He twitched in his sleep. A tense, sharp concentration of his stomach muscles, as though he’d been punched. He didn’t wake, but a harsh grimace twisted his face. For a moment she considered shaking him, but then his body stilled and the deep grooves between his eyebrows smoothed.

He’d given her his vow. Made upon his people’s most sacred objects. She couldn’t get past that and, really, that had been his point, hadn’t it? Ever since he’d found her here on the island, he’d been denying his involvement with the Senatus and trying to convince her he was here of his accord. Had he succeeded? She laid the knife across her knees and considered him.

Griffin’s conviction ran as deep as the legendary Source. He wasn’t one to half ass anything. He wouldn’t go after something unless he could do so with absolute concentration and one hundred percent effort. And he sure as hell never went after anything if he didn’t believe in it whole-heartedly. In that they were too much alike.

He’d only ever wanted the Senatus. He’d only ever wanted Ofarian advantage. If she told him about the Chimeran disease she would give him such a weapon to wield, but through his oath he’d turned that down, sight unseen. He denied his presence had any involvement with the Senatus and she was . . . daring to believe him.

What had changed for him, this shift in objectives? Did it even matter? He had what she needed and she had his word.

Out of nowhere, Griffin’s body gave a violent jerk. His big arm sliced awkwardly through the air to land across his chest. His hand made a fist. No, wait. The curl of fingers held a phantom gun.

“Griffin?” She moved to a crouch.

He convulsed, his body twisting to one side, one knee coming up as if to protect himself from a blow. A groan shot out of his throat, followed by a string of unintelligible mumbles, but then she distinctly heard something about “orders.”

She started to crawl toward him, wary but worried, unsure what to do. This time the bodily twitching did not stop, but instead got more pronounced and intense second by second. The sounds that came out of his mouth were like garbled one-way conversations trying to patch through a spotty communication device. His closed-eye expressions shifted from fear to rage to cold fury to sadness.

Setting the knife down, she knelt before him and gave his shoulder a gentle shake. “Griffin, wake up.”

It happened too fast. Too fast for even her reflexes. Griffin snapped awake, coming instantly alert. With a snarl he snatched her around her waist, flipping her up and around his body. She landed on her back and he came down on her, all his weight pressing her into the rock. The knife handle was in his hand, the blade tip at her throat. How the hell did he—

“I have my orders!” Spit hit her cheek. The fierce, hoarse cry ricocheted through the leaves.

In her warrior’s heart, Keko knew she could throw him off. Knew she could inhale and draw her fire out, and either blast him far away or knock him out with its force. But that same heart realized that the Griffin she knew was not the Griffin with the wild, murderous eyes who loomed over her now. This was not Griffin the Ofarian attacking Keko the Chimeran, intent on preventing her from getting to the Source. He was panting, sweating, the knife tip trembling against her skin.

“What orders?” she whispered.

Griffin blinked, clarity and reality rolling back into his eyes. He crumpled, shoulders collapsing, the knife falling from slack fingers. The crushing weight on her arms and torso lessened, but he didn’t get off her, instead just pushing back to sit on his heels, his chest heaving, spasms jerking his limbs.

He searched her face. “Keko?”

She raised her arms and showed him her empty palms. “What orders, Griffin?”

“Oh fuck.” He rolled off her, going into a heap, his back to her, and tried to catch his breath.

She sat up and carefully nudged away the knife. “You were dreaming.”

“Haven’t had that one in a long time.” He dropped his head into a hand. “A long time.”

This was crossing over into unmapped territory for them, but she’d never been afraid of a little exploration. Like her, he didn’t want pity or attention because of something personal, but she simply had to ask. “Why now, do you think?”

“I don’t think. I know.”

It wasn’t the sex. “Orders” had nothing to do with that. Attacking her with a knife had never followed sex before. But they’d been in a pretty harrowing battle yesterday, and she suddenly recalled his reaction after it had all ended, the haunted look when he’d touched the tree after the earth elemental had left it.

“The earth elemental. The fight,” she said. He agreed by not answering.

She rose and moved the few steps over to face him. He didn’t look up as she lowered herself back to the ground, but he also didn’t flinch away when her knees brushed his.

“Was it about someone you killed?”

“No.” Now he looked up, met her eyes. And in them she saw a shattered soul. “It was about all of them.”

They were more alike than she ever would have guessed.

“I see all of them,” he said, and his voice sounded like it had dropped off the edge into a bottomless chasm. “One after the other. In the same order, first to last. Each of them playing out exactly as they happened. Every detail, the same as what I saw. What I heard and smelled. What I felt.”

She made herself sit perfectly still because she knew he didn’t want to be touched. “How many?”

“Twelve.” His voice was utterly flat. “Twelve Primaries.”

Her eyes widened, even more pieces completing the picture of this man. “Why them?”

“Because it used to be my . . . job.”

She thought back to what he’d told her in the Utah hotel room. “I thought you were Gwen’s protector.”

“I was. But when her dad, the former Chairman, wanted a Primary taken out—a Primary who found out about us who wasn’t supposed to know, or a Primary who violated terms of our contracts—he used me.”

She couldn’t breathe. For all her body was made for, she couldn’t take even a simple breath to power the human lungs of her existence. Suddenly she was back around a bonfire in the Utah mountains surrounded by anxiety and threats.

“That’s what that was about,” she was finally able to say. “When the premier ordered that Primary scholar’s mind scrambled and you got upset. Because that’s what you had to do once.”

His expression hardened. “I had to kill. What they’ve been doing is worse.”

“But that’s what put you on edge. What might have made you mistake Makaha—” She cut herself off when his glare turned to blades, because she was more than aware that part of the blame belonged to her. “I mean, I understand now why you were so angry. You’d been poked hard in a wound, and then rubbed raw. It didn’t make sense to me before. Now it does.”

He didn’t like her knowing this, she could tell. He wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed by having her witness the nightmare, but he was pissed off he’d had to reveal it at all. He’d been trying to bury it for all these years, keeping himself behind a desk and surrounding himself with politics so he wouldn’t have to go out into the field and risk resurrecting old ghosts.

“I’ve killed, too.” When he looked at her in a silent way that said he was listening, she added, “More than twelve.”

“When. Who.”

“About five years ago the Chimeran clan from Molokai came over. They invaded our valley, wanted to take down our ali’i. Wanted to raise themselves up and make us all their lesser.”

“What happened?”

She shrugged. “We destroyed them. They had small numbers. Their clan was dwindling and that was their last effort to make a name for themselves.”

“Did they kill a lot of your clan?”

“Yes. My parents among them. They were excellent fighters but they were older. A lot of our younger, untried warriors died, too.”