Kahlan pressed herself flush to his chest. A long, aching breath shuddered from Kershov’s lungs, echoing the bars of his Beast’s prison as that secret monster howled and paces against its rigid confines. Hunger. Desperate hunger. Dark, stygian memories of a forbidden hunt initiated but not completed, jaws clenched and muscles trembling with the desire to spill blood. Whatever had happened that night—the precise, crystalline images that evaded the Pharaoh’s mind like fish trapped beneath ice—was smeared by horrifying traces of obscured violence. Kershov recalled himself wanting to harm Kahlan . . . to murder her, perhaps—a sacrifice to appease the demon that had overtaken him. He had wanted to kill her, destroy her, ingest her, because she had been someone he respected. Beyond the fact that she had been useful to him, Kahlan occupied a special place in the hierarchy of Ker’s exclusive relationships. She shone like a lantern in the night—always there when he needed her. Perhaps it was this unique admiration that had driven his savage secret demon to bay so incessantly for her death. And honestly, not just her death. Ending Kahlan’s life could have been a simple affair, just as the murders the Beast committed beforehand had been “simple.” Kershov might have snapped her neck and desecrated her corpse, as he’d done to whoever’s bones now rested somewhere in Blossom’s mutated landscape. He could have stripped the fur off her carcass and used it to line his den.

Except he hadn’t. The longer Kershov stood there with moonlight spilling over his shivering hackles and inhaling Kahlan’s scent the way a sommelier sips fine wine, he saw what his monster had seen so long ago. This dear, brilliant femme crouched unsuspecting over a hare, her cinnamon-dusted fur rippling like the long grass she thought hid her from view. Her sunlit irises as they cut toward him—suspicious. He felt the bizarre, impossible starvation that drove him to pursue the healer in the meadow. Saliva pooled in his mouth. The white dragon had wanted—more than anything—to rip into Kahlan’s flesh and swallow her whole. To feel the slide of thick blood and organ tissue down his gullet. He dreamed, pined, begged for this she-wolf to be part of himself. “Standing near you again . . .” A searing jolt slashed like lightning inside of Kershov’s guts, and he convulsively curled himself around the earthen woman to tuck her closer to his broad chest. Breathing hard. Shallow. As air itself stabbed him. “How much faith would you put into recollections that are merely the ghosts of emotion? I wanted to harm you, Kahlan. And it had nothing to do with hate, or anger.” His neck arched over her nape—though the blizzard phantom could not distinguish the roiling tempest in his viscera to be a surge of protective instinct or the vicious jealousy of obsession. His or the Beast’s. Ker had tried to keep his voice as even as a thin layer of frost, yet now a seismic grow throttled his vocal cords. Surely Kahlan could feel this resonating upon her very bones.

“I think I loved you then. And because I loved you . . . I tried to consume you.”

He would not blame the clandestine devil still throwing itself against the glacial infrastructure that trapped it. Kershov regarded Kahlan with renewed deference thanks to her stoic admission of affliction; however, the colossal dragga could not bring himself to reveal his own weakness. Even thinking of it made bile slosh up his throat.

An Alpha in command of himself would have turned Kahlan away. Despite the nearly frantic pull to draw closer, part of Kershov’s mind barked at him to slice ties with the shattered healer immediately. Her presence pushed him to the precipice of sanity . . . and still he nuzzled into the auburn waves of her ruff, her perfume intoxicating and her voice a soothing pleading maddening melody in his ears. Her warmth glowed on his snowy robes. She had said “please.” She offered herself upon a silver platter, vulnerable and inviting, and every part of Kershov that made him a man pulsed with the agony of wanting her. The Emperor shift his fangs toward her ear, scraping lightly along that sensitive outer shell. “I fear the consequences of unlocking whatever knowledge we buried. Nevertheless . . .” A long, slow lick that traveled from the base of her aud back to its perfect triangle tip, leaving a trail of moisture his breath would cool. “I could never deny the fae that saved my life.”

Gentleness had never been the ganglord’s forte. Still, he found himself attempting to treat Kahlan with some level of delicacy and reserve . . . as if holding himself back would somehow protect them both from the catastrophic rupture of a hidden nightmare. He positioned himself behind her with the calm, detached air of a physician: observing the mouthwatering roundness of her haunches and the tantalizing curl of her banner as if examining a patient. Heat spiked his blood upon breathing the aphrodisiacal pheromones her body tried to tempt him with . . . and he choked the reaction down. No. I cannot . . . WE cannot risk this. It was an operation to surgically uncover their shared gaps in time—nothing more. A favor between dear friends. Their union would act as a scalpel, their mutual attraction the anesthetic, their epiphany the stitches to sew them back together from whatever horrendous wounds awaited. With a soft grunt, Kershov rose to his hind legs and draped himself across the silken expanse of Kahlan’s spine, forelegs hugging her sides and ready member throbbing impatiently against her gate. How was she already so hot? His inhales and exhales quickened. “Tell me if we need to stop.” A frigid order, belying none of the muted worry sloshing around with his rapidly engorging lust. Gaze fixed firmly on the ivory-glowing moon above, the pallid titan pushed himself into Kahlan’s yielding walls—the two lovers fitting as if they were lock and key.