Blood Warrior

Kings, who never expected such animation from their own kind. “You’ve been too distracted. At best, you’ve been successful and I’ll find out soon enough. But I think you suffer from the illusion you’ve created. How many would know your genuine call of distress?”

He shifted onto his knees before leaning down to kiss her cheek. Softly. Innocently. The touch was nothing more impassioned than a man might bestow on a sister.

The telltale hitch of her unsteady breath gave her away, despite how quickly she reclaimed her composure. He smiled. How often were Indranan surprised?

She smelled of the thin, cold Himalayan wind. She was warm beneath his lips when he kissed her again—an impression he could trust. Her shiver was honest, too. The Sun would’ve concealed that weakness had she been able.

“My seaxes didn’t intimidate you as much as when I held your waist,” he whispered against her temple. “Violence won’t keep your mind occupied. But I can.”

He traced his tongue along the line of her jaw. His stir of reaction was not surprising. His people had always been base and earthy, and she’d been tempting him for years. Now . . .

Now he knew how she tasted.

“I intend to use every method I can to make sure your thoughts remain right here, in this tent. With me.”

—

This man, Tallis, was as intimidating as he was impossible to understand. He spoke in riddles. Being unable to skim his thoughts was pure frustration, like attempting to see through granite or hear a pin drop halfway around the world. She’d tried to find her bodyguards among a multitude of Indranan thoughts, but so many wore Masks —mental distortion blocks to protect them from being detected by prowling siblings.

Even if she had found them, Kavya couldn’t jeopardize the tranquility of the assembly. To do so now would bring about Tallis’s dreadful scenario: the failure of all she’d worked toward for decades.

Her mind raced. Her wrists and ankles ached. And her lips burned with the touch of this stranger’s kiss.

Tallis was different. Frighteningly different.

A mind I can’t read.

She shouted into his brain until her gift retaliated with a walloping headache. She’d have been better served by smacking her forehead against the ground. Trying to compensate with her senses was nearly useless. Who of her clan needed them?

All they really needed was a Dragon-forged sword to kill . . . or a Mask to hide.

Every Indranan was born as a twin or, in Kavya’s case, as a triplet. Siblings grew up knowing that the Dragon had divvied up their true potential in the womb. Learn to share. So few did. By committing fratricide, the Indranan could unite fractured pieces into a whole. Some called them twice-blessed, although twice-cursed was more accurate. Murderous twins carried with them the screams of the departed.

The ability to read another’s mind was the most intoxicating, terrifying gift among the Five Clans. To keep from wanting more was the ultimate responsibility.

The Heartless.

Kavya had never protested the derogatory nickname. She’d simply fought to rise above that hideous legacy.

Her fight at the moment centered on Tallis. With his face tilted down and decorated with a maddening smile, he was as solid in body as he was opaque of mind. She’d suspected that he hid strength under unassuming clothing and a lean fighter’s frame. She hadn’t known how that strength would feel, pressed intimately along her silk-clad hip as they’d walked through the valley.

Now he knelt before her. Body to body. Heat against heat.

He was holding her.

He’d slipped his hands beneath the long sleeves of her sari and cupped her restrained arms. His fingers were warm, blunt, strong. When was the last time she’d been graced by anything more than reverent touches? This was prolonged contact. This was calluses against smooth skin. Because she couldn’t read his mind, she compensated with a desperate scramble for information.

He smelled of dust and juniper.

He was a foot taller.

He had eyes the color of the sea at its darkest depths, but not the Indian Ocean—some frigid, azure wasteland.

Kavya’s attention kept slipping back to him. She couldn’t even find Chandrani, her best friend and closest ally since childhood. Chandrani was the only person who knew Kavya’s mind without its Mask—the only person except for Pashkah. Without the Masks she’d worn since the age of twelve, Kavya would’ve been at her brother’s mercy. If he succeeded in killing her, Pashkah would become something unholy.

This stranger knew how he was affecting her and had piercingly guessed that violence was a fact of life for Kavya, as it was for every Indranan. She’d spent her adolescence in the rough cubbies and alleys of Delhi. A girl didn’t survive places so perilous without witnessing terrible things and developing protective skills. The net result was that to be threatened by a blade—even one as intimidating as his seax—had nothing on the distraction of being held.

Thought began and ended with Tallis’s arms sliding down to her backside.

No.

No!

Chandrani!

Except for her rabbit’s-heart pulse, she held perfectly still. Chandrani would find her. Kavya had to believe —and bide her time.

Her feet and calves were going to sleep, but she hadn’t wanted this man to lord over her with his height, strength, and the weight of his stare. Not that it had mattered after he’d assumed the same stance. They looked like worshipers at prayer, supplicated before one another.

What he’d done to her . . .

What he kept doing. The trace of his lips from the divot behind her ears to the tendon of her neck was like nothing she’d ever experienced. What was this madness? Had his ramblings been a strange cover for his desire to bind her, even ravish her? Sensation shot through her limbs and down her spine. Her thighs trembled—nothing he would see, but she resented her weakness.

“Those people who revere you,” he said against the skin he’d made damp by his tongue. “Do they know how you taste? Do they wonder? Do some fantasize about claiming the body of a living deity?”

Kavya punched her shoulder against his jaw. “Get off me, you Pendray filth. Always thinking with your cocks and your work-worn hands. If you think at all.”

He smiled as if he were the mind reader. “Stereotypes, eh? Wasn’t that my sin a few hours ago? We could play that way all day, but my game is better.” He grabbed a fistful of hair. “Tell me, goddess. Do you like that they imagine fucking you? Or that I have? For years.”

Her heart shuddered. He was sick, yet her body reacted to his crude words. No wonder the Indranan lived apart from baser clans, no matter the danger within their own.

“That’s why you brought me here? In a camp full of people loyal to me?”

“Ah, so they’re loyal to you. Not to your cause. You give yourself away.”

“No, they have dreams of a better future and hope for the safety of their families. What I offer them is beautiful and pure.”

“Pure,” he said, the word thick with sarcasm. He sounded English—not the typical Pendray blend of Scots and Norse—but certainly refined and exotic to her ears. “I’m sure the Sun burns away all sin and all thoughts of flesh and desire.”

Kavya yanked her head back, but he only pulled her hair taut and dug hard fingers into her hip. He scraped his teeth along her throat. She bit back a cry of indignation.

“I like how you taste, goddess. I even like these twists and fights. Those are real. You’re giving me quite a lot. I’m owed more, but this is a start.”

Kavya closed her eyes. His mouth’s caress was wrong and ghastly—and yet intriguing. What she knew about