth. Blood fountained through her fingers and splashed to the floor. Not my blood. Can't be. There's too sodding much. She panted roughly, her cheeks working like bellows. Do. Not. Scream.

Her father despised weakness.

So did she, in truth.

Raymond came to stand dispassionately over her, his Gucci loafers stopping just short of the spreading stain of her blood. She didn't look up—couldn't, really. Just as well. Raymond's eyes were such a startlingly clear blue, they appeared almost colorless when he was enraged. Like now.

Not the jolliest of sights.

The room fractured into a prism around her as the electrical charge of her father's power seared through her once more, tearing the hole in her belly wider. A gritted, "No," made it past her lips. She toppled over, landing with a hard splat in the pool of her own blood. Her viscera boiled up and out of her, piling onto the floor around her body.

Silence.

No. The thunder of her heart and the harsh cadence of her breathing were deafening.

Wetness soaked through her jeans and into her knickers. The books on the shelves she'd been scanning mere moments before Raymond's arrival slanted sideways and grew moss: Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bront?, James Joyce… Through pain-slitted eyes, she stared up at Raymond. Tall and refined, his features sculpted and handsome, his hair a rich mane of silver-blond falling to his collar, he was a man who could be as warm-hearted as ruthlessly cold. Let a soul act according to Raymond's rigid specifications of behavior and all would be dandy. Break a rule and the poor sap earned herself one beastly punishment.

Until recently she and her father had an unspoken agreement about those rules. If she chose to break a minor one, she would do so outside of his general knowledge and make sure her actions wouldn't damage his reputation in any way. The one exception was her penchant for dressing like a tart. She did that with full awareness it cheesed him off. But then…he'd never overtly told her not to do so.

On his end, Raymond wasn't supposed to act behind her back. He would tell her what to do and she would do it, but it was understood that there was always this communication.

He'd broken this rule.

Without asking, Raymond had used information Pandra had acquired regarding the Varcolac, the bloodsuckers who held the dubious honor of being Raymond's mortal enemies. They'd earned this unenviable status by kidnapping Toni Parthen, Raymond's daughter from his first wife. Toni and her brother, Alex, possessed an extremely rare and powerful gene called Royal Fey Dragon; a gene Raymond wanted bred into his grandchildren. With this scheme in mind, Raymond had always planned on reuniting with the daughter he'd abandoned. But the Varcolac had ruined that by abducting her instead.

For nearly a year now, Raymond had been trying to snatch Toni back. To no avail. He needed to find an easy way into the Varcolac's secret, underground town to wage a proper war. His brilliant plan? To kidnap a Varcolac delivery woman—Pandra had unearthed her schedule, and this was the information Raymond had swiped—and persuade her to reveal the entrances to the Varcolac's lair. But Videon, Pandra's mental half-brother, had tortured the poor girl to death, which had inadvertently led to another woman getting captured: Marissa Nichita. She was the pregnant wife to one of the Varcolac, making her a perfect bargaining chip to trade for Toni. Except…

Pandra had released Marissa a little over an hour ago.

Two could break the rules in this sick game she and Raymond played, eh?

But, of course, Pandra's actions had violated her father's most stringent and unforgivable rule: never openly defy him.

And so here she was… sweat running in rivulets down her neck, her vision tunneling.

Raymond clasped his hands behind his back and gazed down at her coolly. "What a perishing disappointment you turned out to be, Pandra."

She gritted her teeth against a stab of pain piercing through her sternum…her heart. Not from her father's power, but his words. What a pile of wet lettuce she was. Here her guts were spewed around her like tangled macramé, and what made her want to cry was one, wee sentence of Raymond's. And he was only confirming what she already knew. She'd thrown away her status as her father's favorite—or his second favorite—with both hands.

Raymond turned and walked crisply for the door, the tap of his Gucci loafers across the marble floor managing to sound both elegant and lethal, the same as on his trip into the library to mete out her punishment. Her father's power shot out of her like someone yanking a cord from an outlet. Her bowels jerked once against her fingers, then came to a quivering rest.

"You may put your ring back on now." Raymond's voice floated back to her as he disappeared down the hall of this Fairbanks Ranch mansion that served as both her home and prison.

My immortality ring. She squinted up to the top of the desk where she'd left it. Enchanted specifically for her, that red crystal ring would take away the worst of this horrendous pain and heal her with miraculous speed. But up there on that desk it might as well have been in Siberia.

Other options? Lie here and let herself waste? What a perishing disappointment you turned out to be, Pandra. She blinked slowly. Tempting.

"You sure as hell dropped a clanger by lettin' that girl go, Pandra, you dimmock."

She carefully angled her vision toward the doorway.

Her older brother, Murk, was standing just inside the library.

She stared at him dully. He could be here to insult her as much to help her. It was anybody's guess. "I hadn't realized that," she rasped past the dry lump of her tongue. "Thank you ever so much for enlightening me."

Murk crossed the library and knelt at her side, heedlessly planting a knee into the shimmering pool of her blood. "Sufferin' fuck, he really brasted you, didn't he?"

At twenty-six, Murk was two years her senior and the eldest of the seventeen-sibling blended family who'd been brought into this world—same as Toni and Alex—to be Raymond's breeding machines for the ultimate Fey race he planned to propagate for regular human takeover.

Murk was a right frightening-looking blighter, tall, broad, muscular, and black-eyed like her. He kept his hair shaved off, exposing a ghastly array of black flame tattoos that began above his ears and trailed over the top of his skull.

All seventeen of them wore black flames, the tribal markings denoting them as born of Yavell, the last Om R?u female in the world with pure demonic bloodlines.

Pandra's flames had been on her stomach, now utterly buggered.

Murk inspected the snarled mess of her intestines. "Hurts a shitload, doesn't it?"

Her focus automatically shifted down to Murk's belly, where she knew a gnarled scar was. So he'd been privileged to endure this same punishment, had he? For what transgression, though, she didn't have a Scooby.

She swallowed tightly as nausea speared up her throat. A spate of vertigo tilted her senses upside down, and her eyelids dragged down.

"You're going into shock," Murk informed her.

"My ring," she croaked, her lips trembling.

Murk used a small crystal dish to scoop her ring off the top of the desk. He couldn't touch it directly because of the painful shock it would give him. "You'll close up soon after you stick it on, so first we'd best put you back together a bit."

She sucked in a sharp breath as her brother painstakingly started cramming her intestines back into the gaping hole in her belly. A halo appeared around her pupils and her pulse beat frayed.