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Dominique pinned Jackson with his eyes. “You cannot just tell me? You have to play some bizarre game? Create some past in which strangers call me ‘lord?’ What makes you think I would ever believe such a thing?”

“Actually, right now, that’s the most believable thing about you,” Jackson countered.

Cassidy jumped into the fray. “You inherited a kingdom from someone—”who turned you into a vampire.

“Yes? Go on. This is fascinating,” he snapped, his accent thick enough to cut with a butter knife, his gestures small but abrupt.

“You don’t…you don’t remember him now, but he was, well, crazy.”

“And obsessed with you,” Jackson added and stuffed another piece of toast in his mouth, as though trying to keep a torrent of other words from pouring out.

Dominique pursed his lips. “Some of my lovers can be a little obsessive. This is true.”

Cassidy stared at him. She knew his every memory as if it were her own. While there had been no shortage of lovers in his mortal life, not one of those relationships had been anything but casual, and none ended in anything darker than bittersweet memories. None but one, the last one, the woman he had cared for—before he killed her. Like he killed his father and sister. All of them among his first victims after being turned.

All of them still alive and well in his mind now.

She looked away, suddenly aware of what they were really up against. He was fighting them too hard. On some level, he must know what he would find if he remembered the truth.

And he didn’t want to.

“Is this what is happening here?” Dominique ventured, placing his elbows on the table and folding his hands. He peered at Jackson, whom he had apparently determined as the mastermind behind this nefarious plot. “You have some twisted obsession with me, have lured me from my home, and kept me—”

“You need to stop right there.” There was no mistaking the menace in the hunter’s face or in the warning finger he raised.

Dominique waved at the phone on the table. “—in a drug-induced haze?”

Another chirp sounded, this one from Jackson’s pocket.

“What manner of sick pleasure do you take from me…when I am not even in my right mind?” Far from outraged, the words twisted in a sultry dance. “Tell me, Jackson. Do I make you moan?”

Samantha put her utensils down and covered a delicate cough with her cloth napkin. Cassidy’s face tingled with heat as she recalled the moaning Jackson had indeed done in his sleep—and why. He still remembered, too, if his rising color was anything to go by.

“The only thing sick here is your head,” Jackson snapped. His pocket chirped again, and he yanked out his phone, glanced at the screen. “Fuck. The Grid has a hit in Europe. Three dead.”

Cassidy’s heart dropped. “Oh God.”

The Grid was the Striker Foundation’s global, high-tech alarm system for potential vampire activity. Inevitably, this involved the victims of violent deaths.

Jackson glared at Dominique. “This is where Garrett and I usually warm up the jet, but instead I’m stuck here, watching you scatter your marbles.” Another chime. “And now Garrett is looking for me. Great.”

Dominique brushed his folded knuckles against his lower lip. He studied Cassidy’s and Samantha’s solemn demeanor, studied Jackson come unglued, and smirked. “So you are obsessed,non?”

Furious color climbed up Jackson’s bulging neck. “You son of a bitch. You and yourobsessivedelusions are what got us here. This experiment doesn’t work. It didn’t work the first time. It’s not working now.”

“Jackson,” Cassidy warned.

He got up to lean over the table toward Dominique whose smug demeanor faded. “There is no going back. Not for you, not for any of us. Deal with it. Deal with what you are and do the fucking job you signed up for.”

“Jack!”

His nostrils flared with agitation as he looked at her with eyes as cold as any predator’s.

“Don’t,” she said, shaking her head a little, praying that Jackson would pick up on her meaning.

Samantha did. “He’s not ready,” she said under her breath. “He has to remember on his own.”

“In the meantime, we babysit him? Nice.”