She greeted him with a grin like a pearly dagger and then slithered past his side like a cat, meshing her snowy cloak with his own pristine robes. Classic Enigma. Danger with a dash of subtle sexiness. The most honored of his soldiers. Ker chuckled haughtily at her good-natured jab, his obsidian lantern slicing toward her playful expression. “If that ever happens, you’re to kill me on the spot.” A fairly dark joke, and only half joking: Enigma knew as well as her Emperor that such practice wasn’t at all uncommon where they both grew up.

He nosed her cheekbone as she whispered into his aud. Without warning, Kershov thought of the girl he’d hidden in the snow-prison on the mountain. Suddenly the girl’s wan gray face grew pale in his mind’s twisted eye. . . paler . . . white, with a splash of black across mismatched eyes, eyes which brimmed over with pain and betrayal and bitter disappointment—

A violent shudder wracked Ker’s body like a furious winter gale wrenching at empty branches. It took a massive flex of willpower to still his muscles, to shut down the rapid-fire nerves that crackled through his body and filled his skull with picture upon gruesome picture. He closed his single bottomless stargazer. Forced the impossible images from his brain. Enigma was here, in front of him, not locked away in a prison of ice. He had not harmed her. He would never harm her.

Except . . . the fracturing Czar could no longer be sure.

And that horrifying uncertainty tugged at his guts as if the world had cracked into a bottomless chasm beneath his feet and he was plummeting hopelessly into the void. How could he not say with absolute conviction that Enigma was safe from him? Why did he keep seeing his Beta in the place of his sacrificial lamb, all battered and bloody and begging for mercy? Kershov had no desire to punish the porcelain warrioress; even her long absence merited celebration rather than retribution. In all his years of meting out ruthless justice, of torture and extraction, the calculating monster had always been able to separate that work from this work. Business and pleasure. What’s done is done. But the Secret Beast did not see things that way. Its talons raked into his mind and savaged it until the dismembered thoughts twisted together in a gory mosaic. Discerning pack from prey grew harder every day. As much as the notion sickened him, Kershov wondered how long it would be before he woke up and broke the bones of his soldiers just to see if they’d shriek. He couldn’t pretend to be fine forever . . .

But he’d go on acting for as long as necessary. “Fun? Impossible, Enigma dear. When you are gone, you take all the fun with you.” His voice lilted coolly, snowflakes dancing lightly on a breeze. Pretty convincing, despite the strained quality of his smirk. Shit—when had this become so difficult? Where was his cunning, his flair for performance? I HAVE been enjoying myself a lot lately, Beta mine. But you mustn’t know about that. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed making her suffer. “It’s gotten awfully quiet here, lately. Abendrot has had its lulls . . . only I think this is worse. Perhaps I’m just acting like a selfish child. The army needs its second-in-command.”

He’d been gazing at her calm, flirtatious visage, drinking in the sight of her leaf-and-ocean eyes in search of a flaw—anything minute discrepancy that would betray her as a mere illusion. Light glinted off the smoothness of her ivory brow and the natural flow of fur smoothed over her neck and spine. Her scent was in his nares and on his tongue. He felt the daring swish of her tail as it stroked the underside of his churning abdomen. All at once the frostbitten phantom felt a pressure in his chest—and he immediately balked at the sudden unwelcome surge of something, of emotion, a punch of horror knocking him breathless. It can’t be. Kershov did not even know the feeling’s name. He only knew that he did not want it, that he hadn’t expected it, and touching upon it had been like laying down to rest and finding a severed head in his bed. Or reaching out to turn on a light and brushing against the slime of entrails instead. This shouldn’t have been possible. His heart was a dead thing. He was a dead thing. Frozen, emotionless, controlled. No. Please no.

“Enigma—I have to tell you something.” The hideous strange warmth in his breast wouldn’t cease. Kershov’s voice hissed urgently from his shredded maw. He did not look at her. Now the crushing weight of his secret slammed down on his back, his lungs, and the cracked King thought the only thing that would save him from destruction was confessing. He could trust Enigma . . . he had always trusted her . . . “I—I’ve made . . . a mistake.” What was WRONG WITH HIM? He had not meant to say that—he’d meant to say deal, he’d made a deal with a devil equal to himself. And at the last moment, Ker snatched his words back and swallowed them whole. A weariness stole the strength from his pillars. He sagged where he stood, shoulders sloping downward, war banner hovering at half-mast. “Your Alpha is a fool, Enigma. You were better off where you could not witness his folly.”