“So that’s what you look like.” She’d pitched her voice lower, going for husky sexiness. “Not bad.”

No reaction.

“A man like you stuck in a place like this. What a waste.”

Sean said nothing.

“Wilmos is missing,” she said.

Wilmos was a first-strain werewolf, a veteran, one of the oldest survivors of Auul. The werewolfism kept him spry, but he was an adult when Sean’s parents were born, and he was instrumental in creating their alpha strain. After Auul was destroyed, Wilmos made his name as a mercenary. Now he ran a weapons shop at Baha-char and served as a go-between for mercenaries and the people who needed them.

Wilmos thought Sean walked on water. We’d met by chance, and when Sean decided he wanted to see the universe for himself, Wilmos showed him the ropes. He was the one who’d gotten Sean into that Nexus mess, and I would never forgive him for that. Ever.

Wilmos was also responsible for our current enthusiastic suitor problem. During the war on Nexus, Sean had assumed the identity of Turan Adin, an unkillable general who led the Merchant forces of Clan Nuan. In reality, Turan Adins dropped like flies, but their armor covered them completely, hiding their faces, so when one of them died, the Merchants simply hired a new one, put the armor on them, and sent them back into the slaughter. Some only lasted a few days, others a few weeks. Sean was the last Turan Adin. He had survived for 18 months.

When that war finally ended, Sean gave the armor back to the Merchants and stayed with me because he loved me. Nobody was supposed to find out that he used to be Turan Adin. However, Wilmos couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He was bursting at the seams with pride and little by little he let that cat out of the bag, one secret conversation at a time. The werewolves knew.

The werewolf woman narrowed her eyes at Sean. “Word is, Wilmos asked you for help and you turned him down because you were too busy playing house with a human girl. People say you’re a coward. That you’ve gone soft. The wolf who subdued otrokars and vampire knights, reduced to a mere shadow of himself. So, I came to see for myself what happened to the hero of Nexus. You used to be somebody. What’s that like? To just give up and turn your back on a friend?”