“I’ve been rejected my entire life, Bane. I’ve been found lacking in every way. I’ve had zero advantages. No money or special education. What I have had? So many absences from high school I nearly flunked out. Constant sickness and pain. Medical bills I’ll never be able to pay off. Months spent in bed, dreaming of being someone, anyone else. Foster families who starved me, called me terrible names, or beat me. So yeah. Physically, your Aveline can take me down, no doubt about it. Yay for her. She can do the same thing as a gust of wind. But mentally? Emotionally? I’m unmatched.” The more she spoke, the higher her tone and the louder her volume.

Why were some people born into blessing and others born into curse?

Bane’s temper detonated, his breathing faster, his color brighter. “Who beat you?”

Why? So he could go and kill them? “Doesn’t matter.”

He gripped her forearms and shook her. “Tell me.”

A little smug—okay, a lot smug—she grinned up at him. “Why don’t you make me? Oh, that’s right. Because you can’t. In this, you are weak, my will stronger than yours.”

He narrowed his eyes, huffing and puffing like a big, bad wolf. “You’re right. In this, I’m the weaker of us. But I understand the future, you do not. Do you want to know the first thing queens do after their coronation? Kill their loved ones to ensure no one can be used against them. I was spared because I was too valuable as a warrior and trainer. Years later, Aveline ordered me to stand down while she killed the woman I loved right in front of me.”

His confession tore her to shreds, his grief like salt in her wounds. The pain he must carry inside him...more than any one person could bear. And oh, the loss he’d suffered. A loss she knew well.

Would she one day want to kill Vale?

No. No way.

As she and Bane stared at each other, something wonderful...terrible...happened. Defenses melted away, desire stirring inside her, hot and liquid, past pains fading away. Where they touched, she burned and ached.

“Bane,” she rasped.

“Nola.” He loosened his grip and traced his hands up and down her arms. Every upward glide gentled, and yet the aches intensified. With every downward glide, he lost a layer of calm. Now, only savage hunger remained.

“You hate me,” she said, his incredible heat seeping through her clothing. “For what you believe I’ll become.”

“I do.”

“But you...you want me, too?”

“I do,” he repeated and this time, he sounded drugged. Up, down. Up, down. “I want it to stop. Why won’t it stop?” Agonizingly slow, he trailed his fingers along her collar, then down, down to her breasts.