Eli had been hoping against precisely this outcome. Nel was going to keep her mouth shut until the two weeks was up and she was killed at the ceremony. And if Nel did have any contact with Mil, she’d tell her to keep away and save herself. She’d rather frustrate Dom’s schemes and die than give her sister up to be an unwilling bride.

Another nine days he was going to have to deal with her. He felt a little surge of irritation, mixed with something else—a qualm. But why? It was her own fault she was here—she’d said as much herself. And if she wanted to die so badly, he certainly couldn’t stop her.

Still, when he returned from his training the next day to question her, he felt uneasy.

She sat in the same position he’d left her in, cross-legged on the edge of her divan, eyes closed and breathing deep. The scales on her skin were larger now, though they remained the pale pink color of her flesh. She looked a bit like Dom with her too-human skin and dark, dark hair.

Like Mom, too.

He shook himself, pushing the images back into the darkness of his mind. “Any luck today with Mil?”

Nel didn’t even acknowledge his presence. Her mind was far away, and she’d put up guards around her thoughts. Her presence glowed like the day he’d first seen her.

“Nel. I need an answer.” He tried again to end her reverie.

Again, no response.

He was loathe to break it by mental force—for once, there was a blush of pale rose in her moonlight, the smallest tinge of joy. He’d never seen it there before, and it sparked his curiosity.

He crept over to her and tapped her shoulder.

She jumped and stared at him with panic-stricken eyes as the mental walls she’d put up came tumbling down.

“I have to go,” she said, but before he could find out to whom, she raised her guard back up and crossed her arms. The moonlight dimmed and lost its rosy tint. “What do you want?”

“Who were you talking to?” Eli asked, sitting down beside her.

She leapt up and paced the room.

“No one. Just someone I made up in my head that I talk to when I get lonely.”

Eli had his suspicions, but ignored them for the moment.

“Alright. Fine. I need to know if you’ve heard anything from Mil.”

Nel turned a hard glare on him and paced on in silence for a moment.

“I’ll tell you the same thing every day, so don’t bother asking tomorrow. No.”

“And even if you had, you wouldn’t tell me.”

“No.”

“Nel.” Eli combed his fingers back through his hair and struggled to find the words to say what he meant, without sounding paternal. “This whole lack-of-self-preservation thing is really starting to creep me out. Don’t you care about your life? I mean, come on. You’re…” Eli decided not to wager a guess at her age. “Young.”

“And my sister isn’t?” she retorted. “What’s your point?”

“My point is, you’ve got a life, too. And you don’t seem to care one teensy bit about living to see the end of next week.”

“Well,” she said with venom, “that’s sort of what happens when you love somebody. You care about what happens to them more than what happens to you.”

Mom’s image came to mind, juxtaposed and intertwined with Nel’s furious visage. The same fiery white hue he remembered feeling from Mom the last time she’d spoken to him flared in Nel’s moonlight now.

“Don’t you have someone you’d die for?”

“I did, once.” He was still struck by the resemblance the two women shared. He hardly noticed when Nel returned and sat by his side. “How do you love someone more than life? Why?”

“When I was 14, we lost my dad.” Her thoughts began to unravel. He paid attention now, because the box that had been guarded so heavily, remaining closed even to his strongest efforts, was being pulled to the surface.

She didn’t bother throwing up mental guards as Eli followed her thoughts. As she spoke, pictures were drawn from the box. There was an image of a man, tall, with dark hair and scruffy facial hair to match.

The figure moved in Nel’s memory, smiling, laughing, and entertaining Nel and her sister with magic tricks. There were the same green eyes Eli saw now looking at him from Nel’s pale face.

“Hey, Citronella, put this in your pocket.” Nel, in her memory, obeyed, but just as quickly as she slipped the rock into her pocket, her father produced it from behind her ear.

Nel and her sister laughed.

The image changed to show the same man smiling and waving from the deck of a small boat. Nel’s moonlight pulsed with a blue-black light.

“He was out on a boat one day to study some of the new species of freshwater sharks that had recently come up in the area. Just a normal day at his job. Then the boat caught fire. No one remembers the smell of gas.” Her face contorted as she choked on a sob. “But I do. We’d waited there to send him off, me and mom and Millie. They were fueling the boat. Dad told me the gas always smelled that strong when they were fueling.” Her whole body shook with the force of trying to contain her tears. “Then when they went to shove off, 20 minutes later, I still smelled it. I told Dad. I told everybody. No one would listen to me.”

She pulled in a slow, deliberate breath and turned a tortured glare on Eli.

“I’m not going to let it happen again. I’ll die. I’ll do it willingly, I’ll turn the knife on myself before I let that monster take my sister away from my mom. She can do without me. But my sister is the light of my mother’s life. I can’t…”

She stopped and stared at the floor, her eyes shut tight against the tears.

He had to respect her resolve, her honor. It was everything Dad had always stood for, what he’d fought for and instilled in Eli’s mind. Eli had been right when he’d found the word ‘motherly’ coming to mind the instant he’d laid eyes on Nel.

She was like Mom in a lot more ways than he cared to admit.

“You don’t even care,” Nel spat. The guards came back up, and she stood. “I don’t know why I said anything to you. Like I should have expected something from you.” She turned towards the door and stormed off.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down.” Eli stood and followed her to the doorway. “Where are you going?”

“Away. Where I can be in peace.”

He caught her wrist. “Nel.”

She stopped, but only because he held her firm.

“I know you were talking to Mil.”

It had been a guess, but her wide eyes confirmed it.

“You told her not to come back, didn’t you?”

Her brows furrowed and she fought to get out of his grasp.

“No, no. I can’t let you go until I get an answer.”

“You let me go now, or I’ll—”

“What? What are you gonna do? Try to stab me again?”

She looked ready to cry again. Her bottom lip quavered; she bit it to make it stop.

Eli scowled at the floor.

“Look, I’m sorry. That was low. What I’m trying to say is… I get it. I get this whole heroic thing you’re doing. It’s impressive. You have my respect.” He chuckled. “I think my dad would be impressed too. He’s second-in-command under the king, you know.”

“How fascinating,” she said. She wrenched her hand out of Eli’s grasp, but stayed where she was, her eyebrows raised in expectation.

Eli checked her moonlight—steady but with a tinge of flame. He’d be walking on thin ice.

“And what does that make you?”

Eli’s half-smile faded.

“Oh, hit a sore spot, did I?”

“Sort of.”

“Been demoted?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Oh. So let me guess.” She pursed her lips. “You’re doing this so you can get back on your high horse.”

Eli didn’t look at her. He didn’t trust himself to respond. Who cared if she knew anyway? She’d be dead in a few days. He tried to ignore a pang of guilt.

“What’d you do?”

“Huh?” He looked at her; she was grinning playfully, a look he’d never seen before. Again he was struck with her beauty. Before he could stop himself he smiled back, then quickly lowered his eyes.

“What’d you do to lose your rank?”

Eli picked at his fingernails. “I, uh. I punched Dom in the face.” He felt like a schoolboy confessing a crime to his teacher.

Nel snorted. “No. Seriously.”

Eli looked at her and held his hands out. “That’s it. That’s really it. I punched him in the nose in front of everybody in the kingdom. So he demoted me.”

Nel laughed, a genuine laugh, and a bit of warm yellow tinged her presence. “That’s hilarious. Dom’s so immature and selfish. Reminds me of politicians back home. They’re all childish idiots.”

“Dom takes childishness to a new level entirely,” Eli said. “Forcing his childhood enemy into a wild scheme to steal a bride…” He shook his head. “He’s ridiculous.”

“Ha.” Nel laughed. The sound made Eli’s stomach flip. “So you are being forced into this.”

“Hey, that’s enough about me. I need an answer to my original question.”

Her expression sobered.

“I’ll answer you,” she said. “But first I want to know something.”

Eli shrugged. “What?”

“Do you really think that having power is the same as having honor? Do you think that just because Dom wears a fancy title, that you’re obligated to obey his every order?”

Eli stared at her. He’d always been taught that rank deserved honor, and he’d never had any reason to doubt it. Not until Dom came into power, anyway. He’d always been the only exception.

Apparently, Nel felt the same way. She’d been stupid enough—or brave enough—to protect what she loved the most from Dom’s thieving grasp. Mil didn’t belong to him just because he was king.

But what did that have to do with anything? One exception didn’t destroy the rule.

“That’s what I’ve found to be true.”

She looked at him, and something in her look, the sternness of her green eyes, told him the truth. He was no better than Dom in his stubborn pursuit of what mattered most to him. He was no more deserving of his rank than Dom was of his royalty. He’d lied to Luc’s face and antagonized Nel, whose only remaining desire was to save her sister from a fate as Dom’s bride.

All at Dom’s request. All because he was holding Eli’s blues like fish bait.

He looked hard at Nel, unable to refrain from seeing Mom staring back at him through her eyes. Her dark, furrowed brows, channeling her anger; her disgust of him; her tight lips and the dark, dark hair strewn over her shoulders, glinting in the light like lightning in a storm cloud—all of it said one thing, without a thought, without a word.

You are not honorable. And you’ve gotten exactly what you deserve.

If Mom was still alive… he looked down at the ground with a scowl. She would have never let him hear the end of it. He realized that that was why he wouldn’t look at Nel, why he left the house as often as he could.

He couldn’t bear to be reprimanded by Mom’s memory. So he’d fled from her reflection.

“How do you judge your own case?” Nel asked him.

He didn’t answer her.

“Do you think I have to give an answer to the monster who calls himself a king? Do you have to continue being his puppet? Do you think that’s really the honorable thing to do?”

When Eli didn’t answer again, Nel snorted and turned away from the doorway. “Figures. I wouldn’t expect any less from a man—excuse me, a Tognir— that captured a woman so he could go back to his high-class lifestyle.”

Her words cut, even though Eli willed them not to, willed himself to hold his head high. But he couldn’t. Part of him was angry. But as he watched her stumble down the hall towards the kitchen, trying to look indignant despite her imbalance, his anger fled. She was simply a woman, not so different from Ana and the noblewomen he knew in his own kingdom.

But she wasn’t simple at all, and that was what confused him most. She had honor, nobility, qualities he’d only attributed to Mom, Dad, the Takers he’d commanded, the noblemen he’d known growing up, to Ana…and to himself.

Until now.