Then one day Daemon refused to service one of Dorothea’s coven.

Dorothea summoned the First, Second, and Third Circles of the court. With her husband, Lanzo SaDiablo, by her side—Lanzo, the drunken womanizer whose only value was in providing Dorothea with the SaDiablo name—she began the punishment.

Kartane had hidden behind a curtain, chilled with fear, as he watched Daemon fight the Ring, fight the pain, fight the guards who held him so he couldn’t attack Dorothea. It took an hour of agony to bring him to his knees, sobbing from the pain. It took another half hour to make him crawl to Dorothea and beg forgiveness. When she finally stopped sending pain through the Ring, Dorothea didn’t allow him to go to his room, where Manny would give him a sedative and wash his sweat-chilled body so he could sleep while the pain slowly subsided. Instead, she had him tied hand and foot to one of the pillars, had him gagged so his moans of pain would be muffled, and left him there to humiliate him and warn others by the example while she leisurely conducted the other business of the court.

The lesson was not lost on Kartane. To be Ringed was the severest form of control. If Daemon couldn’t stand the pain, how could he? It became very important not to give Dorothea a reason to Ring him.

That night, after Daemon had been allowed to rest a little, he was ordered to serve the witch he’d earlier refused.

That night was the first time Daemon went cold.

Among the Blood, there were two kinds of anger. Hot anger was the anger of emotion, superficial even in its fury—the anger between friends, lovers, family, the anger of everyday life. Cold anger was the Jewel’s anger—deep, untouchable, icy rage that began at a person’s core. Implacable, almost always unstoppable until the fury was spent, cold anger wasn’t blunted by pain or hunger or weariness. Rising from so deep within, it made the body that housed it insignificant.

That first night, no one recognized the subtle change in the air when Daemon walked by on his way to the witch’s chamber.

It wasn’t until the maid came in the next morning and found the windows and mirrors glazed with ice, discovered the obscenity left in the bed, that Dorothea realized she had broken something in Daemon during that punishment, had stripped away a layer of humanity.

Hekatah, the self-proclaimed High Priestess of Hell, would have recognized the look in Daemon’s eyes if she had seen it, would have understood how true the bloodline ran. It took Dorothea a little longer. When she finally understood that what Daemon had inherited from his father was far darker and far more dangerous than she’d imagined, she gifted him to a pet Queen who ruled a Province in southern Hayll.

Dorothea said nothing about the killing. Among the Blood, there was no law against murder. She said little about Daemon’s reaction to kneeling in service, commending his training as a pleasure slave and only adding that he could be somewhat temperamental if used too often.