Present Day

Kalasharv Castle, House Stargazer, Tigrantine Empire, Altai

“My dearest older brother,” Kanona‘s tone was exasperated as if she was speaking to a child rather than her Tigerlord. “I warned you that if you didn’t change things, I would.”

Kai’s lips peeled back over razor-sharp fangs. “You exceed your place!”

Her voice was calm, assertive. “We need a ruler who is here, not gallivanting around the galaxy searching for something he saw in a dream.”

He made a leap toward her, shoved her against the wall, and held her inches away from his face. Fangs the size of his fists jutted from his mouth as he roared at her. The monstrous sound hit the objects in the room like a shockwave.

It was one of the most frightening sounds I had ever heard.

Kanona merely laughed at him. “Tooth and claw, Kai. Stop being so dramatic. You knew this was coming. You don’t even want to be Tigerlord.”

The sound he made was more snarl than words. “You shouldn’t have brought her here.”

She looked at him with scorn. “Even now, your first question is not about your House. Not about the threat to your rule. She asked for help. You weren’t here to respond. Are you going to punish me for saving her when she needed help?”

Kai turned to me, his eyes on fire. “Is that true?”

When I had finally figured out who he was, and how much he had lied to me, I swore to myself that I would never see him again. Until I realized what a mistake it had been to go to my father’s house. At the time, I had no one else I could turn to. So, I messaged and mailed through as many channels as I could.

And Kanona had come.

“It doesn’t matter.”

A flicker of emotion crossed his face, too fast for me to see. He turned to Kanona. “You’ll have to do better than sneak in a substitute bride to take the House from me.”

She smiled an oddly somber smile. “It’s already mine.”

“I’d like to go back to my rooms,” I said.

Two pairs of glowing shifter eyes turned on me. A sight that most would take as a warning. Maybe it was a measure of where I had been and what had come to pass, but it didn’t even faze me.

“I’ll summon the guards to escort you,” said Kanona.

“No,” said Kai. “You will await me here. I will walk Seria to her rooms.”

* * *

I was determined to hold my head up as we walked through the ancient Ealen-made halls of his ancestral castle, even if I was wearing nothing more than a wedding bodice, underwear and the shredded remains of a flight suit that kept flapping around. Thank the stars that shifters were far less concerned about nudity than most humans.

I clutched my mother’s stone pendant, the only thing my Alpha werewolf father had given me of hers, reminding me that I wasn’t truly human.

Shiny white surfaces intersected with stripes of what looked like shimmering mosaic tile. The tile was another Ealen-made defensive mechanism, made to look decorative. The Ealen had cloaked their deadliest weapons in the most beautiful of objects.

We walked through the hallways in silence. Each person we passed inclined their head toward Kai with a nod, just like they had with my werewolf prince brother Ral, just like they had with my werewolf Alpha father.

My father. He was more of a genetic donor, intent on claiming me as his property. I clenched my mother’s stone pendant around my neck. No one would use me as a pawn.

Not him, nor any shifter.

We stopped at two double doors engraved with foliage and flowers - a suite reserved for honored guests. Two guards flanked the door, nodded to Kai, and then resumed staring straight ahead.

I put my hand on the door. “You’re not coming in.”

He leaned in. He was uncomfortably close and shirtless to boot. Something clenched inside me, an involuntary reaction to that unmistakable scent of his. It brought back memories of warmth, laughter, and belonging that I knew were false.

But knowing the truth didn’t change the part of me that wanted to curl up in his arms.

He smirked as if he knew. Fuck, with all his tiger senses, he probably did. “I have to do a security check.”

I could feel the door pressed against my back, some carving shoved uncomfortably against my ass. “That is an excuse.”

“At least I’m offering you one.” He pushed open the other door and went in.

I followed reluctantly. I didn’t want to be alone with him, but I didn’t see any other way out of it.

He was already sitting on the sofa as if it was his suite, which I suppose technically it was.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

If he had said he was growing grass on his head, I would have been less surprised, because shifters didn’t apologize. They just didn’t.

“For what?”

His lips pressed together as if trying to decide what to say. “For you being dragged into this.”

I wasn’t going to let him think I was a completely helpless victim. “I’m here because I want to be here. Are you going to help me?”

He extended his hand. It had a thin white scar across the palm where there hadn’t been one before.

“Hand it to me.”

I walked toward him, and moved to drop the stone pendant into his hand. But he seized my wrist and yanked me into his lap. His presence overwhelmed me. Touching him ripped pages out of the book of sensibility in my brain.

“What are you doing?”

“Helping you.” He closed his hand around mine, the stone nestled between our hands.

I struggled to get out of his grasp, but he was completely immovable, except for the tightening around his arms, the unmistakable impression of his…interest…underneath me. Only three, maybe two layers of fabric lay between us.

“Kai!”

“What you ask requires physical contact. Touch-reading is only a tertiary ability of mine.”

I stopped struggling. “How long?”

“As long as it takes.”

I sat there, in his lap, trying to ignore the unmentionable yet unignorable bulge pressed intimately against me. I was afraid to move, and yet there was nothing more I wanted to do than squirm. I was surrounded by his muscled arms, unable to escape from his focused attention, completely and utterly trapped by him.

Uncontrolled warmth pooled irritatingly in my lower belly. It was a purely biological reaction.

“How long?”

He smiled. “How long what?”

“You’re enjoying this!”

His thumb stroked the inside of my wrist. “Not in the least. I’m suffering. I hope you can tell how much I’m…pained.”

Did he just pulse his —

“Whatever you’re trying to do, it’s not working.”

“On the contrary. By the quickening of your pulse, the dilation of your pupils, the flush of heat in your skin, I’d say it’s working beautifully.”

My voice was a whisper. “Stop it.”

His free hand caressed my waist. “I’m only doing what you ask.”

“You don’t have any claim to me.” Not anymore.

His fingers, his arms tightened, pulling me closer.

I had to remember who I was, who he was. I had werewolf blood. And Kai was not only a liar but a betrothed Tigerlord. I seized onto that truth, a lifeboat in a sea of desire I wanted to drown in. I opened my mouth to tell him.

He tilted my head toward him. “You can’t fight fate.”

And that was when he kissed me.

I opened, helpless against his focused, full-on assault. His mouth was full of delicious, beautiful lies of possession, and yet, I drank them, thirsty for him as I had ever been for anything in my life. He smelled of the sweet smokewood trees that surrounded his home, and something that lent a sharp edge to my desire. His hands smoothed their way across my body, the stone still in his palm.

The hardness woke me. I was still wearing the bodice, part of the exotic angel-made wedding dress Kanona had forced on me when I arrived.

Something went dark and cold within me.

“No.” I made my voice titanium hard. “NO.”

He stopped.

“That’s enough. I know what you’re doing. I won’t be your vision-making concubine. Find someone else, Tigerlord.” The words were daggers from my mouth.

He looked at me.

I would not show weakness in front of him. I turned my back to him. “I wish to retire for the evening, Tigerlord. Please allow me my privacy.” If I kept using his title, I would remember who he was. Who I was.

He was silent for a moment.

“Very well, Princess,” he said formally.

Too late, I realized he had taken my mother’s necklace with him.

* * *

You are my destiny, Seria.

I blinked, unsure of the line between dreaming and real life. Why couldn’t I stop those dreams, those unconscious longings for him?

Even then I knew it would get me in trouble.

And as the sleep cleared from my eyes, I suddenly realized I was trapped by a very large arm, snaked around my waist.

Now, waking and finding someone in your bed once you had gone to sleep so resolutely alone, should be more shocking. Maybe it was the latent werewolf genes, but it was as if some part of me knew it was Kai.

Worse, that part of me still trusted him.

I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling oddly safe and secure, even as I knew, forced myself to remember the lies.

I tried to push his arm away, but he only tightened his grip and pulled me closer. He was completely naked, I could tell, with his chest against my bare back, the heat of his length pressing against my butt, resting in the crevice barred by the very thin cloth of my underwear. It had been the only thing I had gone to sleep in because of how hot my rooms had been.

His hand drifted downward.

“Kai,” I said.

There was only a sleepy growl.

Was he actually asleep?

“Kai.” I said more urgently, trying to wiggle free of him. Unfortunately, my efforts seemed to be stirring the parts of him I really didn’t need rising.

His hand cupped my bare breast. Involuntarily, I gasped, the kind of gasp that sounded like I was enjoying it. Which I hated to admit to myself, I was.

“KAI.” I elbowed as hard as I could into that nicely ridged abdominal wall.

He let go.

I got out of the bed, grabbing the sheet with me. It pulled away, revealing that mountain of a man. But he wasn’t just big like some men he was magnificently carved with strength and symmetry in the way that sculptors dreamed of.

I had told myself that all shifters looked like that. Their human forms had been biologically engineered for perfection.

But no matter how good other shifters looked, only this one had the power to make me forget what I was trying to do.

Stay the fuck away from him.

I drew myself up, repressing the hurt, the desire, and summoned the safest emotion to have around him: anger. “You can’t just sneak into my rooms and sleep in my bed.”

He sat up slowly, muscles languorous and stretching with all the regalness of a Tigerlord in his domain. “Actually, these are my rooms. You are in my House.”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do but it’s not going to work.”

His eyes glittered, gazing at me with an odd intensity that made me wrap the sheet around me more tightly. “My visions have not had the same clarity since leaving Tranquility. I need to be able to see what is coming.”

There is something about you Seria that makes everything more clear.

My mouth dropped open with his disregard for me. I was nothing more than a means to an end.

“If you think I’m going to be your vision-making concubine, you’re loose in the head.”

“I would never think that of you.” He paused, as if he were deep in thought. “Kanona is right. She needs to take the mantle of Tigerlady and the rulership.”

Did that mean he wasn’t getting married to someone else? The whole reason why Kanona had come for me was to break a promised betrothal to another House, which would somehow usurp his position and let her take control. At least, I thought that was the reason. Shifter politics were so complicated.

Wait, why should I even care? There was no way in the Seven Stars I would let him close again.

I rubbed my eyes, certain that my mind was still fogged from sleep. I glanced at the time, confirming it was indeed the middle of the night when normal people should be sleeping. But Kai was definitely not normal, otherwise I wouldn’t be in this situation. Of all the people in the universe I could have gotten involved with, a magic Tigerlord who could see the future was nowhere on my list of possibilities.

I let out a sigh and rubbed my forehead. “Why are you here, Kai?”

There was a pause. “You are the most expedient way for me to renounce the Lordship and continue with my quest.”

I blinked for a moment, unable to fathom what he was saying.

And there, like a book falling open to the most needed page, it came together.

“Sex.”

He didn’t blink.

“It’s an intense physical exercise. It clarifies your visions. That’s what you want me for.”

He didn’t even try to deny it. “It’s not the only reason.”

I clutched the sheet as if it were a shield as I backed away. “Oh no. No. No –”

He came toward me, a huge dark shadow of a man. “I need your help.”

I was ceding too much physical space to him. “No,” I said forcing myself to stop. “I’m going home.”

“You can’t go home. There’s a blockade and an intergalactic war.”

“It is no concern of yours.”

He arched an elegant eyebrow, then spoke a command that he clearly expected me to obey. “You will remain here.”

“Am I your prisoner? Is that what you’re here to tell me?”

He looked surprised by my words and shook his head. He looked away, then slowly, as if the very words were difficult to say. “I’m here to ask you to marry me.”

Laughter exploded from me, a completely inappropriate response to an overly tense situation in which I felt powerless. It was conditioning. A result of atypical childhood socialization, I repeated to myself. And yet I couldn’t stop. “You’re psychotic.”

He backed away to wave his hand, commanding the network to project a star map between us. He zoomed in on the Far Reaches, the borders of civilized space.

They were flat round cylindrical discs, hovering where none should be. Oddly enough, they resembled the stations of the Universal Library where I had been trained. But then again, Ealen architecture was always easy enough to recognize if you knew how.

I reached out to touch one of the ships, my hand passing through the projection. “This can’t be.”

“These are the ships carrying the Lost Ealen Army of the Dead.”

I shook my head in disbelief and looked back at the projection. “Are you sure?”

Everyone knew the Saga of the Three Kingdoms. How an Ealen army of reanimated dead had nearly over taken all the living worlds. The symbiote virus that reactivated the dead was highly contagious. No matter how many were killed, more just kept coming because there were always more bodies to infect. The undead were immune to nearly everything, save Dragonlord fire.

Only no one had seen Dragonlords, if they existed, for thousands of years.

Kai had asked me to marry him, not because he cared, but because he needed me for his fated destiny quest. I closed my eyes, unable to face the harsh truth of what I truly was to him. “I’m not a soldier or any kind of fighter.”

He touched my bare shoulder. Even that little bit of contact sent a shock of heat and an unwelcome twinge of desire to my core. “I have always known that the undead would return within my lifetime.”

He had lied to me, ignored me, failed to help me when I needed him. I knew he didn’t love me. Yet I still, still wanted him.

His hand slid down my upper arm, offering something I would be foolish to respond to. “The code embedded in the walls of this estate is Ealen, maintained by Code Masters who study the language for years before they’re even allowed to modify a single string. And yet I’ve seen you manipulate it as if it were your native language.”

A cold realization shivered through me. That was why he had been so impressed when we had first met on Tranquility.

I forced myself to pull away from him. This was precisely why coming here had been a bad idea. “Even if I could help you, how would we find the Dragonlords? People have been searching them for thousands of years.”

“We will find them within ten days.”

A laugh bubbled out of me, turning slowly into hysteria. He didn’t just say ten days, did he?

I looked at him in disbelief. He matched my look. There is something about you, Seria, that makes everything more clear. “You are important to me,” he said.

I welcomed the anger surging inside me. He had said those same words to me just before he had left.

“I’m a convenient excuse for leaving your House obligations behind.”

His eyes narrowed. I had impinged his precious honor. Poor kitty. He had already gone to the Far Reaches as far as I was concerned.

He held up my mother’s stone without a single word.

Anger filled me. “Let me guess the price of this information.”

Was there a hint of a smile around his lips? “You’re still angry. Good.”

Belatedly, I realized that if I was angry, that meant I still cared. And not caring was better than anger. Not caring meant that he would have no hold, no power, no control over me.

I heard his voice behind me, much closer now as if he were right behind me. “Even if I had told you, it wouldn’t have changed anything.”

It would have changed everything. Or would it have? Had he “seen” this happening? Had he seen what had happened to us? Was the future fixed no matter what I did here?

I turned my back to him and walked into the other room. I didn’t care what shifters thought about ceding territory or whatever. I had to get away.

He followed me. “I didn’t see you in your father’s House or the Teeth. If I had…I haven’t had any visions since leaving Tranquility. Not since tonight. Not since I touched you.”

There is something about you, Seria, that makes everything more clear.

I stood at the doors of the balcony, as I had earlier that evening. If only I had succeeded in my escape. I put my hand on the door handle. “That’s not my problem.”

His voice was low. “Would it be so bad to be married to me?”

He had been the only man I had ever dreamed of marrying. My fingers tightened around the door handle. “I’m not going to marry you, Kai.”

I heard him put my mother’s necklace on a table. When I dared to turn around, he was gone.