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“You need to speak with your bond,” he says.

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only answer I can give you without making this worse. I don’t want my future queen to hate me because she thinks I betrayed her.”

“And so you will betray me by keeping this from me?”

“No, I’m keeping her safe as you requested. I was trying to save you the heartache.”

My hand reaches for his collar again, and this time Eagan catches my wrist and holds it, his eyes locked on mine with an intensity that stops me. There is something in those red-gray eyes that I haven’t seen before. Pity. Eagan pities me.

“Tell me,” I growl.

Eagan releases my wrist slowly. He breathes in through his nose, and the exhale carries the weight of a decision he didn’t want to make, a line he didn’t want to cross, a loyalty to me that is about to override whatever misguided mercy he has been extending to the woman sleeping in my bed.

“You will smell him on her,” Eagan says. “Had I known, I would have left him on Purgatory Island. I did not know for sure that they knew each other until I caught her in the cells the first night—although I suspected it, I had no proof.”

The first night.

“Excuse me?”

Eagan glances away. “He’s in the cells. I swear, my king, I didn’t know who he was to her. If I had, I would have gotten rid of the problem before he became one.”

The rage doesn’t build. It detonates. Every muscle in my body contracts simultaneously. The veins surface across my forearms, pulsing with the possessive, territorial violence that lives at the core of what I am. The bond in my chest isn’t flickering anymore, and I finally understand. The bond was never reacting to fear of something happening to her. It was reacting to her being with someone else.

Without another word, I move toward my bedroom. My hands flex at my sides, and my claws extend and retract.

The door swings wide and hits the wall behind it with enough force to rattle the books on the nearest shelf.

She is on the bed when I enter, and I cross the room in three strides.

My hands find her face before she can speak, my fingers curving around her jaw, palms pressing against her cheeks. There are tears in her eyes, and her lips part on a word that never forms.

Leaning down slowly, I press my nose against the column of her throat where the pulse beats rapidly and alive beneath her thin skin.

I breathe in.

The first layer is her. That warm, golden scent threaded with the copper undertone of her magic that I would recognize across any distance and through any disguise. The second layer is mine, my bite, my presence marked into her skin from hours of proximity and the feeding she offered me willingly.

As my nose traces across her cheek beneath all the layers of our scents, I catch it. Someone human. Male.

Then I move to her mouth.

The scent on her lips is stronger. Concentrated in a way that cannot be explained by proximity or accidental contact. This is someone’s mouth pressed against hers, someone’s taste left on her lips.

The growl that tears from my chest is involuntary and savage, a sound that carries the full weight of a predator discovering that something it guarded with its life has been touched by hands that had no right to touch. The vibration of it moves through my chest and into my palms where they press against her face, and she flinches beneath my hands.

“What are you doing?” Her voice comes out high, her hands rising to grip my wrists, her fingers pressing in as if she can pry my hands from her face. “Kylian, stop it. What are you doing?”

I hold her face tilted in my grip without answering, just looking down at her. My expression must be something terrible because her struggling stops, and the color drains from her face.

Every moment from today replays behind my eyes in rapid sequence, only now the light has changed, the angle has shifted, and what I saw as intimacy when she stepped into my shower carries something else now. She was using me.

Was any of it real? The question lodges in my chest beside the rage and the bond’s screaming, and the doubt it carries is a poison more toxic than anything the mages ever cursed me with.

Curses can be broken, but doubt? Once it’s planted, it grows roots that reach into everything and strangles whatever they touch.

My hands drop to my sides, and I step back.