He cuffed her throat, a feral beast driven by instinct and madness, and slammed her into the wards. Her glistening white wings shuddered.
“Leave me,” he growled, gnashing his teeth and exposing his sharp canines.
She snarled back, baring her own fangs, and the sight shocked him into releasing her. They were so different from the delicate human teeth he remembered. “You don’t frighten me, Tristan. You never have.”
Her indigo eyes gleamed with affection and, for a single moment, he was pitched back to the night he’d confessed his love for her. The night he’d attempted to Turn her.
The night he’d lost her.
She appeared only a few years older than she had then, her mortality inching glacially forward. He wondered if he looked any different to her. Had the centuries been as kind? Or could she see the buried scars her loss had inspired?
A violent, painful maelstrom seized his heart—past and present colliding.
She expelled a bitter laugh. “I confess, I thought you might have been a bit happier to see me after I rescued you from your brother. Or that you might have stayed in Akti long enough to thank me.” She leveled him with a pleading stare.
He bit back his fury. Why hadn’t Ione let him know she’d survived? That the Turning had been successful? What thefuckhad she been doing for the past two centuries, and why had she only come for him now?
“We have so much to discuss,” she said, as if reading every question written across his anguished face. “I will tell you everything, but you need to return with me, Prince.”
“I’m not a fucking Prince anymore,” he spat. “That dream died the moment Eamon took Cassandra from me. I don’t want any part of a plan that doesn’t start with getting her back.”
Pain, envy even, flashed through Ione’s eyes before she smoothed her expression and dared to place a hand on his shoulder. He shook her off. “If you want any hope of freeing her, I need you to trust me.” She pulled a glowing fire opal from her fur-lined cloak. “Please.”
Was it the plea of a long-lost love, desperate to rekindle their passion? Or was it the plea of a leader, determined to save her people and in need of a partner with the right title and history to do so?
He couldn’t yet tell. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to know. But what were his choices? Stay here and break himself against these wards? Flee from Ione again and traipse unprotected across a continent on the brink of civil war? Wait for his brother to capture him again?
Or take a chance on the female in front of him? A female who, once upon a time, he’d trusted with his most secret wishes for this world.
He gazed up at the tower, his shoulders dropping. “I never told her.”
“Told her what?”
“That I loved her.” He shook his head, correcting himself. “That Iloveher. She’s trapped in there, fragile and frightened, without even the certainty of my feelings for comfort. I have to fix this, Ione. This world means fuckingnothingto me without her. If I can’t break through these wards myself, then I will raise an army to free her.”
A forced smile crawled across Ione’s face as she reached for him. “We have one of those.”
He didn’t know how to read her, but he grabbed her hand tight as she murmured the name of their destination into the opal and the world around them dissolved into strings of rainbow light.
CHAPTER TWO
Today is the day. Today is theday.
Xenia Cirillo repeated the words to herself as she paced outside the entrance to Ohan Stolia’s headquarters in downtown Rhamnos.
And though this particular mantra had failed her for the past week, Xenia still believed in the power of positive thinking.
After all, what was it if not her sunny determination—and maybe a bit of luck—that had helped her survive in this overcrowded, crime-ridden continental city?
When she’d first arrived at this address seven days ago, she’d been brimming with certainty. Ohan had already helped her once, at Cael’s request, when he’d arranged passage for her to the colonies on one of his cargo ships. And though she’d abandoned that ticket, she knew, justknew, in her heart that Ohan would be moved by her desire to reunite with Cael. That the transportation magnate would find a way to get her to Brachos.
If only she could speak with him.
She hadn’t yet achieved that part. Every day she’d been thwarted by the Deathstalker female who manned the front desk.
Daphne.
A tiny, elegant dictator with a golden nametag pinned to her crisp white blazer.
