Oh, great. How are you going to fight with one arm, hotshot? He lifted me over his head and flung me across the room. I landed hard.

He wiped his hands on his robe. “Having a little trouble?”

“No, no trouble at all.” I hated the wheezing sound of my labored breathing. “Just pacing myself.”

He laughed and held out his arms. “Come on, Carrie. Let’s stop this foolishness. You know you’ll never be able to kill me. There’s too much between us.”

He didn’t sound as confident as he wanted me to think he was.

“I’ve already killed tonight. Maybe I’ve got a taste for it now.”

“You killed strangers. Men you didn’t know.” He took small steps toward me. I didn’t move, even when he put his arms around me. “Men who’d never touched you. Never been inside you. Men who’d never seen your most intimate thoughts and emotions.”

I knew he was no longer my sire, but my heart—the proverbial one that couldn’t be so easily removed—remembered when he was. “It didn’t mean anything.”

“It did,” he insisted, stroking my hair. “You know it did. You felt things for me you couldn’t ignore. You can’t ignore them now.”

“I felt things for you because you manipulated me into feeling them. And I don’t feel them now.”

I didn’t love him, I’d never loved him. Not in the way he’d wanted. How could I have?

He looked more hurt by my words than by any physical violence I’d committed against him. “I loved you.”

The admission froze me just long enough for him to get a better hold on me.

Nathan leaned up weakly on his elbows. “Carrie, get away from him!”

“Let her go!” Max got to his feet. “Don’t move a freaking muscle, Carrie!”

I felt the sting of a blade at my neck. I’d been tricked.

“I did love you, Carrie. I still do.” Cyrus’s voice was strained, and a cold tear splashed against my neck. “Why couldn’t you love me?”

Love wasn’t a word I tossed around lightly, but with a knife at my neck, my priorities changed really fast. “Maybe I did love you.”

“If you had loved me, you would have stayed with me. Why didn’t you stay?”

I heard the same desperation in his tone as my pleading inner voice that criticized me every time I’d failed to please my father. The same desperation I’d seen in Cami, in the poor dead girl’s eyes the night she’d asked Cyrus why he no longer requested her company. The dashed hope that had stolen across Dahlia’s impassive face when she’d come to Cyrus’s room and found me in his bed, in her place.

Cyrus really did want me to love him.

Though it pained me, I had to lie to save my life. “I’ll stay.”

“Carrie, no!” Nathan shouted, the look on his face as devastated as it had been the night Ziggy died. He was afraid.

Trust me.

I prayed Cyrus wouldn’t see through my ruse. “I’ll stay,” I repeated. “But I have to know I’ll be safe.”