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usual pattern. With her luck, she’d still get the common cold and menstrual bloat. If that was the case, she would throw away her morals and kill someone. Being an unstable, schizophrenic vampire with PMS was too much to bear on top of it all.
    “You called?”
    She glanced up. Gideon was back in the doorway. He could be downstairs, or even out on the street, and still be in her mind, but he rarely strayed that far, knowing that Brian wasn’t Daegan. When she lost it, she had to have Gideon close, had to have his touch. Gideon was hers, her servant, and somehow that made it more acceptable to her Mistress personality. As Daegan had predicted—damn him. Again.
    The first time Brian had agreed she could try a short walk through the club during pre-opening hours, Gideon had been right with her, as had Brian. She’d been so nervous she’d sweated through her clothes. Those shadow voices in her head had mocked her the whole time, until she wanted to scream at them to shut up.
    Her nervousness had been understandable. Up until that test walk, the last time her heels had crossed the polished floors and rich carpets, she’d nearly killed Gideon and herself. This time was much less eventful. A quick ten-minute stroll, where she couldn’t remember what she’d said to anyone, and she had a seizure within minutes of returning to her apartment. She’d made herself repeat the process every day since then—every day Brian’s readings said it was okay—until she could do a thirty-minute round of all the club areas, see and be seen, without the excessive perspiration and seizure marking the occasion. She never went over thirty minutes, though, immediately returning to her office or the underground apartment. Gideon never had to remind her of the time.
    She had plenty of resentment and rebellion in her against what had been done to her, but she’d seen what could happen if she acted out. Sometimes she could still feel the blood on her hands, woke from nightmares where she was slamming Gideon against a wall, smashing his head against the steel support beam.
    So she worked her ass off with Brian, cooperated fully with him and Gideon to get this under control. Obeyed Brian’s direction because she couldn’t handle the idea of hurting anyone. Big, bad Mistress, reduced to a cowering, insecure basement creature.
    She couldn’t visit the club during opening hours yet. The types of energies that swamped a BDSM fetish club during open hours were definitely something she wasn’t yet stable enough to handle. She tried not to think about the fact she might never be able to handle it, might never again experience that rush of walking the floor during peak hours, except in her dreams.
    Pushing that away, she focused on the man leaning in her bedroom door. The sight of him eased some of her irritation. He handled her tantrums, her short temper, understanding what they were, such that he even snarled back at her on more than one occasion, which actually made her feel better. Made her feel human, though she knew that phrase wasn’t necessarily applicable to her anymore.
    A few days ago, she’d made him sit still for one of the Atlantis staff, Chantal, to trim his hair, rather than letting him hack it with scissors himself. She’d shortened the shoulder length, but cleverly kept his dark locks a little longish over the brow, the lengths uneven so it fell around his strong face and corded throat with unruly strands. It framed the midnight blue eyes, that devastatingly handsome Irish ancestry only enhanced by the smoother cut. He was dressed now, wearing his T-shirt and jeans, boots and battered leather jacket with a warrior’s grace on that lean, muscular body. He had about nine weapons cleverly concealed beneath the clothes, but she knew where they all were.
    She’d had the pleasure of shoving him to her bed and stripping him, divesting him of every wooden and steel knife strapped to his calves or slipped into holsters under his arms and