Vincent slid a hand under her, at the small of her back, lifting her h*ps in a tilt better suited for the fury he was about to unleash on her. Then he was thrusting into her, trying to make it past the initial overwhelming sensations to seek out the rest. This connection was so satisfying just the way it was, just that alone, that there was a danger of remaining too content. So he moved. He risked throwing off that sense of perfection and moved. And the moment he did, all things primal and fierce took over. Perfection was one thing, but now … now he must claim this perfection as his own. They must stake their claim for all time as the dominant, the ruler … the pharaoh. In his time, Ram had been one of the most powerful and effective rulers of Egypt. He had brought forth some of the greatest wonders known to man, wonders still respected to this day. Vincent had proven to be more than worthy to host such a being. But both were brought low in her body, in her magnificence. And neither would let her go. Neither could. It was as though something inside of them would be destroyed if she escaped them.

Vincent listened to her gasp and squeak and moan, and it gave him a feeling of delight he’d never forget. As he pushed into her, he was determined she would never forget that moment either. He thrust deep enough, he felt, to reach the elusive creature inside Docia who had said so little and reached out to him not at all.

You think you belong to another, and he might think you belong to him, but I will prove us all wrong. I will make the forbidden my own. And I will make myself her servant in all new ways.

Vincent began to tremble to his core, shaking in the face of the magnitude of what was coming. They who had not quailed under any threat or enemy in aeons of time were now humbled and afraid. Afraid they would not be what she needed. What she wanted. What she would keep. Afraid they wouldn’t please her enough to satisfy something so special.

With frustration and desire clawing through him emotionally and physically, he listened to her cries of pleasure, struck into her until he felt her nails ripping through his flesh on his back. Then, unable to contain it any longer, his release rushed up on him. He cried out heedlessly, came into her just as recklessly. All rhythm gone. All well-laid plans destroyed. He felt her sobbing against his lips, realizing he’d never once let his mouth fall away from hers.

And yet still he kissed her. As they both gasped for breath, as she cried ridiculously indefinable tears, as his hot wetness overflowed their meshed bodies and stained their thighs. Docia had felt everything he had felt and more.

“More” being the sudden revival of the spirit inside of her. As if their coming together had awakened her, revitalized her, given her all the strength she needed to come into being. Docia’s body hummed in the aftermath of pleasure and vibrated with the energy of the symbiont.

They didn’t fall apart. They couldn’t bring themselves to separate. Instead, Vincent wrapped his arms tightly around her and rolled them over so her body came to blanket his. Her weight was the only thing that kept him from floating away from the high buzzing through him.

And so, mouths still adjoined, still exchanging kisses up until the very last moment, they let the exhaustion of daylight wash over them at last.

Hours later, at the cusp of evening, Ram woke with a start and an inward breath.

That inward breath brought the scent of sex onto his palate. He turned his head the slightest bit and his lips touched a female forehead, the loose, unnecessary stitches inside perfectly healed skin and the new growth of about an inch of hair telling him much time had passed and many things had changed. As if the understanding that he was nakedly entwined with the woman who ought to be his queen were not enough.

He and Vincent were once again in their usual, agreed-upon positions. Ram the front man and the dominant for the most part, Vincent the background observer with his attention to details, his eye for danger, and his leveling opinions that kept Ram clear and relevant.

Ram wanted to lash out at his alter ego, to scream at him for what he had done, to shame him for the betrayal to king and kind. Because for all he said he was not beholden to the ways of the Bodywalkers, Vincent knew that he was. He knew their ways were now his ways. He knew he had accepted that long ago when he had accepted such a powerful and positional Body-walker as Ram.

But Ram also knew it would be hypocritical to blame Vincent. He had been there. He had been just as present. He had made love to Docia and her symbiont just as eagerly as Vincent had. Ram had thrown aside all protests the minute he had felt the heat of her. And the minute they had moved inside of her, Ram had instantly bridged the distance back to Vincent, as though the connection had broken the separating spell completely, as if it had energized his soul into being.

Ram swore softly, an Egyptian curse, something he didn’t do very often, knowing how powerful words could be among his race. What would happen now? How would he even face Menes, his longtime friend and respected leader, knowing he had willingly done such a thing with the woman who carried the spirit Menes had once said was forever cleaved to his? There were those who looked on the Bodywalkers’ existence as a long-standing curse, but Menes had always claimed that it was anything but, for without it he would never have known Hatshepsut, a queen who had ruled in a dynasty far beyond his own.

What he had felt, what he had experienced, was exactly what he had imagined must pass between the besotted king and queen. He even tested the thought of having to live life without Docia, and the immediate rise in his heart rate and chill on his skin, the vicious rush of rage threatening to boil up over him … oh yes. This was what he had imagined it to be. Blind and furious and fabulous. Everything and anything.

The only trouble was … she was not supposed to be his. What would Menes do if he came out of the Ether and found his queen in the arms of another? What would it do to their people? Their political structure? The Politic Bodywalkers would have no leader, no strength … and the zealot priests and priestesses would gain the foothold they had always fought for.

So no matter how much it hurt him, no matter what it did to him, he had to face one of two choices. Either he had to turn his back on her and leave her to Menes, a thought that felt like a violation in the worst degree, a thought that made Vincent balk furiously and violently within him, or he had to …

He had to fight Menes to become ruler of all Body-walkers. He had to fight to be pharaoh.

“Ramses the Great, ruler of all Egypt, whom men have cowered beneath … for whom women have thrown themselves na**d at his feet. Mighty warrior. Brilliant king. Brought low by a simple female.”

Ram tipped his head so he could look into her face. She was sleepy-eyed and smiling up at him, but he could tell immediately by the strength and cadence of her speech that this was not the quirky little Docia.

“My queen,” he said softly, not knowing what else to say, how else to greet her. She was his queen, just as any man’s perfect mate would always be his queen.

“I am your queen,” she agreed as she rose onto her elbows, “and you must always treat me as such. Promise me you will.”

“I will,” he agreed with a nod. “I always have.”

“Now there you are mistaken, Ram. You have never so much as looked at me before. Never so much as touched me. Barely spoken a greeting or politeness to me.”

One of Ram’s gold brows lifted in curious confusion. “You know that is not true. I have always treated Menes’s wife, until now, with exemplary respect and deference.”

“Ah, but I have never been Menes’s wife,” she said.

Ram frowned, pulling back to look into her eyes. Docia’s sweet brown eyes had warmed, if possible, into something richer, deeper, and, he felt immediately, far more sensual than was normally at the ready. There was a worldliness now, the confidence that came with having lived more than one life, having made all the mistakes of an original and even more as a carbon. But as he looked hard at her, there it was, that unmistakable flash of shyness that so belied the strength of spirit that lay beneath. But he knew it. He felt it. He had felt it from the inside out and then some. She had no secrets from him after that.

Except perhaps one.…

“You are not Hatshepsut,” he breathed, his hand against her face drawing her so close that nothing could enter her eyes without his notice.

“No, I am not,” she agreed. “And before you become enraged, I beg you to remember I was not strong enough to say so before now. It was not my intention to deceive you. You made an assumption, Ram, and I had no way of telling you otherwise. Until now.”

Ram couldn’t speak for a long moment. Hell, he could hardly breathe. The ramifications of her revelation went so far in every direction that it was impossible to wrap his brain around it.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

Her nose twitched and he had a suspicion she wanted to say “Docia” just to mess with him, then rethought herself under the circumstances and considered it wiser not to. It showed a delicious combination of spunk and wisdom that he found ridiculously stimulating. Of course, the fact that she smelled like him at his lustiest and her at her sexiest might have a lot to do with it. She smelled so incredibly delicious that his mouth was watering. It stunned him that he could be so distracted at such a crucial moment. All he could think about was kissing that impishly smiling mouth and driving back into that hot body of hers where he’d known such a dynamic sense of perfection.

“My name is Tameri,” she told him, and the lowering of her lashes and gentle inclining of her forehead told him a great deal. It told him she had never been royalty. It told him respect and deference came naturally to her. But other than that …

“Tameri, I have never heard your name before or touched your spirit.” He was positive he would have known it if he had. He would have felt it if he had so much as brushed past her.

“That is probably because I have not come from the Ether very often,” she said softly, as though it were a confession that lightened her soul. But why? There were many of them who spent long periods, much longer than the requisite century, in the Ether. “And when I have …” She licked her lips nervously. “When I have, I have been priestess.”

Ram launched to his knees, dumping her onto her back, suddenly seeing a viper in his bed. There was no describing, though, the clash of feelings inside him— knowing she was one of those hateful men and women who were part of the rending apart of their people, even as he knew there would be no living without her.

She sat up quickly, her hand reaching for him, grasping his biceps where he was as yet healing from the deep marks she had made on him. Right above the forearm, where iridescent scales shimmered with agitated movement around a dagger.

“Please! Listen to me! Open your heart and open your mind,” she begged him, her eyes that gorgeous mink he’d grown so quickly to love. “I stayed in the Ether because I couldn’t bear it! The war. The constant fighting between the Politic and the Templar. I have so much beautiful faith, no different from your own! Only my faith imbues me with spells and mysticism that you think is poisonous and wrong. It’s not. I swear it. It’s the wielder that makes the difference. The intent that turns a spell or a power to poison. Once upon a time, the Templars’ perspective was just and justifiable. Their demand for a ruling voice was understandable. Your government would have us all exiled. Or so it feels to us. So why not give us room for voice so we can keep that from happening?

“But over the centuries the Templars have lost sight of what we wanted originally. In the beginning we only wanted fairness and to stop being blamed for the Body-walkers’ very existences. But somewhere along the line, Odjit and the others have perverted the cause into a demand for full power, and others have drifted along on the same path because she and the other head priests and priestesses have made us so hated that we have little other choice. Listen to me, please,” she begged him further. “Please don’t hate me. Don’t shun Docia because of what I am. Don’t dismiss us out of hand because I am just a little bit different than you are.”

Ram hesitated, the depth of the war within him in his eyes and across his features. There was so much acrimony inside of him, built up after he had met so many deaths at the hands of Templars like her jockeying for power, jockeying to assassinate the rightful pharaoh of them all. He had watched time and again as they had murdered his queen and left his king to suffer, or vice versa. He had felt them torture his bodies or tear through them outright to reach his king. He had not died a natural death in such a long time. Such a long time. Granted, so much about their very existences seemed unnatural, but still …

A priestess. A Templar. He had bedded an enemy.

Yet he could not dismiss it as a mere bedding, something so crass. She knew it, too. It was in her damnably precious eyes.

“Think, Ramses,” she said softly. “You were willing to break with tradition enough to risk taking the woman you thought was your queen, the woman you thought belonged by Menes’s side, because you knew it was the only right thing to do … because your heart told you. Both spirits within you made it undeniably clear, just as both within me felt it to our very core.” She brushed gentle fingertips to her chest, between her pretty breasts, making him realize she was cold. The chill of the early evening was rippling across her skin and her ni**les. “If you can break with tradition enough to do that, then perhaps you are the one who can turn away from past prejudices enough to see how very lost some of us are. Perhaps you are the one that might realize that instead of offering us swords and violence, perhaps if you hold out an empty, welcoming hand of forgiveness, this war might dissolve before your very eyes.” She moved closer to him, her gaze imploring and soft, her lips a breath away from his. “Teach the Politic to love us as equals, to welcome us like long-lost lovers, and bring us in as friends rather than vilifying us as enemies that must be punished. Why would we give up this war when our only choice otherwise is to rot in exile or in Menes’s prisons?”