I finally met his werewolf family at the state-dinner-turned-victory feast. I hadn’t known that Coalition exo-armored soldiers were apparently quite respected among the wolves. When they heard I had fought off someone wearing exo-armor dressed in nothing more than my funny sparkly suit, they were impressed.

After the dinner, Ral and I had retreated to his rooms and enjoyed each other quite vigorously.

“Where is your armor?”

“Off.” And as I said it, I realized for the first time that as much as I had missed it, I really hadn’t needed it as much as I thought. I took a deep breath, and this time, the invisible weight of gravity seemed… less. It was still there, but all that effort trying to rebuild that speeder had helped my body begin adjusting to the gravity.

More than that, it had helped me rebuild my confidence in myself. I hadn’t been aware just how scared I had been to come here, until the prospect of not being with Ral overshadowed all my selfish fears.

“I don’t really need it here. But it’s nice to have all the same.”

He kissed me. “I am glad you realized that. The woman I am going to marry doesn’t need armor when walking into a room of strange wolves.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Was that supposed to be some kind of test?”

“No. I was describing what you already are. You will be just fine. You’ll be better than fine. You’ll piss them off, shake them up, just as they need to be.”

“Haven’t you done that enough, Chancellor?” I asked, using his new title. “You did force a new system on them.”

“Change is the only way we’ll survive. And we will. So that you and I can have many, many children.”

I froze.

“Aren’t you worried that they’ll be nulls?”

“Nulls, werewolves, they will be our children. House Nightclaw has no biases against humans. They are of our blood just the same.”

“Really?

“There is something I have to ask you.”

I asked him about his mother first.

Ral sat down. He looked bowed by the weight of it. “It is a tradition within the House of Nightclaw that a parent accompanies a child along with their first assault.”

First assault? And then I remembered just how long the wolves of Alzar had been fighting each other. Military traditions had been embedded into their culture.

“My mother came with me, because my father would not. He felt betrayed that I had grown up outside his purview. I’ll tell you more about that later. My mother was determined that I would fulfill the tradition, because I could not be acknowledged otherwise. It was part of the bargain she made with him in order to be able to raise me.”

“What bargain?”

“He wanted me to be fostered with another royal Alzarian family, as my brothers were. My mother said no. He attempted to force it to happen. And she ran. He found her, she threatened him with something, I’m not sure what, and he finally agreed.

“So, I grew up elsewhere. When it came time for my first assault, my mother suited up in her merc Smart Armor as mandated by Alzarian tradition, even though she was human. We were directed to recapture a base that had been taken by a rival House. Something went wrong and we were trapped.”

Ral’s face turned grim. “My father negotiated for my life. Not for any of the others. I walked out of there, thinking I would be the first. But the enemy cuffed me, blindfolded me, hauled me into a crate, handed me over to my father.”

His knuckles were white from his clenched fists.

“After they handed me over to my father, he betrayed the truce with the enemy and bombarded the site with a suborbital rail gun.”

I touched his shoulder. “Your father killed your mother.”

“He said he didn’t have a choice.”

“But you don’t believe him.”

Ral said nothing.

“So then why are you here, helping him?”

Ral laughed. “Helping him? It may look like that from the outside, but I’m going to take that power away from him and all these petty werewolf kings. We should not be wasting lives in these pointless feuds. He knows this. And he uses me, just like I use him. One day, there will be a reckoning.”

Ral looked at me with that too-perceptive gaze of his. “But something else is bothering you.” He took his hands in mine. “Show me the thorn,” he said, an old Alzarian saying. “Before the wound festers.”

I told him what Jonaz said, about his frozen baby in stasis carefully, slowly, watching his face change from incredulity to a terrible anger.

He began pacing and pacing.

“It’s not what you think it is.”

I knew. It didn’t matter to me, because whatever had happened had happened before he had met me. It was Ral’s baby, and I swore to myself I would love the child as much as I loved him.

“You’re going to wear a hole in the floor.”

“No, I’m not. This floor was made in Ealen times —”

“It’s an expression.”

The look on Ral’s face was terrible. “It’s my sister’s baby. And she needs to know.”

***

Thank you for reading! Stick around for an excerpt from Kara’s next project, , the first of a new paranormal romance in the series!