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his bed with a small suggestion. Just the thought of that gigolo touching her sent him into a tailspin of homicidal images.
    He said a quick centering prayer and focused on breathing.
    Her face swam in his mind. Those pale cheeks had flushed as he approached. When he’d touched her mind, he’d captured a blast of desire and replay of their time together long ago. For just those few seconds, they’d been bound by the invisible strings of longing for that heaven before everything went wrong. She thought he wanted her dead? Anger surged at the injustice. Even though his actions looked bad from her perspective, he’d expected her to confront him and fight. Not hide. Her anger he could handle, but not her silence. He deserved more than a twelve-year cold shoulder.
    He glanced around the lightly furnished Egyptian townhouse. The half-empty goblet of water and the remnants of the bread and fruit he’d nibbled, but not finished, remained on the table. Food magikally appeared and disappeared for him, but the gods never granted him anything beyond bland fare. He’d give anything for one spice, or something to drink other than water. Each day was the same. He awoke, he read the same ten books, he exercised, ate, and slept. No variance. Day in and day out—twelve years of mind-numbing stasis. She could have offered him salvation, at least a welcome deviation from monotony. When first locked indefinitely into these five rooms as punishment for his unsolicited human kills, a definite magus rule breakage, he’d been conceited enough to think he could handle it. He deserved punishment for what he’d done, and expected internment in the Lower Realm with endless soul-ripping torture. The gods’ sentence had been uncharacteristically lenient. Yet, he had counted on Astrid to reappear. Her magik could release him from this prison, even if only for a short time. As long as that time was spent naked, he’d gladly lie in the dark fires of the Lower Realm during all the times they weren’t together.
    She never came. And he trod the edge of insanity from his solitude.
    The dragon tattoo on his arm chomped with the bite of a fractious hound. Okay, he wasn’t entirely alone, but he couldn’t summon forth his pets. He’d tried, but early in his incarceration he’d discovered their freedom was forbidden. They prowled his skin, as anxious for freedom as he.
    He flipped a few pages of the text on the origin of the English language that he’d been reading before Astrid intruded. The words blurred, not that he needed to actually comprehend the letters to know what it said. He’d long ago memorized every page. Of the twelve books he’d been granted this one was the oddest choice. The other eleven were Egyptian religious texts. The English book had been penned in the twentieth century, a time he’d only visited once when he had his night with Astrid. Languages came easy to him, but the book enabled him to understand the nuances of Astrid’s English. He’d thought the book a signal from the gods that she’d come back into his life. Why hadn’t he been patient? He’d given her up as gone to Osiris’s Kingdom too soon.
    He and Astrid had bonded. He thought that meant they needed each other to survive. How wrong he’d been. Her emotional grid when he’d connected with her mind just now had been different. What used to be lit up with vivid passion now projected a disconnected void of one who had shut off feeling. He detected a woman who had detached from life. Existing, but not thriving. That’s exactly what he’d done to survive.
    His mind flew back to that moment when he’d first seen her hunched in the shadows crying. The instant her eyes locked onto his, he’d known she was his other half. His soul needed her to thrive. He should have known she wasn’t gone. How many magi had he watched lose their senariai only to succumb to death soon after their bonded woman died? Had she perished, his soul would’ve finally been released into