One ear tipped forward, the other back.
Delirious, she persisted regardless of the fever ravaging her from within. Reached with both hands.
“Giaus—”
His fist landed against Sinadim’s cheek and sent the prince’s head cracking back into stone.
Sinadim sagged only to be pinned in place.
“Giaus,please!” She coughed, her eyes burning and dry. Seeing nothing but a blur of dark, shuddering shapes. The hazy outline of males at war, her own pain forgotten in the face of such a blinding temper. “Wait!”
Feet bare, she trudged across their prison in three halting, blood-soaked steps. Her hands collided with Giaus’ lower back, palms sliding against the sweat-slicked heat roiling off his skin. Hands slipping on muscle that jolted with every landed punch, contracting and heaving with the effort to kill the prince, Renegade found an anchor around the base of Giaus’ tail.
She squeezed.
With a flick, Giaus jerked that fifth limb from clutching fingers and sent her staggering to the right.
Her knee buckled.
“Stay,” he snarled, one wicked, gleaming eye cast over his shoulder. Meant to pin her in place, to force obedience while he decided her fate. And for a single moment, all that feral rage was turned back on her.
It festered and lashed, ripping into her chest with a cruelty she wasn’t prepared to swallow.
He fed it to her anyway. Pumping her full, until her heart floundered beneath the weight of sick, possessive Anhur rage. A male defending his most precious possession against the one who’d damaged it.
She felt it all.
Nape tight, the muscles of her lower back bunched in unseen warning. Her ears flicked back, pupils constricted to tiny points of seething fury.
And still, Giaus feltnothingfrom his mate.
He turned back to Sinadim, drowned her outraged gasp with the merciless impact of fists on flesh. The hitching breaths of a dying prince.
Hadim’s son.
Unbidden, furious tears flooded her lashes as the fever ravaged. Throat an aching desert, brain swollen inside her skull, she staggered to her feet. Fists curled into wicked claws where they were bunched at her sides.
“No.”
The word trembled in the quiet space between clenched teeth. A denial, lost when she wrapped her hands around Giaus’ middle. Set her cheek to that glorious heat, as his temper raged in her name… in her heart.
Renegade.
Bound to a mate offering things she couldn’t comprehend, doomed to drip for the most dominant male…
… she was Omega.
Engineered to please. Forced to endure.
All she’d ever known was what Hadim had shown her. To submit and allow her life to be lived by the whims of another. The harem was as much a part of her as the killing tempest now running thick and hot through her blood.
Familiar and terrible blending with something… new.
Something…worthyof a name she’d chosen herself.
A thing starving for more from this life, to claim what she had earned.
She was the Renegade.
