“The Betrayer King baited me after his wife’s and son’s murders. Told me that I was neither a worthy king nor a worthy mate. And that was why the universe hadn’t allowed my mate or my progeny to survive. My bloodthirst knew no bounds. And I’d raised my dagger to slaughter him as well when I felt two tiny fires upon my back.
“I turned to find two little drakkon hovering in the air. More progeny and most likely the reason the Betrayer King had tried to bait me into delivering him the final blow. They must have been told to remain hidden by their brother but could not keep themselves from flying to their father’s defense. They were twins from the look of them. And then I spotted the distinct female markings upon their scaled stomachs.
“Drakki young! I had not seen such a sight since my young drakkon days on our home planet. And of course, I could not kill such rare and beautiful miracles. Quite the opposite. I fell to my knees in front of them, suddenly overcome with the most abject of grief.
“My mind became crazed. Despite the unexpected obstacle of mating with Ola, I had carried out my ultimate revenge. I had paid my father his due reverence. And now I was free to enact the original plan of going back to the past and making sure that our civilization’s destruction never came to pass. But at the sight of those drakki all I could do was screech. Screech for all I had lost. Screech for my lost son and the other progeny I might have had if my mate, like the Betrayer King’s, had lived long enough to go into heat again.
“And then I fell into what I can only describe as a catatonic state. While my body remained in this world, my mind suffered an endless loop of my time with Ola. Our first meeting. All the cruel things I did to her in the name of preserving my revenge…our mating…the kiss she delivered upon me…finding her dead.
“I’m not sure how much time I passed in this state. But what I can only assume to be a few days later I woke up to find the Betrayer King tending to me, in what used to be the bed he shared with his mate.
“‘But why…’ I asked him. ‘Why would you tend to me after what I have wrought upon you?’
“‘It was the only way for me to stave off Widower’s Madness,’ he answered.
“I still did not understand. ‘But how would nursing me back to consciousness keep you from Widower’s Madness?’ I asked him.
“‘Now you understand truly what the loss of a mate is,’ he replied. ‘And now that you understand that loss, you can fix what you have wrought.’
“You see, as the Royal Fate Maker, he understood something I did not. Widower’s Madness was considered a gate disease. Widower’s Madness only happened to drakkon who had been fated to their mates, not to drakkon who found mates without the use of this technology. And I was very obviously in the early stages of Widower’s Madness.
“He would soon fall back into it, too, he told me, which would render him unable to care for the miraculous drakki I had gazed upon. Our cousin knew this because he had been raised by caretakers after his father descended into it. If he could not care for them, he could not protect them. And his drakki would most certainly need his protection as the only females of our kind.
“There was no other choice but to do what he had only pretended he would do before: help me go through one of the fating portals. If he was right about my being not merely match but fated to My Departed Mate, then I could in theory erase what I had done. Including losing my possibly fated mate in childbirth and the slaughter I wrought in the aftermath of that loss.
“We were both desperate drakkon. Willing to do anything.
“I traveled through the fated gate and ended up outside the North Dakota gatehouse. I recognized this eve as soon as I saw the three-quarters moon. For it was the last night of our mating, the night I came up with the plan to exert complete control over My Fated Mate by having her uncle kill himself in front of her.
“The incoming moon was an important detail because knowing I wouldn’t have access to the North Dakota beta the next day caused me to act swiftly with no chance to calm down from my current mood. And I remembered how after my first full night of sleep in days, I had woken up feeling as though perhaps this punishment had been too harsh. The rage in my flame hadn’t burned nearly as bright as the previous night. But by then Clyde was already on his way. My pride would not let me reverse the decision, especially in front of my stubborn she-wolf.