The touch of his hand was terrible, terrible. It burned through her free will, leaving her hanging suspended in her skin, surrounded by a maelstrom of darkness. The nightmares that haunted the storms, the nightmares that filled his eyes, were suddenly boiling under her own skin. They were part of her.

“Are you able to lie to me, Mehr?”

“No, Maha,” she said. Her voice like winter. “Not at all. Not anymore.”

“You’re bound to me,” he said.

“I am.” There was no question in his voice, but she answered regardless.

For a man who had recently slit a woman’s throat, he’d looked remarkably relaxed even when Mehr had first entered the room. Now he looked positively delighted.

“I should have realized why you so enraged me,” he murmured. “I didn’t quite have you. But the bond by marriage is a new creation, a thing of necessity, and I thought perhaps it simply felt strange to me because of its rarity. But now—ah, yes.” The satisfaction in his voice made her want to recoil. “I have you now.”

He didn’t let her go. Her skin hummed where his hand touched her.

“Everything will be so much better now,” he told her in a voice as tender as bloodied meat. He gave her bruised face a long, leisurely look. “You will no longer be flawed, my dear, by your weak blood and your weaker heart. Your blood and your heart are mine now—and I will shape them into a tool worthy of the great honor of service to my Empire.” He stroked a hand along her cheekbone. “You will be worthy of my love, and glad of it.”

She thought of how he had looked after the storm, with his riven skin and eyes shattered from within. Now, stroking her face with terrible tenderness, he looked more like the man who had greeted her when she had first arrived at the temple. His eyes and his skin glowed with inner light. The fractures in his eyes shone like pointed stars.

He could afford to be tender now, cruel, sadistic animal that he was. Now that he had her—truly had her—he did not have to hurt her. His presence alone was pain enough. His touch was agony. Even his voice clawed her ears. How had Amun survived this horror since childhood? Mehr couldn’t fathom it.

“Speak to me,” the Maha prompted. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“That my pain brings you joy,” she said promptly. She had no control. None. The words poured out of her. “That you are far older than any mortal man has the right to be. That you have single-handedly crushed my mother’s people to dust for the sake of the Empire, for a throne you no longer sit on and I can’t—I don’t know what you are, but you are monstrous—”

He gripped her hard, holding her jaw painfully shut.