He looked away and stood with his hands clasped behind his back.

For a long while, neither of them spoke.

“That’s true,” he finally said, quietly and without a shadow of sarcasm. “More true than you know, Jenna. I’ve been groomed to succeed my entire life, expected to lead and make decisions, trained to win. I take neither my responsibility nor my position lightly. I can’t. I’m the Alpha. There are scores of people who depend on me, women and children and families I must protect, at any cost. It’s a privilege, yet also a burden, because I’ve no one to share it with, no one who understands how I fear losing. If I fail, the Ikati fail. If I lose...”

He turned toward her. “We all lose.”

“Losing,” she mused, turning back toward the forest, eyes hazy and unfocused. Morning light glowed against the slope of her sculpted cheekbone, caught the tips of her long eyelashes, warming them gold. Her gaze flickered back over him, assessing. “I wonder if someone like you has any idea what it really means to lose.”

“We all have things to lose, Jenna, even me. Especially me. My people are in danger, our way of life is in danger.” He angled a step closer, inhaling the soft scent of dew and roses that clung to her skin. “You are in danger,” he said, his voice roughened. “And that is something I simply will not tolerate.”

Jenna didn’t protest or step back, as he expected. She accepted his proximity without comment, without moving away, but she turned her head and lowered her eyes.

“You’re right,” she murmured. “We all have things to lose.” A flush crept over her cheeks. “Things like faith, trust, hope—all the things we were taught to believe in. All those make-believe saviors, like knights in shining armor. Like second chances.” Her voice lowered to the barest of whispers and was shaded with sorrow. “Like true love. And as for the danger...” She slowly raised her gaze to his face.

Leander heard everything around them for twenty miles: the air whispering through the pines, the river Avon flowing swift and deep over granite rock and polished stones, the birds in the sky and the squirrels in the trees and the moles rustling deep in their underground burrows.

But most acutely he heard her heart, beating strong and true, flush with heated blood, a squeeze and thump so compelling he wished he could drown in the sound of it.

All his worry for his people, all his rage at his enemies seemed to melt away, and in their stead there was only Jenna, the drum of her heartbeat, the cool embrace of the morning.

“I’m not afraid of danger,” she said. “Or I never would have come here with you. What I am afraid of...is something only you can give me, Leander. And I hope...” She closed her eyes. “Even though I know it’s going to hurt, I really hope you’ll give me what I want.” She opened her eyes and fixed him with a raw, hungry stare.

He stood mesmerized as an errant breeze lifted a lock of golden hair and sent it fluttering over her bare shoulder and down her back.

“Anything,” he murmured, dazed, his heart clenched in sudden agony. I would give anything just to have you look at me like that for one second longer.

“The truth,” she said firmly. “Whatever you haven’t told me so far, whatever you haven’t wanted to tell me, that’s exactly what I need to hear. And I need to hear it right now.”

She pinned him in her gaze, the smoky-sweet timbre of her voice sliding like satin into his ears. He could barely breathe with her beauty, with the desire pounding through his veins.

“The truth,” he repeated, still muddled, trying to focus on her words.

She spoke very calmly. “What happened to my father?”

“Your father was...” executed, he almost said. He caught himself just in time, bit his tongue to hold the word back. After another, steadying, breath...

“An amazing man.”

Her eyes widened. “You knew him?”

“Every Ikati across the globe knew him. He was a legend.”

He saw how startled she was, saw how she tried to hide it. “Because he was the Alpha.” Her eyebrows drew together. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and he wanted to free it with his finger, with his tongue.

“Because he was the most powerful leader our kind has ever seen. His Gifts were unmatched.” Leander looked away, over the vast stretch of ancient forest where his guards prowled, the trees smoky-blue in the morning sun. “And because of the sacrifice he made.”

“Sacrifice,” she repeated, a chill in her voice. “What sacrifice?”

Leander felt her stare though he wasn’t looking at her, felt the way her body became both stiff and still, heard her heart skip first one beat, then another. She was beautiful, and precious, and new to the world of the Ikati and Sommerley, though he planned to keep her here—with him—forever.

He was loath to hurt her.

And so he couldn’t say he had watched her father die, as had his father and brother and every other Alpha from all the tribes across the globe, every Ikati in his colony. He couldn’t tell this creature staring up at him so rapt and lovely that he had stood by and watched in impotent horror at what had been done to Rylan Moore, how he had been made an example of by the Assembly, so they would all know how outlaws were treated, so they would all see the consequences of breaking the cold and unchanging Law.

His death hadn’t been swift, and it hadn’t been merciful. The Expurgari themselves would have approved of what had been done to the disgraced Alpha.

“Ikati Law is immutable, Jenna,” he said softly, still avoiding her gaze. “Adherence to the Law, to the will of the Assembly, is what keeps us together, what allows us to survive in a world that would destroy us. No matter the position of the Ikati who breaks the Law, no matter the transgression itself, punishment follows.”

“Punishment?” she whispered. She took a step back.

“It is forbidden to marry a human,” he said, carefully watching her face. “It is forbidden to have a child with a human. The punishment for this is...” Death. “Imprisonment.”

“Imprisonment?” she repeated, her voice small, like a child’s. “For how long?”

“Forever,” he said simply.

She took this in with a quick inhalation of breath, two spots of pink high on her cheeks. She stared at him, her lips slightly parted, sunlight haloing her hair.

“It wasn’t long for him, however,” he went on because she wasn’t speaking or moving and he had to do something to distract himself from pulling her into his arms. “He refused any food or water, refused to be...caged.”

This was true, still so real in Leander’s mind that he saw Rylan, chained and defiant even in the face of imminent death, shouting at his father and the whole Assembly that they could go straight to hell and he wouldn’t change a thing if he had to do it over.

That had made such an indelible impression on Leander—on the raw edge of eighteen, poised to become Alpha after his own father someday—he often wondered, in the years that followed, what it must be like to love a woman so much you would willingly give your own life to protect her.

With a shock of recognition akin to plunging naked into a lake of icy water, Leander realized he had finally begun to understand.

“So that’s why we were always on the run,” she said, her voice tremulous and too high. “Because their love was forbidden. Because I was forbidden.” She cleared her throat, the pink spots on her cheeks darkening to crimson while the blood seemed to drain away from her skin everywhere else, leaving her pale, ghostly white.

“And all that time, every single day of my childhood, you’re telling me we were running from...you?”

Leander was experienced with women, so he knew, judging from the tone of her voice and the look in her eye, that no matter what he said next, it wouldn’t be the right answer. Nothing he could say would help her pain, anything would fall far short of what she needed.