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unbuttoned his ruined shirt and cast it aside, heading for
the bathroom.
    The war—the dracambri’s struggle for survival, really—had
fallen upon them in the dark of night, twenty years before the turn of the
second millennium. Even their prince and sovrán , Anthony Ciruelo, had
been unprepared. Darek had been a commander in Anthony’s army then, and his
battalion was the first struck. The first reports to trickle in to the High
Council and to Bane were of a powerful new species of demon—red eyes, black
hides, translucent in the darkness. Halfway around the world, Darek’s men were
caught off guard. The demons nearly wiped out the entire aerie in Melanesia.
    The loss stunned everyone. Anthony called their new enemy
the náladon , a word meaning “out of night” in the old tongue. The next
few years were spent doing little more than struggling to survive, hiding when
they could, fighting the náladon when they had to. Until Bane and other
scientists on the High Council were able to gather their resources and trace
their new enemy’s origins through DNA analysis, the military had nothing to go
on. What they found out would change the course of the war.
    Years later, Darek was at the home aerie in Norway when an
exhausted Bane arrived to deliver the news to Anthony. The náladon were
a hybrid species—half dracambri, half idani and stronger than either. He was
skeptical—interspecies pairings had never before produced a viable pregnancy,
let alone offspring—but the research was solid. Someone had engineered a way to
make dracambri-idani hybrids that thrived. What was more, the sheer numbers of náladon suggested that a breeding program had been under way for some time.
    Anthony’s response was bleak. “We are at war with our
children.” Who would do such a thing—and why?
    That night, Darek and Bane discussed that very question on
the veranda over a bottle of one-hundred-year-old Scotch. It was there that their
partnership was formed.
    Bane stood in front of the bathroom mirror and had a look at
the three deep parallel cuts over his right pectoral muscle. They weren’t too
bad. One shift would take care of them. If Darek had really meant to hurt him,
he could have shifted further, added in the anticoagulant glands at the base of
the dragon’s claws. Bane started the shower and stepped in.
    Once Anthony gave their plan the go-ahead, Darek transferred
to intelligence work, with Bane as his handler and sometime partner. Whoever
was behind the náladon breeding program had been careful. The idani knew
the engineer by one name only, and it wasn’t exactly a revealing one. “ La
vedova ”—“the widow” in Anthony’s native Italian. According to the idani,
she’d come to them one at a time, offering them a near-irresistible deal. If
they signed her contract in blood and underwent a series of injections, they
could have access to an unending stream of inexhaustible men—dragon-shifters.
In exchange, any resulting offspring would be la vedova ’s property.
    Most of the idani didn’t believe the fertility shots would
work, which was all the more reason to take la vedova up on her offer.
If the shots didn’t work, there would be no offspring. The idani would get all
the men they wanted with no consequences. By the time they found out the
injections did work, it was too late—for everyone.
    The water cooled Bane’s skin but did nothing for the heavy
ache between his legs. He kept picturing Lily’s startled eyes after he’d kissed
her, glazed with a hunger she obviously hadn’t expected. Eavesdropping on her
thoughts, he’d felt each new sensation as she experienced it. The scent of her
need had been intoxicating. It had taken every ounce of willpower he had to
walk away.
    He wrapped his hand around the base of his cock, picturing
those soft, soft lips of hers in its place. He reached climax with just a few
good, hard strokes, leaning against the wall and groaning aloud as it overtook
him with