When his breathing quieted, he rolled off and around so that she tucked along his side. “Again,” he said into the near-dark. “I want that again.”

“Tell your prick.” Her voice was sleepy, but he heard a smile.

He kissed her hair, grinning in return. He was grinning. “Dragon Kings have remarkable powers of recovery.”

“Yes, they do.” She yawned and snuggled more deeply into his embrace. “Imagine what it could be if you could use all of your gift. All of those amazing senses.”

The thought was almost too much to handle. He’d overload. But that made him hate the collar even more. He had touched, tasted, inhaled Nynn’s distinct beauty. All of it blunted. He was half-tempted to drag them to the training Cage and make love to her without the barrier that stood between him and his true power.

But no, that would be a poor substitute. Nynn had been right. They would be free.

♦   ♦   ♦

“After the match . . .”

Leto’s scratchy, rumbling voice broke their long, long silence. Nynn may have dozed, but for minutes at a time. It was as if her body only wanted brief moments of sleep so that she wouldn’t stray from him for long.

“Hm?”

He cleared his throat. “After the match, you said that you’d killed your mother.”

Old pains seized her heart. She wanted to curl into a ball and curl and curl until she couldn’t be burned by flame. It had been banked for years, but if she let it, her mind could become that long-ago house on fire.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know when else to ask about it. Tomorrow, there’s no telling, Nynn.”

“I know.” She inhaled his salty, masculine scent. She breathed him again, knowing she was the perfume that didn’t smell quite like Leto. “I’m half Pendray,” she said, not knowing where else to begin the tale.

Leto made some noise in his throat. “Makes sense now. Freckles like them. Ears a little pointed at the top. And your gift, a blend of rage and electricity.”

“That’s what I’ve assumed, too. Well, since finding out the truth of it.” She shifted against his side, glad for his protection. “My mother was Leoki of Tigony. She never revealed my father’s identity, afraid our clan would punish him. When she refused, she was banished. I was left in Mal’s care.”

“Mal?”

“Malnefoley.”

Leto chuckled softly. “I suppose only you can refer to the Giva by such an informal name.”

“Maybe, yes. My mother was his aunt, but she was only five years older. He protected me, and I defended him from those who called him the Usurper. I wasn’t trained in the martial styles for no reason. But I was still an outcast because of my bloodline. I lived a step apart.” She shrugged, adjusting those painful childhood slights. “Eventually my mother returned. Mal made sure she was accepted at the fortress.”

“The privilege of the Giva?”

“More like the power of a man coming into his own.” She sighed. Dragon be, this weight on her chest. She never wanted to feel it again. “But my mother was . . . unstable. Whatever she’d endured out in the world had not been kind. Mal was losing the ability to protect her. Things were tenuous enough when . . .”

Nynn blinked back tears. They were welling inside her, with no other outlet. Telling the rest of the story would make crying inevitable. Leto was still looking at her, his grave features etched with concern and a sympathy she never would’ve thought possible from the great champion of the Asters. Not at first, anyway. Now she knew that he felt a great deal. She took refuge in the comfort he offered wordlessly.

“You’ve seen what my gift can do. I didn’t know how to control it. The house. Our house, there in the Tigony complex. I was sitting next to my mother on her bed. She had a fever, raving, half lost to the world. Then I was fire. The first explosion of my gift.”

“You remember it now?”

“Not . . . entirely. I remember people’s reactions to it. Grief. Accusations. Hatred. But the actual moment the house exploded and she burned?” She shook her head as tears dripped toward the pillow. “Thank the Dragon I don’t remember. When Mal’s personal doctor said she would never recover, she begged to be killed. Mal took the responsibility himself when he wielded a Dragon-forged sword to take her life.”

Leto petted the tears away, then kissed the corner of her lips. “So when they let some Indranan witch dredge your brain, they hid more than just your gift.”

Nynn managed to nod, although her neck was stiff and cramping. “They took most memories of my mother. I became Tigony in name only. Blending in with the humans became a better option. I emigrated to the States. Studied art. Fell in love with Caleb. Became a teacher.”

A sob shook her shoulders, then overcame what remained of her control.

Leto pulled her into the hollow of his curved shoulders. He held her, even rocked her gently. The words he said in their ancient, Dragon-given tongue were a comfort, even if her tears drowned out some of the words. She’d lost so many versions of her life, then regained them in pieces only to have them taken again. All of those gifts and thefts had led her to the moment when a Cage warrior held her as if he could take her grief into his own warm skin—the Cage warrior who’d taught her how to forge a life of her own.

The sound of metal scraping into a lock shocked Nynn back to herself. Leto had jumped clear of the bed and grabbed his shorts before she blinked. He threw clothes at her and grabbed a shield and curved sword off his wall. Perhaps he’d been awarded them as prizes after some victory or another, but he held them now like a man ready to defend his home.

Maybe he was, because the lock began to turn.

If anything proved how weak he was in the scheme of the Asters’ cartel, Leto knew it the moment his privacy was invaded by three armed guards. The shield and sword he hefted were no better than toys when the intruders leveled cattle prods and rifles loaded with napalm bullets. Without his gift, Leto was a medieval knight against an army from the future.

“Nynn of Tigony,” said one of the helmeted men. “You’re coming with us.”

“Where—?”

The man leveled his prod at her as she yanked her tank top into place. “No talking.”

Another of the guards gestured to the armaments Leto had snatched off the wall. “Put those down.”

All this time, Leto had believed he was worth more. Now he was staring at faceless human opponents who aimed rifles at his bare chest. Faceless humans had come to take Nynn away.

Without his collar, his decision would’ve been simple. Take them out. Three guards laid out on the ground. With it, however, he needed to gauge the outcome. He couldn’t be sure that he’d incapacitate the guards before one of them hurt the woman he loved.

The woman I love.

Dragon damn, that realization had felt so right when holding her close. It had become a weakness. He would never recover from the pain of losing her.

That won’t happen.

Leto dropped and did a somersault. He thrust his shield between Nynn and the guard holding the prod. Electricity sparked off bronze and jolted up his arm. He swung the sword low and took the guard out at the knees. The crunch of breaking bones was muffled by plastic-bonded armor. Behind his helmet, the guard’s scream was muffled, too.

Angered beyond words, Leto used the language of violence he’d spoken since he was a child. He thrust the shield into Nynn’s hands and snatched up the fallen prod. Swirling it like Weil did with her lance, he jammed it into the second guard’s stomach. A buzzing, gurgling sound was followed by the stench of singed plastic.

Two napalm bullets fired. That premonition feeling he experienced on occasion in the Cages showed him where to escape the trajectory of the bullets. He used sword and prod in a one-two attack against the final guard. Another bullet fired into the ceiling. Its lasting, unnatural green glowed until chunks of concrete rained down.