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Quinn Fortina,

Marshal General of Horvath

I had the beautiful boy arrested because I couldn’t bear to part with him.

No more reason than that, but I couldn’t let him know it just yet.

I had to keep up this pretense that it was because he’d been caught in an illegal action regarding a vetami egg and then he’d pulled a disruptor on me, even though now that things had calmed down, and I’d had a chance to think, I knew the truth.

Travon had misrepresented his ownership of the egg, and the boy or, more likely, his family had purchased it. As for the disruptor, I knew it had discharged accidentally. I’d seen the look of utter shock on his pretty face.

I’d easily disarmed him. He’d been waving it around like a child would do, and it had been little threat to me.

But I would use that as an excuse if I had to.

I had to have some good reason for keeping him.

And I couldn’t tell him the real reason that he wasn’t going back home. Not now at least. Probably not ever.

I could hardly stand to admit it to myself.

The Lycans had notified us days earlier that they had received word that a large crate containing a vetami egg was going to be transferred on their docks and we had arrived the day before to meet the thieves when they arrived.

It was a large, ready-to-hatch egg, according to their sources and it supposedly “belonged” to King Travon of Thalios.

He had sold the egg to a third party, they said, and that person or his agent was coming to pick it up.

On Horvath, we had known about Travon of Thalios and his vetamis for years.

In fact, he was my cousin, the son of my late father’s youngest brother, though I’d never actually met either of them.

I’d never had any desire to meet them. His father and my uncle, a man named Illios, had been entirely disreputable.

He had married the queen of Thalios long ago in an arranged marriage.

The queen had tragically died of “food poisoning” not long after their son Travon was born, and Illios had then installed himself as Regent for the infant.

Illios proved to be a harsh ruler, and there was a short-lived coup attempt later on by what was left of the old Thalian army after he got through with it.

Illios had prevailed against it, however, creating his own army of mercenaries and he kept his office.

When he had first gone to Thalios, Illios had taken six vetami with him without permission from Horvath.

From what we knew, he had, over the years, managed to build his own stock of vetami, and they numbered around twenty-five or thirty beasts from what our spies had been able to report.

It didn’t seem like much, but Vetami eggs took years to hatch, and vetami weren’t prolific beasts by any means anyway.

It was one reason they’d landed on the endangered species list.

Worst of all, he had taken all of the very rare Golden vetami left on Horvath. Goldens had always been scarce, and therefore more valuable. It seemed as if he’d taken every one capable of breeding with him.

Travon hadn’t assumed the role of king, however, until after the death of Illios, about ten years ago.

The Parliament of Horvath had declined to make an issue about the vetami Illios had stolen from us.

But they did agree to keep a close eye out for any trafficking of the eggs or the young vetami themselves, and Travon had been sternly warned against trying to sell or breed them.

The very fact that there was an egg at all was illegal, as he had been told not to breed any of them without permission.

We offered again and again to purchase the eggs from him, but he continued to refuse.

King Davos himself had agreed to step in if it became necessary, and it seemed, with this latest stunt, that it was.

Travon was flirting with rebellion too, and we’d heard the increasing rumors of King Davos’s patience wearing thin.

Travon’s presence here on Lycanus 3 delivering “his” egg was a direct violation of the law, and I intended to report him right away and see if I couldn’t hurry the process along.

If I had my way, I would have arrested him today for the violation, but once he’d made it back to his ship.

I didn’t want to involve the Lycans in his removal and arrest. Travon was a thief, plain and simple, and a troublemaker.

I wondered what it was that he’d meant to accomplish by selling the Moravian king this egg.

He was the kind of man who would always have some nefarious scheme in mind.

Having seen the beautiful prince, I now had a good idea of what that might be.

Travon was probably hoping to marry the young man and gain favor and power as Davos’s grandson-in-law.

We had petitioned for rights over all the vetami years ago, just after the war, when so many eggs and young hatchlings were being stolen by Axis and Alliance soldiers. They were not only stealing our heritage but a valuable asset of our moon, and thankfully, King Davos had agreed.

All of this was racing through my mind and jealousy swept over me to think of Travon even touching the boy.

Was this brash, gorgeous young man guilty of anything except bad judgment?

I didn’t think he was. He’s said something about his father sending him to pick up the egg, so I was holding out hope for the fact that he’d been caught up in something that wasn’t his fault. I fully intended to find out for sure.

But despite the outcome, his fate was already sealed.

I would never let him go. I’d try to negotiate a marriage contract, but if that failed for some reason, I’d take him and go to the Narvathian Mountains, so wild and so remote that we’d never be found.

Tracking equipment didn’t work up there because of the magnetic fields that covered the area, and it was well known throughout the galaxy as a place a man could hide out indefinitely.

Hopefully, it would never come to that extreme. I was not only the Marshal General of Horvath, and related by marriage to the queen, but my grandfather had been a former king of Horvath, so I was a royal in my own right. I didn’t think the boy’s family would turn down my marriage offer.

I fell down in my chair, exhausted by the morning’s excitement, and wondering what the hell I was going to do now.

I didn’t want a mate and had no business having one—especially a young man like this one, who was so loud, so belligerent, and so rather extraordinarily beautiful that having a mate like him would demand far too much of my time and attention.

It wasn’t anything I wanted or needed. But it looked as if I were trapped by this damn mating bond.

That morning in the warehouse, the scent of him had hit me from across the room.

It was sweet and compelling—and so intense that it made my knees a little weak.

But I tried to ignore it at first. I began to breathe through my mouth, because I had an awful feeling that I knew what this was, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

Not that there was ever a good time for the fucking mate bond, but I was hoping against hope that I was mistaken and one of the men in this place simply smelled incredibly good.

Of course, I knew the truth, but at the time, I was in deep denial.

The moment I’d seen him, however, I felt that pain in my stomach that people said came along with the bond.

It infuriated me, and as I got up closer and more personal to him, that ridiculously sweet scent continued to hit me hard.

He began shouting at me at one point and my brain was screaming “mate” at me, but I was determined to ignore it and keep denying it.

And I did pretty well, considering. I didn’t like the others touching him, but I was all right until he pulled that damn disruptor, and I had to disarm him.

The moment I put my hands on him, I was lost.

I didn’t have to treat him the way I did, but by that time I’d seriously lost all reason anyway.

Thank the gods he hadn’t tried to run from me.

I came to my senses fairly quickly and got him up to his feet, wrapping my cape around him to hide his nearly naked body from prying eyes.

I was shaking as I realized that some small part of me was thinking of mating him right then and there.

Like a Lycan wolf, determined to have its way.

I didn’t strictly consider myself to be a Lycan—no Horvathian ever did.

The truth, of course, was that we more or less were , though we didn’t like to admit it.

Horvath was a moon of Lycanus 3, and to be sure, we had common ancestors with the residents of the three planets.

Physically, we resembled their inhabitants, except for our fair hair, but we proudly considered ourselves to be just Horvathian citizens and not Lycans.

There were significant differences between us in our history and our biology as well.

We didn’t shift into Lycan wolves, as they did for one thing, and we never had.

That was one, big, definite evolutionary split in our favor.

It was said that it was the main reason our ancestors had migrated to this moon.

But somewhere down the line, many of us had inherited that stupid mating bond they had, and it was nothing that any of us wanted. It completely disrupted and even ruined lives, like I felt it was about to ruin mine.