She stiffened as his unexpected question jerked her back to the days when Avin had felt threatened by her height and intelligence. Jealous of the job she had that she loved and the one he did that he hated. Back to when she hadn’t been a trained assassin, and had lived her life in stark terror of her boyfriend’s bipolar mood swings. “Excuse me?”

“Your boyfriend. It’s why you killed him.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact.

Sumi wanted to deny it, but how could she? He spoke the truth. And while she’d learned how easy it was to physically kill a man, even one who was a lot larger and stronger than her, it was never easy to live with the guilt that forever remained afterward. “Yes.”

Hauk saw the horror and shame in her hazel green eyes before she glanced away again. It was a mannerism so similar to one Omira had once used that it sent a chill over him.

Nor did he miss the way her hands trembled as she noticed how much room he took up on the ground beside her.

“It’s why my size unsettles you.”

She nodded as more awful memories surged. “You’ve no idea what it’s like to be trapped and helpless. To be held down with no way to fight back, no matter how hard you try.”

“That’s not true. You’ve seen the scars on my back. I know exactly how it feels to have my life in the hands of someone else, and to hate it with every part of my being.”

She scowled at his angry tone. “What happened?”

Hauk ground his teeth. Her question knotted his gut and took him straight back to that day he would rather forget. A day that had forever changed his life, in more ways than one, and set him on a path he’d never foreseen. While it’d destroyed his destiny and cost him the respect of his parents, it’d compensated him with a battle brother he was grateful for every day of this existence.

Sipping his water, he narrowed his gaze as visions from the past haunted him. He’d been in a training pod at the academy with what he’d stupidly assumed were two Andarion friends. Unfortunately, all of them had been schooled with humans long enough that some of humanity’s finer traits had infected them. When Nykyrian had been sent to their academy, the full-blooded Andarions had declared it open season on the hybrid.

Something that was not in their culture. Fighting an equal or answering a challenge was Andarion. Picking on the weak was human. But Prince Jullien had insisted that they attack the hybrid, and drive him from their school so that they wouldn’t have to look at him.