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For Killen and his growing quest to claim his legacy, a journey that she worried would be fraught with uncertainty, danger, and perhaps even extreme violence.

It was a dark path, yet he insisted he had to traverse it.

Although reluctant to take the throne, her son was convinced the hawkstone had the answers his people needed. All this without meeting any of them, not even a single soul.

She shivered as memories of the brutality of her people and, most of all, her father flooded her mind.

His fury had scorched planets, and his marauding instincts had pulverized nations. He was the Kíríga of Katáne, the All-Powerful King. Who only listened to thekirorero, the dreams of purpose, power, and prophecy, as told to him by thekurogiwitchmen and curse placers.

Killen had none of these memories or these horrors to deter him.

She rose from her bed and gazed out of the open spaces that let in the filtered light bouncing off the chromed surfaces of Devansi’s plains.

Élisa paced her room and used her lodestone, the remnants of her time wearing the hawkstone, to shut off the past.

What remained was a raw need for comfort and intimacy, and increasingly, yet confoundingly, she’d begun to desire it from her guest.

Since encountering the weathered bounty hunter, her body had played tricks on her. Her heart thumped, her pulse skittered, and her temperature rose every time he looked her way.

No man in decades had ever had such an effect on her.

He was not even her type.

She gave a frustrated moan, falling back in her bed as craving swamped her.

Against all logic, Ribau reminded her of her first love, her only love.

Not so much his appearance but how he moved, his smile, his essence.

It had all brought back echoes of her past.

Of her silver-eyed Riv.

The only man who made her feel like she was flying just by looking at her.

The Galician gazed at her in a similar way, and it was driving her mad.

The way he sized her body up and down.

How his eyes heated, how he licked his lower lip.

His hands moved with grace, which made her imagine what they’d feel like stroking her just as Riv had used them in the past to leave her weak between the sheets before he rocked her to sleep.

She shut her eyes tight, flooded with memories she’d tried to suppress for many years.

Of Riv, of his sensual energy, the way he’d made her feel when he was holding her, when he was spooning her.

How seductive he’d always appeared with his silver hair sheeting down over her when he touched her, rocked her between her thighs, and made love to her in what was then the most exquisite sensation.

His face melded into Ribau’s in her mind’s eye, and she jolted.

You freak!she chided herself, her face heating as a rush of wantonness hit.

She rushed onto the terrace outside her chamber, seeking relief in the night air, desperate for the breeze to cool off her heated flow.

Sweat dripped down her back, and she growled, frustrated by how a stranger with a grizzled face and skin scarred by rough living was having this effect on her.

Perhaps if she gave him some or they had a night for fun, it’d rid her of these unbidden thoughts of a man she’d left so long ago.