The Shadows

maichen swallowed hard. Then she lifted her hands to the mesh that covered her face—but it was to hold the masking in place. “I am afraid.”

“Of what?”

What if he didn’t like what he saw?

“I already know you’re beautiful,” he said, as if he read her mind.

“How?”

He touched the center of his large chest. “I see you in here. I know you . . . in here. You are very beautiful to me, no matter what you look like.”

Acutely aware of everything that she hadn’t told him about herself, she whispered, “We do not know each other.”

“Does that matter to you?”

“No.”

“Me, neither.” He frowned and looked into the fire. “The last couple of nights, with everything going on with my brother—it’s been an eye-opener. I don’t want to waste any more time. I want to get on with living, instead of keep going in this neutral-zone nightmare, waiting for the ax to fall.”

“Is your brother . . . is he going to come back to the Territory ever? They say . . . he refuses his duty, even though the Queen has decreed after the mourning . . .”

She had to stop. The anxiety was too great.

She was supposed to come unto her mate untouched.

That was not going to happen.

But what could the Anointed One do to her? They were both being forced into the mating, and tradition dictated that he was essentially her property.

A protest from him would be like a chair making an argument against being sat upon.

iAm shook his head. “After Trez loses Selena, all bets are off—and frankly, that Princess? She isn’t going to want what’s left of him, not unless she’s into necrophilia. He’s going to be dead whether he’s walking or in a grave.”

maichen hung her head. She had never not known about the mating that awaited her. It had been part of her rearing, the expectation that the Anointed One was destined by the stars to be her impregnating mate—and that with him, through him, she would ensure her mother’s bloodline continued to rule over the s’Hisbe.

Preordained. Written in the sacred stars.

She had accepted what was her due the same way she had accepted everything about her life, from her station to her loneliness to the perennial sense that she was missing out on so much through no fault or choice of her own.

She cleared her throat. “I would imagine that the Princess would let him go, if she could. She would not want anyone to suffer, most especially one who had lost a female of worth.”

“Do you know her?”

“I have attended her.”

“What’s she like?” Before she could answer, he put up his hand. “Actually, I don’t need to know.”

“I think she would say that she is as trapped as your brother. I think . . . she is in a jail of destiny, too.”

He rubbed his face. “That actually makes me hate her less. I guess I never thought about what it’s been like for her.”

“She was told of her destiny just as he was. She has not chosen any of this.”

iAm gave a short laugh. “Maybe they can tell the Queen to go screw. If both of them refuse to play the game, it could be all over. Not that it’s going to save my brother from losing his love.”

“But the stars have revealed their destinies.”

That dark stare swung back to her. “Do you believe that? I mean, do you actually think that the alignment of a bunch of disinterested planets a million light-years away should be used as a map for people’s lives? I don’t.”

“It has been the way for generations,” she said in a hollow voice.

“Doesn’t make it right. In fact, that makes it even more offensive. Think of how much has been ruined.”

maichen’s chest got tight as he spoke out loud things that she had been thinking about . . . ever since she had learned many years ago that the male she was to mate had found his fate so distasteful that he had escaped the Territory under threat of death and upon punishment of expulsion.

“Enough with this talk,” he said. “It isn’t what we came here for. Is it.”

Her eyes shifted to his under her mesh. “No, it is not.”

His stare went to her robing, as if in his mind, he was getting her naked already.

Her heart started to hammer again, her palms growing sweaty. “I must have you know that I haven’t . . . I am not . . .”

“Neither have I.”

She recoiled. She couldn’t help it. He was just so masculine, so beautiful of form, so . . .

“Change your mind?” he clipped out. “Not sexy, is it—”

“How is that possible,” she blurted. “You’re so phearsom.”

There was a pause. And then without warning, he threw back his head and laughed. The sound was so unexpected and . . . captivating . . . she nearly pulled back in surprise again.

When he leveled his eyes on her once more, he smiled for the first time. And he took her breath away.

“That is the nicest compliment I have ever received.”

She felt herself break into a smile under the mesh—but then as he grew serious once more, she did, too.

There would be no going back, she thought. If she didn’t leave now, before he took her hood off . . . she was not going to go until the deed was done.

maichen’s hands lifted to her masking, her decision made.