But Jex Zanlan was a man drawn to the unattainable and piqued by the extraordinary. He began to include her in conversations when he visited the women of his family; he asked her questions until she responded. And then his face went blank in astonishment when she fired off one of her father’s radical theories or offered him her own analysis of some political event that had transpired on Gold Mountain. She caught his attention. And when Jex Zanlan focused his attention on a person or an idea, everything else faded away.

They became lovers the summer she was twenty-one. She had resisted that long because she knew, it was so obvious, that once she surrendered to the inferno of her infatuation for Jex Zanlan, she would be consumed. She would melt into a blue puddle of ecstasy and desire. And it was also obvious—impossible to avoid knowing—that they were meant for lives with anyone but each other. He was the gulden heir and fated to take some carefully chosen pureblood as his wife. She was a strange, displaced foreign woman, born to a hostile race, with no real position in his society and only a tenuous one in her own. They could be lovers, but not for long. Whatever they meant to each other now would one day be erased by the inexorable demands of their conflicting worlds.

Perhaps it was that which made Kit cling to Jex all the more tightly as the years progressed and their ideologies began to force them apart as surely as their heritage did. She had strongly disapproved of his trips to the city and his bitter protests staged in the crowded streets. She had been profoundly shocked when she learned of the bomb set at the medical building, an exploit he passionately defended. She deplored his action—but she understood his motive—and whatever he did, she could not unlove him. He was Jex. Half the cells in her body seemed inscribed with his name. The gravitational pull that drew her to his side seemed stronger than the one that anchored her to the world.

And she had not seen him in weeks and weeks. And she was on her way to see him now.