If he could.

One last look at Caine, then a scream echoed from above. A woman. Mina’s blood ran cold as her head jerked up.

Steel screamed as Leo drew his blade. “Go, Mina.” He stepped in front of her. “Come, Caine. Let us see how well you’ve taught me.”

The moment he attacked, Mina darted forward, slipping past the deadly duke and ducking beneath his sword as he lashed out at her too. Then Leo pushed hard, whipping his blade across Caine’s cheek.

“Run!” Leo yelled at her, taking a countering blow across his forearm that he could have dodged. Distracting Caine for her.

No time now for all the things she should have said. Mina started running, lungs burning from the exertion of it.

I love you, her aching heart whispered.

* * *

“Bloody hell, boy. This is foolishness! I don’t wish to hurt you!” The sword lashed at Leo’s face, whip quick, but Caine pulled away from the blow.

Leo parried. Steel screeched on steel and he was driven back. “Then stand aside.”

“You’ll destroy everything that we have worked for!”

“I’ll create something that you never dreamed of,” Leo corrected and lunged.

“With that bitch?”

Leo managed to rake the tip of his blade across Caine’s face. “You will speak courteously of my duchess, or not at all.”

Caine spat blood, his pale blue eyes reddened with fury. “You bloody fool. She’s the one, isn’t she? The one you think you’ll marry? Do you honestly believe you can trust her? She’ll betray you.”

Fury fired in Leo’s blood. “No, she won’t.” He drove forward under Caine’s arm, smashing his shoulder into his father’s ribs. They both went down and Leo rolled, swiftly coming to his feet but staggering on two different levels of stairs. He didn’t dare look down. “This is about my mother, isn’t it? You think she betrayed you.”

He’d never once referred to his mother. That was one lesson he’d learned as a little boy. Caine had beaten him the one time he’d dared ask about her.

The words worked now too. Caine’s eyes blazed and he whipped the tip of his sword across Leo’s face. Blood splashed against the gleaming white walls and fire flared along Leo’s cheek, his lip stinging as the craving virus set to work repairing it.

“Don’t you even speak her name!” A roar of fury and Caine drove back Leo, who stumbled down the stairs, trying to keep his feet under the onslaught.

“I damned well will if I want to,” Leo spat back, darting to the left and cutting low across Caine’s thigh. “She was my bloody mother, damn you.” Lunging forward, he trapped Caine’s sword between them, shoving him back against the wall. Caine’s head cracked on the marble and Leo tried to slide his sword against the bastard’s throat, but his hand was trapped too. Somehow he pinned Caine there, his fist curling in the bastard’s collar. “My mother. And you never let me mention her name. Why? Because you weren’t man enough for her? Because she found another man to replace you?”

“You little cur.” Caine shoved him back with a strength Leo couldn’t match.

He caught himself, fingertips touching the steps as his father lunged. He blocked the expected blow, but again just barely. Caine didn’t bother with finesse, smashing blow upon blow down on Leo’s upraised sword. Blood rained from Leo’s arms and hands.

Then Caine turned away, kicking at a Nighthawk who ran up the stairs. The man flew back through the air, tumbling head over heels down the marble staircase and crashing into his fellows far below.

Caine turned, baring his teeth. “You will not speak of your mother like that! She was a good woman! The best.”

Leo paused.

“Do you think that I didn’t know? Who do you think encouraged her to lie with him? You were the child that I engineered. You were mine. I made you. I sculpted you. Mine! My son. Not his!”

“What the hell are you saying?”

“I couldn’t give her children.” Caine’s nostrils flared. “A childhood bout of mumps. I knew it and I still married her, knowing how much she wanted them. She was so furious with me, and then I saw the way Todd looked at her. It was an arrangement, nothing more.”

The blood drained out of Leo’s face. “Why?” he whispered.

“To make her happy,” Caine said, his sword lowering. For the first time in his life, he looked uncertain. “Marguerite was my weakness, and I killed her with your birth.” His voice roughened. “I killed my Marguerite.”

“Then all of this was punishment?” Leo demanded. “Every beating you ever gave me, every time you—”

“Punishment? I made you strong. Clever. I made you a man who could be a duke, the way my own father molded me.” Caine laughed roughly. “You want to know about punishment? You should have been raised by that brute.”

Leo’s sword tip lowered, trailing on the floor. Everything he had ever known about this man he now saw in a new light. “I hated you.” And wanted his love—his praise—just as strongly.

“As I hated him,” Caine said, tipping his chin up a little proudly. “One day you will thank me.”

“You’re mad.”

“So this is the end of it?” Caine asked. “You’ll put down your sword? Surrender?”

Leo looked down at it, spattered with the vampire’s blackened blood. “No.” He met his father’s eyes. “But I will accept yours.”

The Nighthawks were nearly upon them. Leo saw Lynch kick Richard Maitland, his old nemesis in the Coldrush Guards, in the face. Lynch was still wearing the same bloody clothes he’d worn that day at court, but he looked none the worse for his time in the cells.

Caine raised his sword, his teeth bared. Seconds dragged out. Caine’s gaze jerked to the spill of Nighthawks running up the stairs toward them.

“After all,” Leo said, with dawning certainty, “you won’t kill me. And not even you can fight off an entire legion of Nighthawks.”

“What the hell have you done?”

Leo laughed at that. “I’m overthrowing the prince consort. Haven’t you realized yet?”

Leo’s sword lowered. Caine stared at it for a moment, looking baffled, then let his own relax. “And do what? Sit on the throne? Do you actually think they’d accept you? Or whatever puppet you put there?”