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Westvane didn’t answer. He waited instead for her real reaction, for the consequences of leaving the captain of her guard broken at her feet.

At his silence, she shook her head, like a mother might when faced with a recalcitrant child. Stepping closer to the edge of the landing, she gazed down at her injured soldier. The movement caused her scent to drift. His predatory nature took over, hearing and smelling everything, noticing even more — the whisper of her wing-tips against stone, the perfume she wore made from morning dew and lilac petals… the distance between his hands and her throat.

With an ease that spoke of decades of practice, he stilled his killing instinct.

The queen rolled her eyes, then changed tact, focusing on the warrior lying broken at the base of her stairs. Lyonesse waved her hand. Magic pinwheeled down the treads, sparking over stone. The red-pink glow swirled around Anckar, mending muscle, reknitting bone, breathing oxygen into lungs gone without for too many minutes. The male twitched, gasping in pain before managing to take a full breath.

Without taking her gaze from him, she spoke to her captain, “Be gone, Anckar… and take the rest of the guard with you.”

“As you wish, Majesty,” Anckar said, gaining his feet, hugging his ribcage.

The whisper of footfalls against hard-packed earth rose behind Westvane. Iron hinges creaked. A heavy wooden door opened, then closed as the Queen’s Guard left him alone in the courtyard with the merciless witch who ruled their realm.

Keeping his stance relaxed, he raised a brow. “You called?”

Painted blood red, her lips curved. “And like an ever-faithful hound, you came.”

The muscles along his spine tightened as instinct urged him to attack. He quieted the impulse and locked down his body. He refused to give her the upper hand. The second he responded to her verbal jabs was the instant he lost control of the situation. He would have time and more to put her in her place.

Now, however, wasn’t the hill he planned to die on.

Crossing his arms over his chest, Westvane tipped his chin. “What do you want, Lyonesse?”

The use of her given name got her attention. Her dark eyes flashed in warning. No one called her by name. No one, but his father… and now, him.

“I’m having trouble remembering why I let you live, Slayer,” she said, tone sharp enough to cut most males. But then, he wasn’tmost. “Your insolence knows no bounds.”

“You know why,” he said, doing some goading of his own. “Now again, what you do want?”

Gaze aglow with fury, she unfolded her wings and took flight. Her feet touched down at the bottom of the staircase, less than six feet away. Her nostril flared. She recoiled as she came close to him, walking a wider path around him. “You wear the stink of your mother upon your skin.”

Again. Like always. It always came back to this — a slur against his ancestral line.

Accustomed to it, Westvane didn’t react. What Lyonesse thought of him didn’t matter. He knew who his mother had been, what she’d stood for — on the right side of all things good. Nothing the queen said would change that… or take away the blood-bond, a gift from his mother for doing nothing other than being born of her womb.

His mother had loved him. Even more than she’d loved his father.

An incredible claim, given his parent’s affinity for one another.

Class hadn’t mattered to his parents. His sire and mother had fallen in love anyway, ignoring the laws written and enforced to keep them apart. He knew the story. Had listened to it over and over in his mother’s retelling. By the time the queen discovered his parents’ deception, it had been too late. He’d been nestled inside his mother’s womb. Already illegal, considered an abomination in the eyes of his countrymen before ever being born.

His parents had fought long.

They’d fought hard.

The rebellion lead by his father dividing an already divided world.

In the end, his parents died for their beliefs, fighting to abolish the law separatingCropperfromAssenta, andAssentafromElecti, legislation that expressly forbade a union between classes. Magic wielders (Electi) stayed with Electi, Assenta with Assenta, and the low-class Croppers with those born as serfs. No exceptions. No mercy. Examples made of all who defied the royal edict. Which meant…

Despite the year-long battle, the law remained the same. And he continued to be reviled and ostracized for something he couldn’t change — the mixed blood in his veins.

Lyonesse completed her circuit around him.

Westvane smoothed his expression, giving none of his thoughts away. The history that made him must remain in the past. Nothing mattered now but the present, his ability to not only avenge his parents, but do what they had been unable to — right the wrong and change the law through any means necessary.

“Forever a beast, never any manners.” Distain in her expression, her attention left his physique as she moved away from him to mount the first step.

“And yet, you keep calling on me.”