She was pearl pale and feminine, a poet’s muse of golden hair and Mona Lisa smiles and quiet, effortless grace. Born a commoner, she was now a Queen, the most Gifted and powerful Queen her kind had seen in centuries. She could read a mind with a touch of her hand, she could change from woman to mist to lethal, cunning predator, among other things. She could even, when the mood struck, change into something that quite shocked and offended all her predator kin, and made her happy precisely because it did.

Cats thought birds were lesser creatures, silly creatures, good for only one thing: snacks.

But for the moment she was only a woman, sitting upright and breathless in bed, listening to the low, rumbling voice on the other end of the telephone.

“…and if you grant me this, I will agree to join the confederacy. I’ll agree to…your terms.”

Jenna had never met the man on the other end of the phone, but she knew him regardless. Celian, leader of the Roman colony, gave her husband fits.

She glanced over at that beloved husband now, sleeping on his back with one heavy arm thrown over his face, his muscular chest bare and gleaming in the pale morning light. His other arm was still wrapped around her naked waist; he hadn’t moved, even when the shrill ring of the phone broke the stillness of dawn.

Leander always slept like the dead after a long night of loving. Which meant he almost always slept like the dead.

“Tell me, Celian,” Jenna said, tracing a light finger down her husband’s chest. At her touch, he stirred and made a low sound in his throat, then sank back into slumber. “Why would this Demetrius—your brother, you call him—take it upon himself to do what he did? He must have known what the consequences of his actions would be. Help me understand why he would risk so much, for what appears to be so little.”

There was a pause, a cleared throat, another pause that felt pregnant. Then Celian said simply, “Love.”

Jenna’s hand stilled. “He fights for love?” she whispered, arrested.

She heard the long exhale from so many miles away, heavy with a hundred unnamed things. “Are our ways so different, Jenna?” He refused to call her Queen as steadfastly as he’d so far refused to join the Council of Alphas, which she didn’t hold against him; in his place, she’d feel exactly the same way about both. This also gave Leander fits. “Where you’re from, will a man not forsake everything he has for the woman that he loves? Even, if necessary, his life?”

Her eyes found Leander’s sleeping form again. No, their ways were not so different. They were not different at all. She murmured, “Even if the woman he loves is the new leader of the group that’s been trying to kill us for centuries?”

Silence. Sudden, crackling anger she felt like a hand around her throat. “Eliana is not her father—”

“No,” Jenna agreed, “she’s not. But she is the daughter of the madman who left my sister-in-law maimed for life, who tortured and killed many of my kin, who kept the heads of his enemies like trophies, and who,” her voice lowered to steel, “had me tortured and beaten near to death.”

Celian had no answer to that. Jenna went on, “Blood follows Blood, Celian. It’s the way of our kind. What proof do you have that she—or her brother—hasn’t followed in her father’s footsteps?”

“I can’t speak for her brother,” he replied, his voice tight, “but Demetrius believes Eliana is innocent, therefore so do I.”

It wasn’t enough; the Council of Alphas would say it wasn’t nearly enough to grant the favor he asked, even with his willing capitulation to join them and bow to their will. Demetrius had broken ranks and gone against orders, and that made him dangerous to them all. No matter how much Celian believed in him.

And yet…and yet…

Outside a bird began to sing, a high, trilling warble in the stillness of the pink-lit dawn. Jenna glanced at the expanse of lead-paned windows that ran along the east wall of their bedchamber and saw beyond the sill a tiny white butterfly bobbing above the planted flowerbeds with bumpy grace, settling finally on the open bloom of a rose. The flower didn’t even tremble under its weight.

Life is pain and everyone dies, but true love lives forever.

Her mother’s words. They came back to haunt her at odd moments like these. She’d died years and years ago, but Jenna often wondered if she was still out there somewhere, watching over her.

Reminding her.

Jenna herself was the product of such desperate love and granite loyalty, a child of two star-crossed lovers who paid the ultimate price for their dreams. She knew what it meant to risk everything, to gamble on love, to lose in the end but never regret one brilliant, doomed moment because what was gained was worth every sacrifice, even death.

Perhaps Demetrius would come to regret following his heart. Perhaps he would be lucky enough to find true love, or cursed enough to lose it—only Fate could tell. But Fate was burdened with the minutia of the universe, and sometimes she needed a little helping hand.

Jenna sat a moment longer, thinking, then came to a decision in her usual way: she went with her gut.

“I’d like to meet this Demetrius of yours, Celian,” she said softly. “And you, too. I admire that kind of loyalty. It’s very rare. And I’m sorry…that we all got off on the wrong foot. The last thing I want is more fighting. More bloodshed. We’ve all had too many years of that.” She paused a moment, allowing the silence between them to deepen. On the other end of the phone, Celian waited, his attention honed sharp as the tip of a knife. Firmer, she said, “I’d like to see you join the confederacy, Celian, but I won’t force you to, even under the circumstances. If we’re going to work together, it has to be on equal footing. You have to want to join us. I know all too well what our laws are like.” She smiled, a wry twist of her lips. “Fortunately, I’m above them. So you have your two days. Make them count.”

There was a beat of astonished silence before she heard Celian’s low, amused chuckle. She imagined him shaking his head. “Well, for all the ways your husband and I disagree, at least we can both agree on his taste in women.”

“I’ll tell him you said so.” Jenna glanced back at Leander. Without another word, she ended the call.

She made another call—quick and to the point—and then set the phone back in its cradle on the nightstand beside the bed and snuggled into the space between Leander’s strong arm and warm body, the safest spot in the world.

He turned his head and mumbled something incoherent into her hair. “Sleep, love,” she whispered, closing her eyes and tightening her arms around him. “Go back to sleep.”

They had hours yet before the sun would crest the mountains and he and the Council would discover what she’d done. They might as well both be rested for what lay ahead.

Belief in Fate, like belief in God, requires a certain suspension of disbelief, the ability to accept without physical proof that there is something larger than yourself operating behind the scenes in the universe, there is a Plan that’s being followed and your own small life is a part of it.

That was a concept so foreign to Keshav it was rendered not only unimaginable, but entirely ridiculous.

An assassin by trade and by nature, Keshav believed not in Fate but in Chance, Fate’s blind, gleefully chaotic sibling who had no long-term Plan but wreaked havoc on hearts and lives just because he could. Keshav had seen and done too many horrible things to harbor any tender notions of a benevolent God. He knew God was a concept humans had created back in the days when they’d first crawled from the mud, gasping air with amphibious lungs. God’s primary function was simply to help soothe the primal, animal terror of death.