He cupped her face in his palms and stroked her hair back from her damp, flushed face. She smiled at him, her pleasure shining in her emerald eyes. He’d never seen a human so beautiful. Even the stunningly gorgeous Beguiler females he’d known paled in comparison.

Rez kissed her long and deep, inserting a desire for sleep into her mind.

It’d taken every ounce of will he possessed to protect her from him at the moment he’d released his essence inside of her. He felt curiously drained, as though she’d sucked all his vital energy from his body. He needed to rest, to examine this experience in minute detail.

But Leisa somehow resisted his compulsion and kissed him back, wrapping her body around him. And her mind.

He felt her essence seeping into him, insidiously infusing his veins with everything she was. Before he could take steps to protect himself he’d absorbed her—her hopes, her deepest desires. Her pain.

He knew her.

And unconsciously, instinctively, not knowing what it was she was doing, Leisa began to draw knowledge from him. Desperately he fought her, exerted his will and battled her relentless desire to know all there was about him, to bond with him as no creature had dared attempt before. Finally his compulsion won out and sleep swept her away.

But it was too late. She had the knowing of him.

Amediel. My Amediel.

Intimately linked to her mind and body, still, Rez heard his true-name echoing in Leisa’s mind as clearly as though she uttered it aloud.

Panic engulfed him, countless ice-cold shards piercing his body, crystallizing around his heart. He unsheathed himself from her body and flung himself from the bed, backing up until he hit the wall. All his senses heightened, becoming preternaturally alert. His pupils dilated, elongated. His hands became talon-tipped claws. His body bulked, muscle mass increasing to battle-ready proportions. His skin became armored with iridescent, impenetrable scales. He crouched, coiled, tensed and poised to battle.

Rezon teetered on the verge of fully transforming into his primary form and becoming Drakon, a form he hadn’t found it necessary to revert to since becoming a Beguiler. But Leisa threatened him. Not physically—no mere human could ever do him physical harm—but fundamentally, and his reactions were instinctive. Some part of him viewed the vulnerable weak human female he’d just fucked as if she’d suddenly morphed into the ultimate Demonic predator, a predator whose sole desire was to consume him as prey.

She’d named him Amediel, the name bestowed upon him at birth by some nameless elemental presence. The name which had blossomed in his mind the exact instant he’d burst from the egg. The name he’d struggled to be worthy of and finally earned in blood and pain and sacrifice. The name no other creature on Earth, Heaven or Hell knew. Not even his King.

He was Amediel, Bonecrusher, last of the Drakons.

And this vulnerable human female had somehow wrenched the gift of his true-name from the innermost recesses of his powerful mind.

Amediel. She cried out to him in her sleep, reached for him with blindly searching hands, reached out to him again with her mind. He fielded her call, cloaking himself from her. And when she could not find him, she curled herself into a ball and whimpered piteously.

He could not deny her. Rezon’s shields disintegrated. His essence—his soul—shattered into a trillion tiny pieces, each one shrieking Leisa’s name before melding together into a new, stronger whole.

Leisa. The mate he’d longed for. The human woman who’d captured his heart and made it her own.

For the first time since he’d been a youngling, alone and struggling to survive, Rezon felt that unwelcome clenching in his gut, that clammy sweat oozing from his pores, that tell-tale dryness of his mouth. Fear. True, paralyzing fear.

It took far too long for him to quell it. Even longer to prod his mind toward logical thought and finally let go of the pseudo-Drakon form he’d assumed. Rez prided himself on being a creature that inspired fear, not succumbed to it and he was not at all impressed.

In fact he was damned—Hell, they both were.

Asmodeus was not going to be at all pleased.