Movement in her peripheral vision made her snap her head around just in time to see a large shadow move around the back of the car. It was too dark to see his features in the faint light of the stars, but she didn’t need a visual to know who it was.

“Hello, sweetheart.”

“Marathin.” She whispered the name of the man who’d first captured her, hoping against all hope that she was mistaken—that the demon who’d promised to bend her to his will wasn’t here, about to take her away and break her. “No.”

“Now, now, don’t say it like that, my sweet. You’ll hurt my feelings.” There was a distinct smirk in his voice—the sound of a man who knew he’d won. “After everything I’ve done to ensure we could meet without the interference of that brute who thought he could claim you after you’d given yourself to me.”

Oh, god. Sick realization nestled in the pit of her stomach. “You are behind this? You captured Kain?”

“Oh, no—only another Lord could do such a thing. But I may have been the one to suggest to the Prince that he should take care of your unworthy mate. No royal can ignore a direct threat to their power, and His Highness was more than willing to listen to my suggestion of how to get rid of the Lord who challenged and beat him.

“You see, once Kain—” He spat the name as if the very taste of it tongue disgusted him. “—got out of his mating high for long enough, he may have decided to lay claim to Naharan’s position. It’s his right, after all, since he defeated a royal in an equal fight. So as you can imagine, Naharan didn’t need much persuasion. I mainly provided the contacts.”

Contacts? Those females…

“What’s going to happen to him?” Despite her fear of the dark creature slithering around the car, she needed to know her mate’s fate. Somehow, she would make it through this nightmare and she would find him again. As long as he was alive, this monster couldn’t break her.

“Oh, the queen was most receptive when I approached her. You see, while Naharan worried he couldn’t take your mate on by himself, he couldn’t very well involve other Lords in this. Killing one of their own without provocation? It is treason, even for a Prince of Demons.

“So I came up with a simple solution: The females are struggling because our Lords are so much stronger than them—the males they can kidnap and breed with do not produce sufficiently powerful daughters. But if we were to offer them a Lord and a Stone of Power? Let’s just say that it’s very beneficial to me that the Queen of Demons owes me big.”