“No, Claire.” The tortured look in his eyes was nothing to the sorrow she felt on his end of their link. “I watched you die.” Damaged as he was, he’d been able to do nothing but watch. He’d watched Jules run toward them, watched his second-in-command administer CPR, the man bleeding from a wound to the torso. He’d laid there as Jules pulled tubing from the med kit hanging from his shoulder and hastily slapped together a direct blood transfusion, the Beta pumping her heart with his fist until he’d passed out.

When the resistance finally found the opportunity to storm into the crumbling Citadel, Claire wasn’t breathing, Jules lay pale and unresponsive, and Shepherd… he had to watch as the Thólosen scum dragged his mate away.

If the building had not begun to crumble, they would have finished him. But the ground fiercely rocked, fissures cracking through the marble floors, and they left him there for dead to save themselves.

One or two had even laughed as Shepherd lifted his hand and tried to reach for Claire.

In that moment, he prayed her soul had fled to the Goddess, watching her flop over the shoulder of a man who had no right to touch her.

His vision blurred, death closing in.

“Debris smashed into my roof, you fucking son of a bitch. Everything I’d prepared was ruined!”

Bleary eyed, Shepherd had dared to turn his head, and saw his unlikely savior. Gods he hated her. He hated more that he passed out the instant she tried to move him.

The next time he woke, he lay wrapped in bandages, trapped on the last, stuttering transport ship out of Thólos. And Claire, she was parted from him, in a fortress on a ventilator.

All reports claimed she was too damaged, that she would not survive—just as his child had not survived. He had raged before the ragged remnants of his men, broken in that cargo hold. Lost in grief, three of them he had condemned to death for abandoning her and saving him. But he could not carry out his intended punishment. Shepherd had been too wounded to move.

Once alone, he’d wept like a child.

But day by day he could feel that Claire hadn’t died, she was too stubborn by half—even if the people wanted her blood. While lying savaged in the Premier’s Sector, Thólos, her Thólos, had made her into a villain. The very people she’d fought for spat her name as a curse.

Shepherd wanted to hate them, but he could find no room. His hate for Svana was too consuming.

That lying cunt’s quick death at Jules’ hands had been a mercy she did not deserve.

Reason returned when Shepherd had learned Claire took her first unassisted breath.

And now he had her back in his arms.