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by her full-blooded god lover who couldn’t stand to go a night without her. Revulsion whipped a wicked path through his mind.
    As he passed Aneksi she whispered, “I am sorry.”
    He wished that he didn’t equate her with everything fetid in his life. Even so, they were bound by their mutual imprisonment. “There will be that someday. I promise.”
    Her pale blue eyes met his, hopeful.
    Ibioni stood in the center of the bedroom, statuesque in her silky cream-color robes that perfectly highlighted her olive skin and draped curves that would have most men on their knees. The gold bracelets around both wrists jangled as she turned. Her dark hair was left loose, falling in gentle waves to her waist. She was exquisite.
    For a moment the vision drew him back to the first moment he’d glimpsed her. As an Egyptian infantry squad leader, his life had been focused on distancing himself from a childhood of starvation and destitution. And of shedding the stigma of being the offspring of a whore’s son and the nameless father who’d impregnated and then abandoned his mother and her twin sons, thus condemning her to a life of prostitution. Success and rank had been hard won, but he excelled at discipline and training. With his blond hair, a definite rarity, women came easily. At twenty he’d been an idiot when it came to the opposite sex. He’d enthusiastically agreed to marry Ibioni in exchange for riches, and a chance to bed that radiant creature, thinking himself in love.
    Back then he’d thought himself one hundred percent human. Min had known of Zannis’s lineage. That he was the son of Amun-Ra, the king of all the gods, a little fact he hadn’t become privy to until well after the nuptials. Min wanted Zannis’s son, and planned to get that child by any means possible, including prostituting his lover.
    “Zannis.” A feline smile curved Ibioni’s lips—the perfect alchemy of seductive, mysterious, and fascinating. “What? No open armed hug or foot kissing at my genius, which will enable you freedom from your cage?”
    He ground his back molars. “Do not insult me with feigned compassion.”
    She didn’t take the bait, but moved around the room as if showing off her grace. Her movements had purpose—a weapon scan. Old habits never died, at least when it came to sex with her. He never went naked in her presence without a weapon within reach. She liked it rough and only got off when she inflicted the most pain possible.
    Ibioni slid her hand under the mattress, removing the rough blade he’d forged from a broken vase. She cocked an eyebrow and put it far from the bed. Damn. His mind slid to a time when the bedroom didn’t equate to a war zone. To a time with a beautiful tall blond.
    With a jerk Ibioni halted. “Who is the woman in your mind?”
    “Just an actress from a long ago play,” he lied smoothly. “Jealous?”
    “To be jealous, I would have to be threatened. That is impossible.” She smiled. “Tell me. Who is she?” Although a request, an underlying threat simmered.
    “This is what you want to do? Talk?” On her approach, waves of nausea rolled through him. He feared at her touch he’d humiliate himself by emptying his stomach on her sandaled feet. Reality crashed in. Even should she try mental coercion, which she’d done countless times when they were married, he probably could not experience arousal. Signing on as a magus must’ve guaranteed all aspects of that job applied, including having only one woman that his body craved. He had not been with any woman since Astrid, nor did he desire any other.
    She chuckled. “Astrid?”
    Oh shit.
    Ibioni clucked. “That female is dead.” Ibioni’s sweet smell assaulted his nostrils as she glided close. She traced a manicured nail along his collarbone. “Why do you perpetuate your fascination with that pitiful human? A dead human. She could never do what I can for you.”
    The need to destroy Ibioni burned him from the inside out.
    A flicker of