Kershov remembered exactly what Vladya had looked like when he first found the miserable dog half-dead and discarded in the snow. Vlad had been . . . bad. Very bad. Whatever sadistic bastards had abandoned the young soldier there to breathe his last jagged gasps in frigid torment instantaneously earned Kershov’s grudging respect and withering disgust. On the one hand, Ker had to admire the way they’d creatively tortured the boy, ensuring a slow death by first inflicting patchwork lacerations over every flimsy inch of Vlad’s hide before obviously damaging his internal organs; on the other, simply leaving the still-whimpering body behind betrayed a madness, a certain lack of attention to detail that Kershov would not forgive. To this day the heartless arctic monster could recall his first soft words to the shuddering Vladya . . . they were etched in his brain like the purposeful marks of a knife in tree bark.

“Struggling, are we? Why don’t you just die?”

Vladya hadn’t answered, not at first. His bruised and battered maw had been too filled with his own cooling blood to speak. But he met Kershov’s gaze with emotion so strikingly intense that the alabaster gangleader—past the point of no return when it came to possessing something even close to a soul—took pause. Vladya’s burning pyrite portals were not aflame with the aggression he would cultivate later on in life. He hadn’t yet seized the troubled, scorching anger that would become his trademark burden over the rest of his struggle on the tundra. No . . . this emotion cut through Vladya viscerally. Not fury, not even fear: it was pure and passionate desperation. It was the frantic stare of someone who has lost everything anchoring them to life and is plummeting into the void and looking for anything—anything—to pull them back to safety. Vladya was too terrified to look the black-eyed beast in the eyes and spit “Fuck you, I’ll die when I want.” Instead, in a voice so thin it almost snapped, the poor kid whined and begged Kershov: “Help me. Help me.”

He wore that same pitiful mask now, as Kobato shoved him backward out of danger and threw herself forward—as he watched her heartbreakingly delicate frame collide with Ker’s colossal mass, punching a stunned grunt from the Alpha’s chest—as Kershov belted out a stunned roar, cheated out of a neat kill, his jaws slamming with a bone-jarring crash at the air just above Kobato’s neck. Vladya couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. His lungs and heart had transformed into useless stones heavy in his ribcage, suffocating him. His flesh crawled with the sensation of being drenched in gore . . . but he wasn’t., because lovely brave Ko was leaning into Kershov’s seething breast the way a calm mountain presses back against a tempest. Alive. But not safe.

“Stand still like a good girl and let me murder you,” Kershov hissed. The sound was demonic, portraying more rage than the Alpha ever permitted himself to feel. He suddenly hated this weak female creature. How dare she inspire that old desperation in Vladya when months of Kershov’s hard, bloody work had earned nothing more than a dead, blank stare? Hackles spiked impossibly higher. The King was a sculpture of needles and ice. When the girl made no move to flee, Ker snarled once more and plunged his jaws downward. His teeth met the silken fur of her nape. They compressed—but did not rip, not yet, for Kershov wanted to kill this doe as slowly as possible so that each shining second of her death could be imprinted forever on Vladya’s fractured mind—

Her smooth chin lifted to rest on the pitiless Czar’s rock-hard shoulder. A shock rippled through Kershov’s entire frame. Such a gentle, compassionate touch. He could feel the distant thud of her heartbeat against his crawling skin. Her voice reached his awareness despite the fragility of her words. Worse condition . . . than Vladya?! Strands of darkness whipped against the polar ghost’s inner prison of ice. His seismic snarling ceased.

She. Was. Not. Allowed. To. Touch. Him.

The ivory warrior—beyond the ability to express his wrath—wrenched himself away from Kobato’s subtle embrace. His fathomless glare stabbed into her wise tawny eyes. “You INSOLENT BITCH!” His bellowing voice shook, a screech of winter in the heat of the pouring summer storm. Rain plastered his slick white fur against his musculature and turned him into a sleek silver vision of death. “I WILL TOLERATE YOUR FILTHY, MEDDLING EXISTENCE NO LONGER.” And he lunged forward, foreleg lashing out to capture her neck and snare her into the waiting pain of his fangs—

Except this time Vladya was there.

The boy with the black-gold eyes had not broken from his horrified trance. He’d just shattered his paralysis, but he still stared ahead with hollow pleading written across his features as Kershov’s weapons cannoned into the tender joint between his shoulder and neck. The train-wreck force of the Pharaoh’s strike shoved Vladya backward into Kobato; staggered, the wounded gladiator attempted to right his paws and prevent himself from knocking his beloved into the mire. Claws slid wetly into mud. Rain drummed against tattered pale fur and mixed with fresh scarlet rivering down Vlad’s foreleg. “No, Kershov,” Vladya whispered hoarsely. He winced, Ker’s savage knives grinding down against his bones. “Not her.”

Too easily for it to bring him satisfaction, Kershov wrestled his revolting prisoner to the earth and slammed him down like a threadbare rag doll. When Vlad tried to lift his skull in protest, a massive curve-clawed paw stepped cruelly onto Vladya’s face and held him there against the slimy silt. A dark chuckle rolled from the dragon’s throat as he peered at Kobato. “Looks like your knight wants to die first, princess. How am I to choose?”