Alexander I did not want Fiona to feel what I was feeling. To let an empath touch me and share my internal world with her right now? That would be akin to torture. I wouldn’t wish this pain, this misery I was feeling on anyone. Least of all my beautiful, perfect wife or my innocent daughter, both of whom were afflicted with the preternatural curse of absorbing the feelings of those they touched. Sometimes even those who only neared or looked at them. Overnight, my drug-addled mind had conjured up an unusually vivid dream. A dream in which I watched first Alexis and then Fiona slide down away from me into a pit. The sensation of Fi’s slender fingertips slipping through my own as something pulled and wrenched her away from me, and the hopeless look in her eyes as she disappeared down i

