He watched the woman as she continued toward him. He was deep in the shadows and utterly still so that there was no chance of drawing her gaze. She had just changed his entire plan. His entire existence. As she stepped out of the cornfield and the light bathed her face, he could see her flawless skin, the curve of her cheek and high cheekbones.

She looked far too young for a man like him. It had nothing to do with age and everything to do with who and what he was. Still. His palm itched, and that sealed her fate. He wasn’t about to throw away the only thing in the world he could truly call his own. He didn’t have much to offer her. He was hard and callous and damned cynical when it came to the world around him. He could be ruthless and merciless as well—and he would be, he knew, if anyone tried to stand between this young woman and him.

He didn’t even care in that moment, with the dawn breaking, spilling a fire of red into all that glorious hair, that he didn’t deserve her. Or that he didn’t even know her or she him . . . He didn’t care that he was far older and as lethal as hell and had no business with a woman like her, or that his body was in pieces and he looked like a rag doll sewn together. None of it mattered to him.

She belonged to him, this woman. She was created for him. She was the one woman he could bind to him. Gavriil pressed his thumb into the center of his palm. He was broken and there was no fixing him. He was a killer and there was no taking that back either. He didn’t get a do-over—and that emotional insight, that pain, was a burden far worse than the physical one he bore.

She was the youngest woman on the farm where his brothers lived. Lexi, they called her. She turned her head abruptly toward the back of the property and just as suddenly switched directions.

The moment he’d stepped onto the property, the large farm with his brothers and the six women living on it, he’d felt the ripples of power and knew the farm was protected, not only by his brothers, who were dangerous, but by elements. Earth. Air. Water. Fire. He even felt Spirit.

Had he been less powerful in his own right, without his own gifts, he would have been far more cautious about following her through the thick foliage along a broken path. Nothing could deter him from his chosen course. He was stalking his prey, moving like the ghost he was through the heavy foliage as she made her way toward some secret destination.