One spring, he heard a tale through traders, of a ruling family in Constantinople that looked for answers to arcane mysteries and paid good money to honest men. Trusting his instincts, he began to journey to the city.

One morning, early at his campsite on the road, he bolted awake to a sharp thrust of pain, though he had sustained no physical injury. The sharpness soon faded, but the pain stayed with him, a ghostly ache that infused him with urgency.

Leaving his company to follow as fast as they could, he rushed ahead to the nearest port city and boarded the first ship he could find. A couple of weeks later he arrived in Constantinople, only to hear a story of an inexplicable assassination attempt that had left a cherished daughter lingering near death, and her wealthy family shocked and grieving.

In the bathroom, Michael shook his head, his breathing growing heavy and uneven. He fell, and the howling dark consumed him.

Mary pounded on the bathroom door with the flat of her hand, a quick, urgent staccato. “Are you all right?”

“Leave me alone,” he said in a hoarse voice.

The memories continued to slice at him.

Try as he might, he couldn’t gain an audience with the wealthy family. They had closed themselves off from the public and were surrounded with a small private army.

“I can’t,” Mary said. “I’m worried about you. Talk to me.”

“Go away,” he managed to say.

So he had to break in to their citadel. He felt the cold stone beneath his hands as he scaled their walls, night shrouding him in a purple gauze of shadows. Combing patiently through the halls and apartments, and hiding when necessary, he eventually found her sickroom.

The guard at the door had been one of the Deceiver’s tools. He killed the man easily enough, but he knew that the Deceiver had sensed his presence. He entered the room and barred the door, but it was only a delay. Death rushed in a rage to snatch back its prey. They did not have much time.

Inside, the room held a scent like violets and putrefaction, and the air was tainted with the twist of her suffering spirit.

He walked over to the bed and lit a lamp.

The images. After being buried for so long the images assaulted him, as vivid as if they had happened yesterday.

The black fan of her long hair on the silk cushion. The haggard beauty of her face, carved with the graciousness of her spirit. The gorgeous, dark eyes that opened, immense with pain and dilated with opium.

The smell. It came from her body.

“Do I know you?” she asked. She could only manage a mere thread of sound.

He stroked her hair. She was so lovely. She was a treasure beyond the price of all princes. “We’ve known each other for a very long time,” he told her in a tender whisper. “I’ve come to help you.”

Her gaze lit with the fragile luminosity of wonder. She breathed, “I’ve been looking for you.”

He caressed her cheek, her dry lips. He whispered, “I’ve been looking for you.”

When she smiled at him, it lit the entire world. “Where have you been?”

Where have you been? Not, where are you from? Because even in those first few moments of reconnection, it was clear that they both knew where they were from.

“Florence,” he said. He smiled back at her. How could he not? His was an old, savage soul, and she had, in an instant, become the single, shining jewel that lived inside of him. “I’m sorry it took me so long to find you.”

“Have you found any of the others?” Cold, delicate fingers like twigs touched at his weathered face.

He shook his head. “No, only you.” Time winged away from them. He wanted to lunge after it and capture it in both desperate hands. He closed his eyes, touched his lips to the tips of her fingers, and with every ounce of passion inside of him, he willed everything to be different. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Maryam,” she murmured. “You?”

“Michel.”

No matter how desperately he tried to capture it, time would not halt its precipitous flight. Guards shouted outside in the hall, and the pounding began at the door.

He had still hoped against hope at that point. He entertained wild thoughts of tying her arms around his neck and scaling the outside wall, until he peeled back the covers and saw the leather corset. He slit the laces and opened it, and as the support fell away, he saw the long purple-edged wound gape open. He caught a glimpse of glistening muscle or organ before he wrenched his gaze away.

Curled on the bathroom floor of the cabin, Michael gagged.

The tiny movements of her rib cage, the ruined br**sts, were a torture to witness.

The household guard began to take an axe to the door.

“I’m not going to get better,” she said in that ghost voice. “I’m so sorry. I would for you, if I could.”

He kissed her forehead, her eyes and her beautiful mouth.

“You’re going to get better,” he said. He settled on the bed beside her, moving with infinite care so that he did not cause her any more pain, and he laid his head on the silken pillow beside hers. At the same time, he pulled his stiletto and held it tucked against his arm so that she could not see what he did. “You will like my home, I think. I have cows, and a few sheep. In the winter, there is snow on the fields and nothing to do but laze abed with a fire roaring in the fireplace.”

She breathed, “I would like to see snow.”

The guards were halfway through the door. In a few more blows, it would splinter. He touched his lips to her temple. “A noblewoman nearby has gardens filled with irises and azaleas. We will make love in the winter, and I will steal flowers for you in the spring.”

“And I must learn how to milk a cow.” For a few fleeting moments, amusement and tenderness had banished the shadows in her thin face.

He rose up and leaned over her. “We will live until we are very old,” he said against her lips. “And we will be happy right up until the moment we die.”

“I love this dream,” she whispered. It was the last thing she said to him.

As the final blow from the axe splintered the door down the middle, he slipped his stiletto under her ribs and pierced her heart. Her spirit slipped so easily from her body, with a relieved sigh and the lingering brush of an insubstantial caress.

He’d had a few moments in which to decide against escape, when the realization of empty years stretched ahead of him. While he knew he had done the only thing he could, that he had been right to release her from her torment, something broke inside him.

Nothing mattered anymore, not their eons-long struggle, not the destruction of the Deceiver, nothing. Guards poured into the room. With an expert flip, he reversed the stiletto in his hand, positioned it and thrust it into his own heart. The gush of warm liquid flowed over his fingers, and his body settled beside hers on the bed.

Then he knew no more.

In the bathroom, Michael curled on his side and pressed a hand to his chest as his heart kicked in wild arrhythmia. He was aware, as if from a great distance, of strong, slender arms circling him, a feminine body pressing against his side and fingers pressing against his carotid artery.

Michael, Mary said in his head. He turned his head away at the intrusion, pressing his sweating cheek against the cold, tiled floor.

Broken.

Radiance cascaded into him. It surrounded and filled him, and soothed his heart back into rhythm. He gasped as it drenched the raw shards of darkness inside, and his spirit gulped at it with ravenous eagerness. He didn’t think he could ever get enough.

Michael. She pulled him onto his back and passed a hand over his hair. I have been looking for you.

Her serious, blue gaze was very different from those great, lovely dark eyes from so long ago, but he would still know her anywhere. Anywhere. He gasped, I have been looking for you.

She was stronger than she looked. She drew his upper body up and cradled his head against her shoulder. I would have loved to learn how to milk a cow.

And I would have loved to make love in the winter, and steal flowers in the spring. He closed his eyes. He had never been a man of peace, except with her.

She rocked him. The memories are terrible, but they are in the past. Don’t let them consume you. Acknowledge them, and let them go.

He nodded. Her physical scent and psychic energy mingled in his senses until he didn’t know where one began and the other left off. It was all the same: warm, fragrant, golden. It nourished him with a lavish, lustrous generosity. Twisting up, he wrapped an arm around her neck. “This was why you didn’t want me driving.”

She laid her warm, soft cheek against his. “You didn’t seem to remember, and—well, I knew how hard my memories have hit me. I would have protected you from them, if I could.”

“I needed to know.” He nosed her neck and rested his lips against the healthy, vital pulse in her throat. Alive, she was alive again.

She pulled back and cupped his whiskery cheek. “I’m going to run you a bath,” she said. “And I’m going to find you some clean clothes. Are you hungry?” He shook his head. “No? All right. Then afterward we’re going to rest, Michael. Mike. Does anyone call you Mike?”

Nobody called him anything. Only Astra knew that his name was Michael. He stood when she stood and let the soothing patter of her voice wash over him like a gentle rain. “You can call me whatever you like,” he said.

She put the lid down on the toilet and pushed him toward it. Obediently he sat.

“Can I? Mike,” she said. Her voice was thoughtful as she turned to start the water running in the bathtub. She bent to test the water’s temperature with her fingers then adjusted one of the knobs. The new T-shirt came just over the curve of her ass. She glanced over her shoulder with a small, calm smile. “Trevor.”

“Aloysius, even,” he said. “Or hey you.”

Whatever she called him, he would always answer.

She straightened and flicked water from her fingers. “I think Michael suits you best. We’ll stick with that.”

“All right.” He leaned against the back of the toilet and let exhaustion sweep over him.

“I found your razor and shaving cream earlier,” she said. She pulled the items out of the medicine cabinet behind the mirror over the sink. Her gaze ran down his lax posture. “You’re too tired to shave, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. He was so tired, he could lie down and die if he thought it would offer him any chance at peace.

“Not to worry. I’ll do it for you, if you’ll let me.”

Incredulous, he watched her wet a washcloth with warm water. After coaxing him to tilt back his head, she placed the cloth on his cheeks and jaw. Then she squirted a mound of shaving cream into one small, capable hand. She lathered his face, rinsed her fingers, turned off the bathwater, and started drawing the razor over his skin with such a light, deft touch he barely felt it.

He regarded her in mute amazement. He couldn’t remember anyone doing such an intimate, caring thing for him before. Certainly no woman had ever done so. Perhaps one or two might have wanted to, but he had always rejected female overtures with a clinical efficiency. Relationships bred vulnerability, and he had known from a very early age he wasn’t going to lead a normal life. Besides, all the women he had met had been too pastel.

“Mary,” he said when she turned to rinse the razor under a trickle of warm water.

“Yes?”

His grave gaze met hers. “Are you fussing now?”

The corners of her eyes crinkled as she looked down at him. When she drew the razor across his cheek, it felt like a caress. “I think we can say I’m officially fussing now.”

* * *

WHILE HE WIPED his face with the washcloth, Mary found clean clothes for him and set them beside the tub. She had to step between his long, outstretched legs in order to move around the tiny bathroom.

A spark lightened his sober gaze. He took hold of her forearm, and she stopped moving. Watching her steadily, he stroked the callused ball of his thumb along the sensitive skin inside her elbow. Sexuality shimmered between them again. She gave him a crooked smile back, shook her head and slipped out of the room so he could bathe in private.

Linen, blankets and pillows were stored in tubs underneath the bed, packed with rings of cedar. She made the bed efficiently with old, soft cotton sheets, two cotton blankets, and a heavy, insulated green bedspread. With only the fireplace for heating, the cabin would get cold at night.

Then she tackled her neglected hair with the travel brush from her purse. The shoulder-length tangled mane was already partially dried, and she had a miserable fight with it. She had just managed to wrestle it into a simple braid when Michael strode out of the bathroom, his dark, wet hair slicked against his well-shaped head. He wore only black cotton pants that rode low at his hips, revealing a long washboard abdomen, and carried socks and a T-shirt in one hand.

She had known he was big, of course, but she hadn’t realized how massive he was across his chest, arms and shoulders. He had the heavy, mature muscles of a man who had spent his life fighting.

She forgot what she was doing and stared at him with her mouth open. Her body forgot how much it had been kicked around, as her long-dormant sexuality came to singing life, not as a brief shimmer of possibility this time but as a searing bolt of urgency. Red heat settled into a sharp, throbbing ache between her legs.

Then she closed her mouth with a snap, spun around and turned down the bed, her hands lingering unnecessarily to twitch the bedspread into better alignment. Maybe while she was fussing at the bed, she could find a way to stuff this attraction under the mattress.

Of all the times for this to happen. Could it be any more inconvenient?

She couldn’t remember when she had last been sexually attracted to someone. Had she ever been? After some experimentation, and her lackluster experience with Justin, she had shrugged, said no big deal and closed the door on the whole subject while she concentrated on getting through the rigors of her residency.