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“Yes, at Havers’s. And I talked to Mary.” There was a pause. “And I went back . . . to where I’d been held.”

His eyes flipped up and bored into hers. “You did?”

She nodded. “I had to.”

“You never told me.” Fuck, she’d been back there? Without him?

“I needed to go. For me. And I needed to go alone and I didn’t want to argue. I made sure Wrath knew when I was leaving and I told him right when I got back.”

“Damn . . . I wish I’d known. Makes me feel like a shitty hellren.”

“You’re anything but that. Especially now that you’re holding your daughter like you are.”

There was a long silence.

“Look,” she said, “if it helps any, I’ve never felt like I couldn’t tell you something. I’ve never doubted that you would man up and support me. But just because we’re mated doesn’t mean I’m not my own person.”

“I know. . . .” He thought for a minute. “I didn’t want to go back to where I . . . To that castle. If it hadn’t been for the fact that she’d imprisoned another male down in that cell . . . I never would have gone back.”

And he couldn’t now. The place where he’d been held in the Old Country had long ago been sold to humans, eventually ending up in England’s National Trust.

“Did you feel better?” he asked abruptly. “After you went to see where you’d been?”

“Yes, because Vishous had ashed the place. The closure was more complete that way.”

Z rubbed Nalla’s little round belly absently while staring across at his shellan. “I wonder why we haven’t talked about it before now.”

Bella smiled and nodded at the young. “We’ve had something else get our attention.”

“Can I be honest? The steakhead in me needs to believe that if you’d wanted me to go with you to that place, you know I would have done it in a heartbeat and stayed tight for you.”

“I absolutely know that. But I still wanted to go alone. I can’t explain it . . . it was just something I needed to do. A courage thing.”

Nalla glanced in the direction of her mother and made a squirming reach that was accompanied by a little burble of demand.

“I think she wants something only you can give her,” Z said with a smile as he got up from the rocker.

He and Bella met in the middle of the room. As they made the handoff, he kissed his shellan and lingered a bit, with both of them holding on to their daughter.

“I’m going out, okay?” he said. “I won’t be long.”

“Be safe.”

“I promise. I’ve got to take care of my girls.”

Zsadist armed himself and dematerialized out west of the city, to a stretch of forest dead in the thick of farm country.

The bald clearing was fifty feet ahead, right by a stream, but instead of seeing an empty stretch among the pines, he pictured a single-room building with a plywood exterior and a tin roof.

What was in his mind was clear as the trees around him and the stars in the night sky up above: The facility had been constructed by the Lessening Society quickly and with an eye toward the temporary. What had been done inside, though, had been the stuff of permanence.

He walked over to the clearing, the twigs of the forest floor cracking under his boots, reminding him of a quiet fire in the fireplace.

His thoughts were anything but calming and homey.

When you went through the place’s door, there had been a stall shower and a drywall bucket with a toilet seat on it. For six weeks Bella had washed in the four-by-four-foot cubicle, and he knew she hadn’t been alone. That bastard lesser had watched her. Had probably helped.

Shit, the idea of anything like that happening made him want to hunt the fucker down all over again. But Bella had taken care of the slayer’s death, hadn’t she. She’d been the one who had shot him in the head while the bastard had stood before her, captivated by his sick love for her. . . .

Fuck.

Shaking himself, Z imagined he was standing once again in the main room of the place. To the left there had been a wall of shelving with tools of the torture trade laid out on flimsy wooden boards held aloft by crude brackets. Chisels, knives, handsaws . . . he could remember how shiny they had been.

There had been a fireproof