He was seeing her sleepy-sexy eyes when he’d brought her to her first peak on the airplane. Making love to her in a sparkling pool beneath an endless blue sky in his beloved Highlands. Spilling inside her, becoming part of her. Watching, as she perched on a chair and practiced saying that she loved him to a shield, then turning to shout it at him. Saying it again, after he’d told her his darkest secret. Remaining steadfastly at his side.

And in that strange quiet moment, he realized that had he not broken his oath, had he not gone through the stones to save Drustan, he would never have met Chloe. Ironic, he mused, that his fate had required his own fall to lead him to the woman who’d been his salvation in so many ways. Had he been given the choice, to go back in time and choose not to break his oath and never meet Chloe Zanders, he would have resolutely walked into the stones and done it all over again, with full awareness that it would lead to this moment.

Simply to have the joy of loving Chloe for what time he’d had.

From that quiet place, his mind glided swiftly to another: to the bitterly cold night he’d danced upon his ice-slicked terrace wall. He’d done it because he’d always known that he could end it all by dying. Simple solution, really. No vessel—no resurrection. Mate, endgame, and match.

A part of him had been so weary of fighting.

But he’d resolved that eve to continue fighting, and relegated thoughts of suicide to his arsenal of the last resort, loathing the notion of it.

Then he’d met Chloe, who’d given him a thousand reasons to live.

He smiled bitterly. He couldn’t call forth the magic necessary to free her and see her safe without also releasing the Draghar, which put him in an impossible position.

He would never usher in that “epoch of darkness more brutal than mankind has ever known,” of which the Prophecy foretold. There was no telling how many millions might die. What if those words he’d taunted Simon with truly were what the thirteen planned to do? What if they did intend to go back in time? Mayhap fight the war all over again? Mayhap win this time?

It would utterly change four thousand years of mankind’s history. Man might no longer even exist in present times by the time they were done.

Nay. His choices, his chances, had all been exhausted.

Och, love, he grieved, it wasn’t supposed to end this way.

When he opened his eyes, it was to discover that they’d stuffed a gag in Chloe’s mouth. Her aquamarine eyes sparkled with tears.

“Cut her,” Simon said softly. “Show him her blood.”