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of him at all?
     
She wasn’t certain he could. Claire inched away from the flames, keeping her eyes on Andreas, who followed her with a narrowed, searing gaze. She searched those eyes for reason—for some small thread of sanity—but all she saw staring back at her was rage. And pain. Dear God, so much pain in those eyes now.
     
“Tell me where he is, Claire.”
     
She gave a weak shake of her head. “I don’t know.”
     
“Tell me.”
     
She shook her head again as her feet carried her a few more paces away from this creature who had once been her friend… her lover. At one time, she had thought Andreas Reichen to be her everything. Now she was certain she was looking at her death. Hers and Wilhelm’s both. “I haven’t seen Wilhelm in quite a while. He doesn’t inform me of his business or his travels. But he’s not here, and I don’t know where he is. It’s the truth, Andre.”
     
Another roar flew out of him as his name slipped past her lips. Nearby, another tree went up in flames like a Roman candle. Then another, and another. Heat exploded on either side of her, fire rolling high into the night sky. Claire couldn’t hold back her scream. Nor could she curb the survival instinct that kicked her legs into motion as the forest around her began to burn.
     
She ran in the only direction she could, away fromAndreas. Her sense of bearings was lost in the chaos of her terror, not that she actually expected she would escape. She ran, waiting to feel the scorch of hellish fire on her skin, certain that Andreas’s fury would not permit her to live.
     
But still she ran.
     
She was breathless by the time she reached the edge of the woods. Breathless and shaking, her feet stumbling over the grass and rough ground. She lifted her head and nearly burst into relieved tears to see the manor house looming up ahead of her. Behind her was darkness and the glow of flames in the distance. A jolt of adrenaline surged into her bloodstream, and Claire raced across the open lawn to the front door of the fortresslike estate.
     
The place was unlocked, left open in the guards’ haste to evacuate earlier. Claire flew inside and slammed the door behind her, throwing all of the bolts and locks home. She ran for high ground, grabbing a cordless phone along the way and fleeing up the stairs to the third floor, praying that the sanctuary she’d just found wouldn’t turn out to be her tomb. She was halfway through dialing Wilhelm’s secretary before she realized the phone had no dial tone. It was dead, nothing but endless broken static on the line.
     
“Damn it!”
     
Claire threw the phone down as she drifted to the large, shuttered windows on the far wall. She had some inkling of what she’d see on the other side of the glass, but it still robbed her of breath when she opened the shutters and peered out over the estate’s expansive grounds.
     
Black smoke plumed from the long drive and from within the forest. Orange fire twisted up over the treetops, licking at the starlit sky. And in the center of the woods, abrighter light glowed—throbbing white heat, blindingly intense.
     
Andreas. He was the source of all that eerie light.
     
Would he come for her now? If he did, she had nowhere left to run.
     
But the light from his body didn’t move. Neither did Claire. Her feet stayed rooted to the floor near the window as she watched that unearthly pulse, unable to look away.
     
She watched, until hours passed and the fires on the road and in the forest began to die down.
     
She watched… as night crept steadily toward dawn and the glow of Andreas’s fury continued to burn.
     
     
     
     
     
CHAPTER
Four
     
     
S he didn’t know what woke her.
     
With a start, Claire lifted her head from where her brow had been pressed against the cool glass of the window. She didn’t know how long she’d dozed—long enough that the faint pink blush of dawn had marched all the way over the horizon, bringing with it a drizzle-laden shroud of fog that blanketed