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I groan as I feel the healthy kick of my unborn son. I am in the hospital gown I haven’t changed in days, and it is stained from the milk that drips from my huge, swollen breasts, grown three times their size since Obsidian impregnated me. I don’t hide from my discomfort, because it is nothing compared to the agony my love is in constantly. I soothed him, for those precious moments that felt like a lifetime ago, but now every time the black, hateful ring is pulled from my finger and I am forced to betray him, again and again, I feel the magma in his veins, the pure torture of his existence.

His physical pain is nothing compared to his grief and hatred. I tell him not to apologize, I tell him that I’m sorry, but that is his deepest torment.

He is the God of War, the leader of the Fanatics, death incarnate, and he was not strong enough to protect his Fated Mate.

One of the Aurelian doctors, an older man in perhaps his late eight-hundreds, is the only one who speaks to me like a human and not a ticking time bomb. I begged him to show me the scans, terrified there was something wrong with my child as the months passed after my due date.

He did—and said that my son was exceptionally healthy. “It is the Bond, Fay,” he said, when we were alone, his colleagues gone. “The Bond exists to bear healthy children. That is why your body has changed, your bones stronger, your breasts larger. And the Bond has slowed the development of your son, because it feels you are not safe. But even the Bond cannot stop biology. Your son will be born soon,” he told me, a week ago, and I was grateful for his humanity even as the hope and horror mixed in my mind.

That most painful hope, because I will bear my firstborn son deep underground, trapped in a compound under the palace on Colossus.

I run my hand over my finger, the chill of the blue-black ring constant against my skin. I broke my finger trying to pull that ring off, but it remained trapped around me. Only the cold, alien Interrogators can pull it off… and Queen Jasmine and her royal triad.

The door to my cell opens. Fear grips me.

Queen Jasmine. Alone, without her triad of Emperors. She stands barely taller than me. She doesn’t look special at a first glance, just another human woman in her late twenties, wearing a blue dress, without ornamentation or her crown on her head,but when I look into her eyes, I see the dull, empty gaze of a shark.

Cold terror. She rarely comes. Only a few times in the over a year I have been captive, but sometimes, when I look at my reflection in the double mirrors, a chill passes through me, and Iknowshe is on the other side, watching me, for hours on end.

At her belt is the hilt of a dirk, with an evil, gleaming Orb that seems to watch me.

The door closes behind her, and without speaking, she points to my hand. I raise it, placing it on the armrest of the chair, and her fingers do not touch me, carefully unclasping the ring without letting our skin graze against each other, as if I am a leper.

She pulls it off, and he grows in my mind.

Obsidian.

The only man I ever loved, the man I lose more every day, the parts of him I love drowned by his rage, his grief, his torment. His mind washes over me like a black storm, flowing through me, lit up by constant lightning strikes of agony. His battle-brothers are merged with his mind, dormant in his veins.

But his mind… it’s different. More full, more alien than ever before. Queen Jasmine slams the ring back on my finger, severing the link, and her eyes narrow.

“He… he’s different,” I gasp out. I stopped fighting them. At first, I tried to resist telling them his locations, his thoughts. They put me in a room with Interrogators for hours, days, breaking me down. They never touched me. Their words were hypnotic, dark, evil promises, telling me that I would cooperate, until I believed it, until all my resistance melted away.

“State it clearly. How is he different.”

“His mind… it’s full of a thousand… pinpricks. He sees more. He sees everything.”

With the precision of a surgeon, she draws the hilt of her dirk, and the blade extends outwards with her thoughts. A thin, razor-sharp black edge, coated by blue-black Orb energy. I press back against the chair, trying to pull myself away from her, my gaze focused on that deadly length.

She places the blade above my shoulder. It will take nothing more than a flick of her wrist. The blade can shear through bone and flesh like paper. “Tell him that if he does not surrender, I will cut your arms off. One by one.”

The searing blade would cauterize my wound. Tears drip down my cheeks. She has never threatened me before, not physically, not like this. She has never had to. I’ve been kept by her to keep track of Obsidian.

She pulls the ring off my finger, and Obsidian feels my horror, my pain, my new, more urgent terror.

His focus is on me, and only me, his vast, alien consciousness rushing through my mind.

“Obsidian. She’s threatening me. She’s serious. She’s going to cut my arms off.”I had grown used to the dull, constant fear, but now adrenaline courses through me.

I had been expecting pure rage and anger to answer me. Obsidian does not even feel like a man. He feels like a sphere of black blood, dripping through my mind, drowning me in his agony and hate.

My mouth opens. His words flow in my mind so powerfully that I speak them as he thinks them to me, my voice darker, deeper, strange and alien on my lips.

“I cannot tell her that I will spare her sons. I will eradicate every trace of her lineage. I can give them only the mercy of a swift death. But if she touches a hair on your head, they will be tortured. I will put her sons in the Rift. I will keep them alive, where a thousand years passes in a second, and they will be in agony for eternity.”

Queen Jasmine’s eyes widen. She slams the ring back on my finger, but this time, her hand shakes, and her fingers graze against my skin. She pulls her hand back like it is burnt and deactivates the blade, shoving it in the belt of her dress.

Her eyes are tight, tiny wrinkles marring the smoothness of her too youthful skin, and I see something I’ve never seen before in her.