Kragen opened his eyes to find his female straddling him. Andromeda was staring down at him, arms crossed, seemingly oblivious to the torture she was inflicting.

Kragen rolled his hips, just slightly. Enough for her to feel what she did to his cock. Then he remembered he had chains wrapped around him.

“What are you doing, female?” he grunted.

Andromeda swallowed. She was trying to hide how much pleasure she felt from just this contact. She should know by now that she could not hide such things from him.

“I’m asking the questions,” Andromeda said. Her expression was determined.

Kragen rose to a sitting position using just his abdominals, until his chained hands were close to the heat between her legs and his face hovered just above hers. He looked at her, hard, until she started to quiver. It amused him.

“Very well,” he said.

“And I’m not letting you out of these chains until you’ve told me what I want to know,” she said.

“Yes, I understand the concept,” Kragen said. He did not bother to hide his smile.

Yes, his mate had a warrior spirit. However misguided.

His amusement angered her, however. Her face clouded, and he could feel, more than see, the weakening of their connection. In its place, suspicion flared.

That angered him. He had displayed more self-control than he had thought possible last night. The only reason Andromeda was not claimed and marked as the mate of a condemned Leonid was because Kragen had seen to it. Had he not earned her trust?

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“For starters, I want to know why you’re torturing a prisoner in the basement,” she said.

Kragen did not bother to suppress the growl that rose in his throat unbidden. That is what she thought? He stared into her eyes so that she would have to stare into his.

“You do not trust me?” he said. “Even after last night?”

Andromeda blinked her lovely eyes at him, and for the first time, there was a glimmer of sadness.

“It wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong about a guy,” she said softly.

Kragen’s lip curled in snarl. Once again she mentioned “other guys,” as though that had anything to do with him. He was not a “guy.” He was her mate. And if circumstances were different, he would find any “other guy” who had treated her badly and make him apologize. Profusely.

“You think I am keeping secrets from you for my own benefit?” he said, his voice deceptively cold.

Andromeda hesitated. Kragen knew the anger was coming off of him in waves. Anger, and desire. He could not look at her without desiring her.

It was true torture. Well, he would not be the only one tortured.

“It did not occur to you,” he said, rolling his hips again, “that some of the knowledge you want might be dangerous?”

Andromeda snorted, and pushed herself off of his lap. The absence of contact only made his irritation worse. He wanted her, he could not have her, and she was being difficult.

“Um, yeah,” she said. “It’s occurred to me that there’s a whole metric crap-ton of stuff about Leonid mating that is not, shall we say, common knowledge on Earth. And frankly, I can see why you’d keep it a secret.”

“And why is that?”

“Because,” she said, holding his gaze, “it is one thing to volunteer. It is another to be conscripted.”

The insult hit Kragen like a blow to the belly. He knew that word, “conscripted.” It had a military origin. It meant that she—his mate—had been pulled into this situation against her will.

“That is how you feel?” he demanded.

“I’m asking the questions, remember?”

“You ask questions that will endanger you. I am not obligated to cooperate.”

“You are if you want out of those chains,” she said. She stood up, her frustration obvious, and ran a hand through her brown hair. Kragen remembered what it had looked like the previous night, splayed around her face as he’d made her come.

The chains around his wrists burned, but not enough.

“You don’t remember anything I said, do you?” she asked him. “I told you, I’m the only person who gets to make decisions about my life. You haven’t claimed me, right? You don’t own me. And even if you had, even if I submitted to you…”

The mention seemed to give them both pause. Kragen’s cock heard her, loud and clear, and Andromeda herself licked her lips.

“It wouldn’t be like this,” she finished. “And I hate to tell you, Kragen, but the cat’s pretty much out of the bag here.”

Kragen tilted his head. “What cat?”

“I already know Leonid mating isn’t just some genetic-matching thing,” Andromeda said, ignoring him and ticking off her points on her fingers, one by one. “I know it’s something that happens to you, whether you ask for it or not.”

Kragen growled. She had succeeded where countless enemies had failed. She had wounded him.

“I know you Leonids feed off of our…kuma, right? Somehow?” she said. “I know if you don’t have your mate, bad things happen. And I know you’re a fugitive because, once again, you have a monster locked up in the freaking basement. Which you still haven’t explained.”

Kragen shifted his massive weight on the bed. Idly, he wondered whether he would stop this here, now. He could.

But even though she insulted him, Andromeda did not deserve that. She might not trust what she saw in the mating bond, but Kragen did. He knew her. He knew her heart.

And she had seen too much already.

“He is not a monster,” he said, finally.

“Then what is he?”

“He is my brother,” Kragen said.

The energy between them crackled, dancing across the mark on Kragen’s chest. He looked up to find Andromeda staring at him, but for the first time, he could not read her expression.

“Your brother?” she whispered.

“Rune. His name is Rune. His family took me in after I was orphaned during our civil war. He is my brother,” Kragen said. “I owe him my life.”

Andromeda crossed the room, her eyes locked on him. They were softer now, warmer. She paused, for just a moment, and then sat near him on the bed, her body turned to face him.

Kragen was struck by just how beautiful she was.

He allowed himself the pleasure of looking at her. He was sure she would consider herself to be, as she would put it, “a mess,” given that she had spent the night in a warehouse. But to him, she was…

He felt the growl rising up in his throat. The way her soft skin flushed slightly when she realized he was looking at her, the way her breasts moved as she breathed, the way the mark—his mark—glowed slightly on her body, all of it stoked the undying fire in his chest. She turned slightly, and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, revealing the small red points on her neck where Kragen’s fangs had met her flesh.

Where he’d held her in position and fed from her.

Kragen would fight through an entire army to claim her. He would level this entire building with the force of his desire. He would bind her, tease her, and fuck her until she begged for his seed. And then…

No.

“Kragen,” she said. He looked up again, forcing himself to ignore his painfully swollen cock. “I’m a little confused. He’s your brother, so…why do you have him locked up like some kind of animal?”

“Because he is an animal,” Kragen said. “He is the most dangerous animal in this galaxy, and probably the next.”

“Why?”

There was no point in hiding it any longer. If he had to, he would find a way to erase this knowledge from her mind. He would make sure no one knew that his Andromeda knew the Leonid’s terrible secret. He would destroy anything and everything he held dear before he let her become a target.

“Because Rune is in the final stages of the kravok,” Kragen said. “When hunger turns to sickness. To madness.”

Kragen had often marveled at the fact that the human female who was fated to be his unfortunate mate was also the most beautiful female on this entire planet. He did not know what humans considered beautiful, but if it was anything other than Andromeda Knowles, they were wrong. That was why he found himself looking at her so often.

And so he was looking directly at her when she heard his words. He saw her reaction. He saw, finally, how little Andromeda Knowles trusted in the mating bond. How little she trusted in him.

Because it was a look of complete and utter horror.

* * *

Andie kind of didn’t know what to do with herself. She also couldn’t believe she hadn’t figured it out on her own. It made sense that the mating sickness would be a really big deal if you never found a mate. And if that’s what the final stages of the mating sickness looked like…

“Wait,” she said, “wait, wait, wait. I had the mating sickness a little bit, right? And so did you, because we were separated before we had, um, ‘consummated’ the bond. But there’s the drug you used—”

Kragen shook his head, and Andie watched her hopes evaporate. She knew that idea was probably too easy, but still.

“Rune’s father discovered the potential of triclosan before he died. It is not a cure—yet—but it can buy time. And when Rune’s condition became impossible to ignore, I had to make a decision.”

“But don’t you have super-advanced medical technology? Why—”

“No,” Kragen said, and the force of his voice echoed off the walls. She would have done anything he said in that tone of voice.

Andie was very much reminded that even chained up, Kragen was powerful.

But he didn’t take advantage of that power. His shoulders heaved, and then he leaned back against the wall that served as his headboard. When he spoke again, all emotion had left his voice.

“A Leonid who has not found a mate is not taken to a hospital when the sickness comes,” Kragen said. “He is executed, by his closest family, by his sworn rivka, before he can become what Rune is. It was my sacred duty to execute my brother. I chose this instead. And I would do it again.”

Andie stared at him. He was only a few feet away, on the other side of the bed they had shared just minutes earlier, but he felt miles away. She was only just now realizing how strange that was for her. In less than a day, she had become so accustomed to the “mating bond” that…

No. Don’t think about that.

She forced herself to speak. “What happens if Rune escapes, or the triclosan no longer works?”

This time, Kragen looked her in the eye. The mark on her breast ached with his sadness.

“Without the triclosan to slow the process, he will no longer be Rune,” he said. “He will be the hunger. He will consume everything he touches, like a fire, but without a mate it will never be enough. He will destroy everything in his path until he is dead, or we are.”

Andie whispered, “Who’s ‘we’ in that scenario?”

“The inhabitants of this planet. Earth.”

“And that’s what happens to all Leonids who can’t find a mate?”

There was a long, deathly silence. Andie had been afraid to say it out loud, but she had to know. For the first time, when Andie looked at Kragen, he didn’t return her gaze. He was looking up, as though he could see through the ceiling, the clouds above it, all the way to his home in the stars.

“We are an honorable people,” he said, finally. “We will not allow it to come to that. But the answer to your question is yes: kravok is what awaits an unmated Leonid. The Alliance has not publicized this fact, because it would make mate-matching more difficult. And because nobody wanted a war.”

“And because you need mates,” Andie said.

This time, Kragen looked at her. His gaze left a heated trail on her body, and when he locked eyes with her, her breath hitched.

“The military might of your entire planet would not be enough to keep Leonids from their mates,” he said.

He pinned her with that molten gaze again, and Andie realized that she couldn’t, if she wanted to, look away. Kragen had that power. He could hold her; he could release her. At will.

The physical thrill that raced through her body at that thought felt almost like a betrayal.

Andie was glad, for the first time, that she had Kragen in literal chains. It didn’t even the playing field—she suspected literally nothing in the entire galaxy could even the playing field between her and Kragen—but it helped, somehow. It helped her feel and think things without the influence of the bond.

And what she was feeling was…pretty pissed off.

The Leonids had lied, pretty much. Didn’t matter how you dressed it up. And literally all life on Earth was at risk. But those worries were almost too big for her to get her head around, and too impersonal.

What she was really fuming about was the fact that Kragen was actually that honorable. He was the person she’d seen with her heart, in the middle of those mating bond spells, as she was starting to think of them. He was a Dom, and she was meant to be his sub, except for one little thing: he didn’t trust her enough to tell her about any of this.

And he didn’t want her. Kragen would choose sacrifice over Andie. And fine, they’d only known each other for a day. But it still stung.

“You’re giving up your mate, aren’t you?” she said. “Maybe other Leonids will do the same.”

It came out meaner than she intended it. The mark on her breast went cold, and Andie shivered slightly.

“The mating bond is based in physical compatibility,” Kragen said. “It is not a guarantee of anything else. The bond is said to give a pair the opportunity to form a soul bond, but the choice is theirs. It is often said that such a bond requires work.”

“Sounds almost like a partnership,” Andie said. “Guess that wouldn’t work for you.”

Kragen merely looked at her. Unworried. It was impossible to get a rise out of him, to get a reaction. It was dumb and immature to have tried.

“Fine,” Andie said, and got up from where she sat on the opposite corner of the mattress to the other side of the room, where Kragen had piled a bunch of useless junk in one corner. There was a paint can there, an empty, rusted one. That’s where she’d hidden the key for his chains.

She bent down to retrieve it, and paused for a moment, pretending to rustle around for it. Really she was trying not to angry cry. Or sad cry. She didn’t know exactly what kind of tears they were, but they were freaking persistent.

Andie didn’t know if Kragen didn’t want her or just didn’t respect her, but either way it didn’t really matter. And it was insane for her to be upset about this. She should be grateful that he was looking for a way to get her out of this situation.

Right?

Kragen said nothing as she walked toward him. He never talked because he felt like he had to, or because he was uncomfortable with silence. No, Kragen was in command even when he was literally in chains.

Andie wished she didn’t find that so damn sexy.

So she didn’t say anything at all as she approached. She just picked up the giant padlock binding the chains around him and produced the key.

“So is there a way to break our mating bond without killing me, or you, or anyone else?” she said. “Because I guess we should get on that.”

Andie felt Kragen stiffen, more than saw it. Felt it deep down. She paused, the key to the lock in her hand, and looked up.

And just at that moment, Kat arrived.