V’lane is a prince from one of the four Seelie Royal Houses, and it’s difficult to look at him directly when he’s in high glamour. He’s gold and bronze, velvet and steel, and his eyes blaze with the stellar grandeur of a wintry night sky. He is so unearthly beautiful that it makes a part of my soul weep. When I look at him, I hunger for things I don’t understand. I ache to be touched by him. I’m terrified of his touch. I think sex with him might undo my essential cellular cohesion, and shatter me into fragments of a woman that could never be pieced back together again.

If V’lane were a signpost, it would read Abandon All Personal Will, Ye Who Tread Here, and while I never thought much about will back home in Ashford, here I’ve begun to think it’s all I really have to call my own.

I tried regarding him with slightly peripheral vision. It didn’t help. My clothing was painfully constricting, and I battled the overwhelming urge to remove it.

Fae princes drip such raw eroticism that it provokes a woman’s senses beyond anything she was meant to experience, turning her into an aroused animal, willing to do anything for sex. While that might sound like it promises the kinkiest escapades and most incredible orgasms of your life, Fae don’t grasp basic human concepts like death. Time has no meaning to them, they don’t need to eat or sleep, and their sexual appetite for human women is enormous, all of which leads to one inevitable outcome: A woman caught in a Fae prince’s spell usually gets fucked to death. If she survives it, she’s Pri-ya: an addict, a void of insatiable sexual need that exists for one purpose, to serve her Master—and that’s determined by whoever is currently giving her sex.

The first few times I encountered V’lane I’d begun stripping where I stood. I was getting better at resisting, because I was catching my hand every time it moved to the hem of my sweater, before I began pulling it off over my head. Still, I wasn’t sure how long I could keep it up.

“Mute it,” I demanded.

A slow smile curved his lips. “I am muted. Whatever you feel is not coming from me.”

“You’re lying.” I briefly visited Christian’s charge that I was thinking of having sex with someone. V’lane was not a someone. He was a something.

“I am not. You have made it clear you will not abide my . . . sexing you up. Perhaps you are . . . how do you humans say it . . . in heat?”

“We say that about animals, not people.”

“Animals, people, what difference?”

“Seelie, Unseelie, what difference?”

Silvery flakes crystallized in the air between us, icing the night with royal displeasure. “The difference is too vast for your puny mind to comprehend.”

“Ditto.”