He couldn't succumb. If he was suffering only backlash, his wife was being bludgeoned to death. Gideon gasped as he gained his feet, fighting himself to step over his son without falling on him. He staggered to his wife, healing himself internally the entire time with a calm that belied his horror at the sight of his beloved mate lying unconscious on the floor, blood leaking from her nose, ears, and eyes.

Never in all of his life had he suspected Noah was capable of such power. Since Gideon knew Noah would never knowingly harm his sister, he doubted Noah even knew it himself. Gideon laid hands on his wife, rapidly healing her, focusing everything he had on her, now ignoring his own pain and injuries. He said a fast prayer of thanks that he had been there, that he had been with Legna when this had happened. What if he had been abroad on some errand? There were no Demon healers in the Lycanthrope court besides himself. In his unleashed fear and fury, Noah would have unknowingly killed his adored sister.

Gideon gently wiped away her blood with his fingertips as she stirred. He bent to kiss her forehead, finally able to breathe again now that she was moving appropriately.

"You are all right, Neliss," he soothed her. "I have to go to Noah."

"No, wait." She cleared her throat, trying to rid it of weakness. "Do not tell him."

Gideon understood. "If I do not tell him and he does it again, he could kill you if I am not with you. He nearly did in spite of my presence."

"It will destroy him if you tell him." Her beloved eyes were begging, though she knew he would always do anything to secure her happiness. "Warn him. Tell him less. Only enough to moderate him. Only do not tell him of this."

"As you wish, my love," he whispered. "Can you teleport me?"

She sat up with his help, but she nodded.

"I will ask Elijah to care for Seth. You will rest."

She didn't give him a single argument.

Gideon entered Noah's bedroom with a pop of harshly displaced air. Gideon saw the King clutching his mate, his face ravaged with panic. She had passed out and now lay pale and limp in Noah's arms, gasping for breath in little hitches. Her lips were blue.

"She had a panic attack. I thought when she passed out it would get better but..." Noah became speechless, explanation unnecessary to the great medic.

Gideon wordlessly reached for Kestra, his fingers touching her throat as he closed his eyes and sank into her struggling body, searching for all the signals and warnings that would lead him to his answers. She had a very healthy body overall, which made it much easier to sort out minor glimmers of illness from that which was serious. When the body entered a crisis, it pooled all resources and sent them screaming to the area of alarm. Gideon was swept along for the ride.

"Asthma. She has asthma, set off by her panic. Her lungs are completely closed off."

As he assessed Kestra, the medic also reached to touch Noah on his shoulder. He made it appear to be a gesture of masculine support, a comforting grip of reassurance, but he was far too aware of the volatility of Noah's emotions in the moment. He covertly, gently, manipulated the chemicals pumping too much adrenaline into the Demon King's body.

Noah instantly began to calm, to regain composure. He had no reason to doubt Gideon's medical skills, he remembered. Gideon could heal with miraculous power and speed. The medic had managed to heal himself from death once, only one of a dozen miracles Noah had seen him accomplish over the years.

When Kestra took her first full breath, a long ragged gasp that echoed into the room, Noah actually sobbed with relief, unable to help himself. Another harsh breath, much-needed oxygen coming with it, and her color began to return. Noah dragged Kestra to his chest as Gideon was forced to find a new touch point of access into his patient's body. The nearest point was her hip, so he allowed the King to purge his emotions and simply touched two fingers to the supple red velvet covering Kestra's pelvis.

Technically, Noah shouldn't be hugging her, as it would restrict her breathing, but given another minute, even that wouldn't matter, so the medic said nothing. He would have her healed completely of her crisis. As her eyes opened and she gasped a deep breath, Gideon also removed the remnants of heat exhaustion from her body. There was some small damage and weakness from her temporary removal from Noah's energy too early on in her growth into a Druid, but it would heal quickly enough in spite of Gideon's inability to aid her in that respect.

Gideon couldn't explain why, but suddenly he was sure he was the center of Noah's mate's attention. He looked up and met her eyes, a pale and glittering gaze, like blue glacial ice cut into gems. She didn't speak, nor were there any traces of her initial panic. Gideon had soothed her body chemistry into perfect balance, but that didn't mean she wouldn't ruin his work with chaotic thoughts.

However, it wasn't that knowledge that allowed a strange sensation to walk down the back of his neck. It caught hold, capturing all nerve impulses and cutting off his brain from his spine until he was relaxed into a paralysis that he found fascinating and even a little frightening. He probably could have broken away from her, but he didn't, his curiosity as a scientist of the Body getting the better of him.

In her eyes he saw clarity and understanding. There wasn't even a blink of an assessing expression. Her comprehension was instantaneous. He realized then that she knew what he was. She knew he was Demon and all that this meant. She now held in her mind a blueprint of his capabilities, his peaks of power and, most of all, his places of weakness.

Noah finally realized both Kestra and Gideon were staring at each other and sitting still as statues as they did so. His hold on Kes loosened, and it allowed her to sit forward. She reached toward Gideon's face, toward the edge of his silver eyes. She laid her hand against the side of his cheek and they continued to stare at each other as if entranced. Noah was beginning to understand that this had nothing to do with common curiosity, that there was an undercurrent of something else.

That there was power.

He felt it suddenly, though it had been growing the entire time as Gideon and Kestra had threaded together through their joined gazes. His heart skipped a beat, only to pound all the harder to make up for it. He didn't know what to do and didn't understand what exactly was going to happen. He wasn't precisely afraid for Gideon, because even Bella couldn't affect him with her awesome power to steal ability from others. So he let the exchange continue, standing ready and waiting.

Gideon felt her following her blueprint, her mind technical and calculating as if she was very familiar with reading and interpreting complex schematics. He felt her tracing within him with a cool sapphire light, a small concentrated orb of color and energy mapping over every path of power, through all the access points to his gifts, examining them one by one, voracious with curiosity.

"Astral projection," they said softly in unison, startling the Demon King, though he didn't show it or allow it to disturb them.

They spoke in tandem because Kestra's mind now controlled all of Gideon's autonomic and voluntary impulses. His vocal nerves picked up the signal of her brain when she sent the desire to speak to her own systems.

Kestra continued on, the sapphire orb of inquisition examining his ability to astral project, measuring it, admiring its scope and all the things he could do with it that no one knew he could do. Then she went a little further and traced the energy slightly into the future, traced the paths of potential he hadn't yet reached or discovered, and saw what he couldn't do, but one day would master.

"Astral healing," they said as they understood that potential for what it was. Gideon's low voice blended with her strong feminine one, and it was almost like music, a symphony she was directing. Gideon had always suspected that one day he would be able to heal in his astral form, and he had even experimented with the possibilities. He had felt on the verge of it, had known it was possible, and yet hadn't attained even a glimmer of success. Now he knew he would. He suddenly knew how he could find the path.

Because she had shown it to him.

Instinctively, he broke into her control over his motor skills; his free hand came up to circle the wrist of the hand against his face. It was not a restriction, but a show of gratitude. Gideon was also aware of the burn of power it was taking for her to chase her curiosities within him, that she was fascinated enough to continue on until she had examined every last power and its potential. She would flame out long before then, her untried power not yet ready or trained to go any further without ultimately damaging her.

"Kestra," he said quietly, firmly. "Release yourself from your task. Pull back toward your own energy; find your home in your own body. I know you are curious, but you have all the time in this ageless existence to discover more."

"Kes," Noah said softly into her ear, adding the familiarity of his voice to the call, "I know this is exhilarating and new, but I also know you are a thrill seeker, not one who has a death wish. You know the difference between using safety measures and being reckless. Be safe now. Harness this. Let us talk awhile about this and plan your next adventure."

She blinked. Gideon sighed and sat back with the release, freeing her hand but instinctively maintaining his healing touch against her hip, although his focus had disallowed any healing while Kes had studied him so closely.

Kestra looked at Noah, met his eyes, but he brushed his hand gently over her gaze.

"No, Kikilia. I know your thoughts. I know you. Knowledge removes fear, and you think if you know me, know my power, then you will learn not to fear me. While this is plausible, it is not safe for you to do right now. But I promise you," he added with a great intensity of emotion that drove his sincerity home to her, "I promise you that we will do this together, and you will know me like no other knows me. This is the way of Imprinted mates, and I am not afraid of it. Not with you."

All at once, Kestra understood the enormousness of responsibility and the trust that would be required for something like that. Even the silver-eyed healer had allowed her unprecedented access, never once thinking of shutting her out, of not meeting her with trust. She now knew him to be an enormously powerful being, one who didn't reveal his weaknesses to anyone. But she knew them all now. Some she herself could exploit just with her human skills, others she could never manage, but she was grasping quickly that there were those out there who could. There was an entire network of beings who wielded gargantuan power just as these two men did. Not just their breed, but several differing breeds.

"Nightwalkers," Noah whispered to her, making her aware once more that he was in her thoughts.

"So." She paused to clear her throat. "You weren't speaking metaphorically about all of this, then?"

The way she cast her eyes up at him, her lips pressing back her wry smile, made him chuckle low and soft, relieving him so very much that he dared to press his lips to her temple.

"I am not the metaphorical type, baby," he informed her.

Kes flicked her eyes back to the medic. "Thank you. For what you did. I haven't had an asthma attack in a very long time."

"It was brought on by your panic and the addition of this heat exposure you seem to have had." Gideon didn't even look at Noah, but the King felt his reprimand anyway. She should have been to a medic immediately, Gideon was thinking. "But I am happy to inform you it will very likely be the last one you will ever experience. Between my skills and the changes in your body, you will no longer be susceptible. Your body will rewrite a lot of your weaknesses and old injuries as you become Druid. Your ability to heal is stronger already, though a fraction of what it soon will be."

Gideon completed his sentence, but an expression chased over his face and she could see the abrupt end to one thought as another was formulated. His head and eyes moved almost imperceptibly, but it was the slide of his fingers from her hip to low on her belly that made her understand. His fingers sought her scar, and her heart lurched with a thousand feelings. Fear again. Dread. Pain and loss. But the worst was the sudden flare of hope, a wild surging that she didn't even know she was capable of. She struggled to smash it down, turning her face away and into Noah's chest, her hands gripping the fabric of his shirt.

"No."

She whimpered the word, her pain causing Noah instant agony. He saw the track of Gideon's fingertips and struggled with blinding impulses. The touch was too intimate. Jealousy. It was hurting Kestra. Protectiveness. It released the memory of trauma and that connection to evil that blanketed their joined minds in blackness so thick it was suffocating. Resentment. Fury. The blinding necessity to lash back, to fight, to destroy the source for all time.

"No."

This time it was Gideon who said the word.

It fell hard and harsh, a warning to the King and his whirlwind of uncontrolled emotions, and a rejection of the hand that reached out and clamped around Gideon's wrist. In his rush of emotion, Noah would crush Gideon's bones to dust if that was what it would take to make him cease hurting his mate.

"What manner of accident caused this?" Gideon directed the question to Kestra, who was already shaking her head in refusal. "This trauma is very old. You must have been quite young. They repaired your uterus, but you lost an ovary. Just the same, this level of scarring makes it impossible for you to carry a child."

Kestra sobbed as Gideon aired out her dirtiest laundry. Noah's death grip on Gideon's wrist fell away like dust in the wind. Kestra was keening, a terrible sound of grief and hurt unlike anything he had ever heard. It tore into him like thousands of blades, scorching him with agony, as if he were standing on the surface of the sun. He clasped her even tighter, sealing her to his pounding heart as he cradled her head in his hand. He felt her hot tears touch his skin at his collar. She then laughed a slightly wild laugh against Noah's neck.

"Are you ready for forever now?" she asked in a hot whisper. "Are you ready to be a King without an heir? A man with no hope of a child? Will you see me with all that beautiful, mindless passion now? Or will you look at me like all the rest-broken and defective?"

"Kestra," he said with soft, scolding pain. "I am ready for only one thing, and that is you. You are perfect for me. You are perfect to me." Noah raised hard eyes to the medic, but Gideon was moving to make his retreat. Legna was already in his mind and she snatched him out of the room with a teleporting pop.

"Look into my mind, baby, and understand me," Noah urged Kestra gently. "I have always thought to have a child one day, but I have lived over six centuries without one and felt no great loss, because my house literally runs over with fosterlings and very short kin who leave too many toys around. There is only one thing I have ever craved with all of my heart and soul. From the first time I saw my parents kiss and look at each other with the boundless love that only comes with the perfection of mated souls, I have hungered for my soul mate. She who would be Imprinted on me for all time. I have aspired to nothing as much as I have yearned for this one thing. Not my throne, not my power, not my scholarship. None of these has mattered to me with the intensity with which I have wanted the one who would look into my eyes with that level of love and devotion I saw in my parents' locked gazes, who would long for the same from me. The one. The only one.

"I have finally found you, baby, and nothing but Destiny herself can take you from me. Nothing you say will drive me from you. Nothing. Do you understand? You will be my love. I pray that I will be yours. I pray that I am worthy enough to earn it."

"Why me?" she asked, huge tears refracting the crystal blue of her eyes as she bored her gaze into his. "Why waste this on a woman who has never known love? Who can't even be sure she can feel it? A barren woman. A woman who is afraid of nothing except this one thing you're asking of me. You offer devotion, obsession, centuries where you believe you won't tire of me? I'm not that naive, Noah."

"Why do you use that word? Obsession? You keep using it, like a talisman to ward me off. I feel and know that scarred place within you, and it has nothing to do with your womb, Kestra. Tell me of this one who haunts you," he demanded fiercely. "This one who makes you so afraid to be loved and adored by me. The one who blackened those words for you forever, making them a curse instead of the blessing they truly are."

"The one who loved me so much that he would kill me rather than let anyone else have me?" She shuddered. "The one who couldn't accept that I never loved him and never would. He did everything so sweetly at first. His words were like poetry, and he was just as charming as you are, but jealousy and possessiveness reared up and he became ugly. Then the ugliness would fade back to charm as he begged for forgiveness. I forgave once, but never again after that. I turned away from the pretty words and the cajoling and he screamed for me. Day and night, walking in my every step, my every move interpreted as an invitation, my every rejection everyone else's fault except mine and his. Two years he haunted me. Stalked me. He hunted me like an animal and I lived in fear. I was fifteen when I met him, and I was seventeen when all that love and obsession finally turned to hatred and rage. I was seventeen when I came home from school and found my mother stabbed to death in the bathroom, my father slaughtered in the garage..."

Here she sobbed once, hard, the memories flooding her, flooding Noah, and he struggled to keep the violence of his reaction down. He knew what was coming. Like a tidal wave, it was an inevitability.

"Tell me," he managed to choke out, his arms tightening around her, his kiss in her hair.

"It never occurred to me he would still be there. I...I couldn't leave even if it had. Leave my mother? My father? What if they were still alive?" Her memory of being covered in her parents' blood washed into him, her vain attempts to stem the flow from fatal stab wounds in her mother's neck and throat. Blood on her hands. Blood on her cheerleading uniform.

And then hands in her hair.

Noah saw it without her recitation, and she knew he could see it. Hands in her hair, dragging her to a fresh point of slaughter. Fists against her face and body, endless pain as a rage she didn't deserve was loosed upon her. Now her blood, broken teeth, broken ribs, broken arms and hands as she tried to fend off the blows. An offensive hit that threw him off her body. Rolling over, crawling.

Screaming, fiery pain as the knife slammed through the back of her thigh, tearing through her flesh, the tip breaking off against her thighbone.

And then he was on her, beating her again, but refusing her the bliss of darkness so she would be awake for the rape that went on endlessly. The police arrived while he was still inside her, trying to spend himself again on the pleasure of her pain. In his final fury, he plunged the blunted knife low in her belly, a purposeful attempt to make himself the last to ever use her as a complete woman.

Even as she lay in shock, begging God for mercy, death, or at least unconsciousness, she watched them shoot her assailant in her own living room. It was the end of evil, but it didn't matter. He would never die now. He would always be there. Buried deep within her like the knife.

Yet she never shed a tear. She couldn't. He would win every time she did. And she swore from that day she never would. She would never be a victim again, and she would never love anyone for fear...

For fear.

And she never had. Until Noah. He had touched her. He brought with him urges that she found she couldn't resist. He resurrected wants and needs that had died with the plunge of a knife when she was only seventeen. She used sex as a control, a tool. Men who got too close were used and discarded coldly, assuring an end to friendship and caring. The very thing she had tried with him.

Except none had touched her like he had. None had made her burn, lit forbidden fires and desires. None but Noah had given her pleasure. She had thought pleasurable sex a lie or fairy tale; she had thought lovemaking an impossibility. Noah had come along and had changed everything, crawled under her defenses, and terror gripped her until she felt as though she were once more lying in helpless shock, waiting to see what horror would happen next.

She could fight anything; she could detonate the entire globe, sabotage the most powerful men in the world and bring them to their knees with both bombs and femininity. She was lethal, every step she took a danger to others.

Yet Noah had stripped her of her power, just as surely as he was setting off the changes to give her new ones. The Demon who claimed to be her Imprinted mate, claimed dependence on her for all time, promised the poetic possibilities of a depth of love unlike any she had known.

But one he had known.

Kestra suddenly raced into his memories, desperately needing to see what he knew. There was no stopping her as she rushed through them like a microfilm scanner, zipping to the one thing she wanted.

Sarah and Ariel.

His parents. Imprinted. The love, the touches, the need. Endless, beautiful need. Not obsession, but uniformity of living. Ariel had been so different from Sarah. He had passed on his position of Enforcer to his brother in order to marry her. He had become a warrior instead, just to please her. Still a fighter for his people, only different now. He was athletic in build, as dark as Sarah was light. Eyes of ice and blue like Kestra's, only far darker. Hair as black as night. Sarah was blond and light, delicate in frame and petite against the height of her mate. He was aggressive and spoke his opinion like law; she was more temperate, willing to see all sides, and lovingly willing to coax her husband into seeing them as well. She mediated when he stormed. She railed and he teased her to frustration. She enjoyed riding through the night, so he bought and bred her beautiful animals on which to do so. He worried she missed her life of royalty, knowing he was too intemperate to ever become King. She worried she couldn't give him the son he wanted so badly. But through it all they had loved. Rhythm, movement, and thought, all the harmonious symphony of two separate souls joined to make one. One in love. One in understanding. One in allowing those things that needed to be separate about them to maintain individual identity.

Ariel and Sarah. Hannah, Noah, and Magdelegna, the treasures of a wonderful union that had lasted for centuries. Sarah had given Ariel a son. Ariel had given Sarah a future King. Kestra saw them both within Noah. Aggression and excessiveness of desires and emotions, restricted by temperance and diplomacy. A scholar like his mother; a warrior like his father. The dark good looks of Ariel; the gentle, loving heart of Sarah.

Then she saw the tragedy of their deaths, as little dealt with as her own pain, as horrific as what she had suffered.

"Oh God..." she gasped, reaching to wrap her arms around his head, holding him tight and close. "Oh, Noah..."

The King fought back pain as she slid into his memories of that day, the day he and Gideon had found Sarah flayed apart, raped and eviscerated by one of their own. The very same horror as Kestra had suffered. Only, it had been a random act out of the blue instead of a purposeful torture, instead of a bomb ticking away waiting to explode. The child Magdelegna, only a few years old, looking for her mother and finding her before they could protect the scene. How to live with that child's expression? What choices to make? To suddenly be the head of the household as Sarah's mate fell into despair? How could Ariel exist without Sarah? He had felt every thought, every moment of torment and pain before she had died. Too far...too far from her to stop it. Failing her. Failing his children. Failing his heart and soul as halves of both were ripped away. Too far to stop his son from finding her. Too far to stop Legna from seeing what no toddler should ever see.

They had lost both parents that night. Ariel's devastation couldn't be assuaged. No Imprinted mate could survive the grief of such loss. They knew he would be gone within a year, one way or another, and there was nothing they could do about it. They didn't want to do anything about it. They wanted him to have mercy, to go and be with their mother beyond this lifetime. But even the dignity of his own death was denied Ariel. He was Summoned shortly after, taken by black magic and Transformed into a horrific monster. And Noah, having been made King by then and the pride of his parents, had to send his Enforcer out, ringing the death knell that would save the world from his ruined father. Jacob. Jacob, who had never known how much gratitude and love Noah had felt toward him for doing that service, for freeing his father from torture and torment.

And so ended a fairy tale. A love incorruptible.

"No..." Noah whispered against her ear as he heard the bitter ring of that thought. "You have to understand that the end of the story is unimportant, Kestra. All stories end. All life ends. Nature makes it so. And you know that it can be peaceful or it can be violent and cruel, but it is not the end that matters. It is everything that happens right up until that very last minute that matters most." He stroked fingers through her hair, knowing she listened as she held him tightly and breathed against his neck. "I know you understand this concept more than anyone I am likely to know. You had two paths before you when that terrible thing happened to you." They closed their arms tighter around each other in impulsive support. "Be forever a victim, or be anything and everything that savage thought he could take away from you. Oh, you make so much more sense to me now," he breathed, making her laugh, the tone low with spent tears.

"Don't get cocky. You don't know half the things about me you think you do," she taunted weakly.

"I am living in your mind," he reminded her in an intimate whisper. "I see the fire. I know Fire, Kestra. Come see mine, see the things I have done, justly and unjustly, all a part of learning my way through life. I see the fury you try to express with explosives. I feel the craving for deeply burning passion that you try to fill with danger. You are notorious? A mercenary? This is supposed to shock me or impress me? I wish to please you, so do let me know."

"You're mad as a hatter, you do know that, don't you?" She sighed the phrase, but there was no rancor to it, no power, and she was relaxed completely in his embrace. Her fingers slid into his loose hair, the curls still damp from his shower. She stroked through them slowly, the sensation singing through Noah as if a tuning fork had been struck to him. The vibration traveled from her fingertips and straight to his toes with some interesting pauses in between. "Nightwalkers, hmm?"

"Yes," he said carefully, not sure where her mind was going in spite of his newfound access to it. "Demons...my people. Vampires. Lycanthropes, Mistrals, Shadowdwellers, and more recently Druids like yourself. Although, your combined human DNA makes it possible for you to live in the sun, whereas we cannot."

"Thus the term Nightwalkers," she said dryly. "This sounds like a plot for a computer game or something." She paused a beat. "Why can't you go in the sun? I mean, what happens? Do you poof into dust-or is that just a Vampire thing?"

"Each species has a weakness to the sun, each reacts differently. For Demons it is like walking into a sleep chamber. Everything about it is designed to make us fall deeply asleep. In muted light, or light colored through stained glass, the effect is wonderful and comforting. We sleep beautifully during the day when the sun filters in." He slid a hand beneath her hair to palm the nape of her neck. He just felt better when he was touching her, soothing her somehow as he talked of wild and strange things. "Direct sunlight, for the young, is deadly. They can die if exposed too long. Adults will feel debilitating lethargy, making it impossible to move or defend themselves. Elders feel it, too, but those of us who are more powerful can defeat the effect for a period of time with tricks of power manipulation and the like."

"You're very powerful."

It wasn't a question. Especially not for one who could clearly look into a being and gauge exactly that. Plus, she had access to all of his thoughts and memories now. Some, when touched, would show a conflagration of power and furious firestorms.

"You will be, too," he told her. It wasn't meant to patronize. It was a stark truth. She had to be powerful in order to dampen his passionate fury. Very powerful. "They will develop faster now that you are remaining close to me. A Druid's power comes from the touch of his or her soul mate. Druids need to feed on that Demon's energy in order to recharge themselves."

"Feed?" She sounded momentarily horrified as she tensed against him.

"Mmm. Like a battery. A toy feeds off the battery to function. In our case, that means being in each other's presence. Being close. Over time, it will not be so restrictive a symbiosis. But we will always need to remain in contact."

Kestra slid out of his lap, kneeling to face him and sitting back on her heels. Noah trailed his fingers off her neck, clearly reluctant to let her go. She shook out her sugary hair, the straight fall settling a little wildly around her shoulders. Her bold eyes regarded him for a moment.

"I don't care for the idea of being dependant on anyone."

"It is not a dependence, Kestra. It is a symbiosis. I provide for you, and you provide for me. It is the Imprinting. I could not survive without you any more than you could without me. Look into my thoughts. See what it has been like for me. See the nights of the Hallowed moons and their waxing and waning the weeks around."

He showed her. Kes was struck instantly with memories of those nights. Dark and gripping urges. Primal impulses to give in to the elemental nature of his power. It was like an endless whisper, growing louder as the moon waxed, begging him to respond, to obey. It cried for fire and mischief. Flame and passion. The body burned with need, a violent ache that even a menagerie of women couldn't sate, so he'd stopped trying. He hadn't taken a woman to his bed during Samhain or Beltane for centuries now. He'd suffered alone, burned alone. For ages he had been saved by the loving presence of his sister as she grew into her wondrous powers of the Mind. Her humor and knowing ways, her ability to ease his emotions just with the power of her voice. It wasn't a cure, but enough to keep his sanity.

But he had been so afraid when she'd left his home to be with her mate, Gideon. And he'd been right to be fearful. Not for himself. No. He never truly thought of himself. He thought of the others. The innocents. He was certain that if he lost control, he would destroy everyone he loved. He had hung on, every year worse than the previous, but never showing it. Never showing his torture, in order to be a figure of support for those who looked to him for their own sanity.