“Why would you want to help the mortals fight?” I asked Baltic, momentarily distracted by the idea of a dragon interfering with human issues.

He smiled. “Have you never beheld the sight of a battlefield, a sword gripped tightly in one hand, your shield in the other, a blood-enraged destrier between your legs? Have you not breathed deeply of the scent of blood and bowels and earth as mortals slaughtered each other? Have you never felt the battle lust grip your being, your heart pounding so loud it almost drowns out the screams of men, your arm burning with the strain of hacking and hewing, slashing first to the left to take down a pikeman, then to the right to cut the legs out from under an attacking infantryman?”

“No,” I said, feeling faintly sick at the picture that rose in my mind.

He shrugged. “Then you would not understand. Fiat, you may leave.”

The penny dropped then. “This is your house?” I asked, feeling slightly sick at the thought of such a magnificent structure in his possession. It should be mine, a little voice in my head demanded.

“Yes.” He flicked a glance my way. “I had it built as a gift for my mate.”

“Ysolde?” The thought that the house was Ysolde’s made me feel a smidgen better, although I couldn’t quite decide why. For all I knew, she could have been just as destructive as Baltic, although I suspected not.

His gaze shifted from me to the paneled wall, but I doubted he was really seeing it. For a moment, for a tiny little moment in time, Baltic’s expression softened, his eyes going from a hard, glittering obsidian to something with shadows, like a shaft of sunlight piercing a deep pond. His voice changed, as well, losing some of its clipped cadence, the words striking a richer tone, more Slavic in flavor. “She helped me design the house, but she would have no other hand working on the gardens, so she laid them out herself. She loved flowers, wanted them blooming year-round. I told her this wasn’t the climate for that, but she had been born here, and would not hear of living anywhere else.”

“What I saw of them looked exquisite,” I said, meaning every word. I was filled with a strange sense of kinship, of sharing a great love with this man, but that was insane. It didn’t make sense. I shook my head, trying to disperse the odd feeling.

“She wanted to have the acceptance ceremony in the garden, surrounded by honeysuckle and lime trees,” he said, still looking inward at the memories. “She said it was fitting that she should formally become my mate here, in the house I built for her.”

“You did an outstanding job with the house. It’s almost beyond description; it’s so perfect. I don’t know why, but it seems almost to speak to me. It’s as if . . . I don’t know. It’s hard to put into words. It’s just . . . perfect.”

“Yes, it is.” He turned back to me with a half smile on his lips, and suddenly, I was in his arms, caught up in the memories he had shared, in the emotions that the house stirred within me.

“You loved her,” I said, my breath on his lips.

“More than life itself,” he answered, his mouth brushing mine.

“Whoa! I didn’t see that one coming!” I heard Jim say just as Baltic’s arms tightened around me. The sense of kinship grew, accompanied by a rightness that filled me with vague shadow memories, images that danced on the edge of my awareness.

“May? Goodness—May?” Cyrene’s voice drifted through a red haze of fierce need in me, but I could no more attend to it than I could stop the rush of emotion inside me.

Until Baltic kissed me.

The second his lips possessed mine, a cold wave of dislike squelched the fires the dragon shard wanted so desperately to fan.

“Ysolde,” he murmured against my mouth.

I put both hands on his chest and shoved him back hard, catching the fleeting expression of surprise in his eyes before it turned to calculating anger.

“I am not Ysolde,” I said simply.

“May, what are you doing?” Cyrene tugged at my arm, giving Baltic a wary look. “I know you are jealous of all the women who are no doubt trying to seduce Gabriel, but this is not the answer! You must trust me on this—I have much more experience with men than you do, and I can assure you that trying to make a man jealous by toying with another one is not the way to go. It just ends up very poorly, usually with one man dead.”

“It was the shard,” I said, still feeling it thrum inside me, and shaken to my very core by what had happened. When the shard reacted to Magoth, I knew it for what it was—an attempt to seek power. But this was different—this was tied up to the faintest shadows of Ysolde. She had loved Baltic, I realized at that moment. She had loved him desperately, absolutely, beyond all reason. And he had built a house for her, just to please her, because he, too, loved with an all-consuming passion. I could only guess at the depth of the pain he felt at losing her . . . but it did not excuse his actions. I lifted my chin and gave him a long, level look. “The shard is what’s making me react to the house . . . to you.”

Baltic looked bored. “You bear the shard my mate once possessed. I have no doubt she imprinted something of herself upon it. All the more reason for me to have it.” He turned to leave and saw Fiat. He frowned. “What are you still doing here? I told you that I had no further need of you. You may leave.”

A parade of emotions passed over Fiat’s too-handsome face; disbelief was quickly followed by anger, which settled into a deep fury. I’ll say this for him—he kept his emotions in check, the only hint of his feelings visible in the glint to his eyes.

“Take them below,” Baltic said, waving toward Cyrene and me as he turned to leave the room.

Two dragons emerged from the shadows, one of whom was the man who’d accompanied him to Gabriel’s house.

“Below where?” Jim asked somewhat nervously, pressing into me. “Below as in a comfortable suite with digital TV and a hot tub?”

Baltic paused at the door and smiled again. It wasn’t a nice smile. “It pains me to be clichéd, but I believe in keeping a dungeon traditional in its accoutrements. You might not find the torture devices as entertaining as digital television, but I certainly will.”

“No,” I said simply.

Baltic gave me a disbelieving look. “You will not defy me, mate.”

“I think I just did,” I said calmly, hoping my usual placid expression was hiding the fact that my heart was beating wildly, my palms suddenly sweaty. “I will not move one foot from this spot until you tell us why you’ve had Fiat kidnap us.”