Akari was sleeping when an alarm sounded, waking her from her nightmare and the ship was suddenly rocked by explosions. Loud ones, coming from above decks and rocking the entire ship—it sounded like an all-out attack, like the end of the world. Something had happened, she thought, to the engines the afternoon before, and the ship hadn’t moved all night. She’d thought they must be working on the engines, but this sounded more like an attack. Had Davos finally caught up with them? The explosions threw her out of bed and made her heart bang loudly in her chest as the sound pierced right through her. She sat up on the floor, disoriented. She had bitten down so hard on her tongue when she fell that it brought blood. She could taste it in her mouth and gagged a little, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. The door to his her was suddenly flung open and three swarthy looking men crowded in, dressed in brightly colored clothing with strips of cloth wrapped around their head

Akari was exhausted, but what else was new? It seemed like sehe’d been tired and drained and sick like this forever. Pushing her hair back out of her eyes, she faced her tormentors again. They had come in while she was moving the food around on her breakfast tray. It was cold now, but that really didn’t matter much, as she hadn’t planned on eating it anyway. “For the hundredth time, I didn’t have anything to do with the plot against the prince. You can keep asking if you want to, but you’ll get the same answer.” “Colonel Kingston,” one of the big Werewolves said, his voice low and menacing. “We have all the proof we need, you know. You and your fellow conspirators will face judgement from the king soon.” There were three interrogators, two young ones and this older man who faced him now. Always the same ones and always the same questions, over and over. How long have you been a member of FeRes? Was her father, the President, aware that she was in FeRes? Is she planning to assassi

They came for her the next morning. The servant had been in earlier and brought her fresh clothing. Dark trousers and fitted shirt she used to wear under her long uniform jacket. They had forgotten her boots though, so she wore the soft, black slippers she usually wore under her dress robes. And as she washed her face that morning, she hardly recognized the woman she's seeing in the mirror. Nikolai was right—she’d lost weight and looked tired and thin. Her cheekbones were more prominent than usual and her eyes looked haunted. Most of the bruising at her temple was already gone, though. Since she was captured, no one had laid a hand on her, though she thought the investigators were dying to beat her and force a confession. Two young guards came to her door soon after she got dressed and “escorted” her to the main part of the palace, if by escort, it meant to be practically dragged along by her arms as their much longer legs ate up the distance between her room and the king’s throne r

Akari wondered how difficult it would be to sneak away and run away far, far away from the Sechuan's, the Federation's Central Command and pretty much everything and everyone she knew. She was still stuck on this godforsaken city, in the Sechuan consulate, three long days after learning that she was carrying Nikolai's baby and her headlong flight down the town to ask for asylum. Nikolai, along with her father and an entire contingent of Werewolves were supposed to be arriving any time here at Central Command, this same place where she’d first met and married the Bloody Prince. Could it really have been only six months before? She had thought for a while that she would spend the rest of her life with Nikolai, far from everything she’d ever known. She’d been so scared to go to their Kingdom, but in only a few short weeks, Werewolf Kingdom had come to seem like her home—maybe because it had been where Nikolai was and because Akari had fallen so much in love with him when she wasn’t even

After five months....Akari eased out of bed and made her way toward the bathroom. The baby seemed to be growing in leaps and bounds every single day, and that meant he was pressing on Akari's bladder more with every day. She had been deeply asleep in her bed when the pressure woke her up, that she wasn’t even sure she was going to make it to the bathroom in time and wouldn’t that just be perfect? To make a mess on Nikolai's floor! She was hurrying, trying not to wake her mate, but hadn’t gone more than a few steps when she was suddenly swept up in strong arms and pulled up to Nikolai's chest. “Where do you think you’re going?” Akari gave an undignified squeak and flailed out at Nikolai's arms, and tried punching him. She hated being manhandled by the big prince she was married to, but even with the extra baby weight she was carrying, the man still outweighed her by fifty pounds of pure muscle so there wasn’t much she could do about it. “You’re going to find out in about three sec