Ever kissed a Drac? Careful, they bite.

Bali Itara survived her father's laboratory. She never escaped what he made her — and now the price is coming due. Her engineered body is failing fast, and the only cure strong enough to save her runs through the fangs of an alien race that doesn't do anything halfway.

She finds Domino — Draconian, golden-eyed, and the boy she once freed from her father's chains. He owes her a debt only his bite can pay. But for his kind, healing and claiming are the same act. One bite, and she's not just cured. She's his.

That bite will bind her to him — no second chances, no walking away.

Too bad Domino never planned on paying his debt by falling for the woman he swore to save.

She came to Tantalus looking for a cure. She's about to find a husband, a war, and a family she never knew she had.

Contains no graphic love scenes. Expect sizzling chemistry, fangs with consequences & a mad scientist.

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Prologue

Earth, 2765

"Daddy?"

The word came out smaller than Bali intended. The stairs down to the laboratory were concrete, unpainted, and each flight was colder than the last. Somewhere below, machinery hummed on a frequency she felt in her teeth. There was a smell, too — chemical-sweet with something underneath it, something that lifted the fine hairs on her arms.

Something was wrong down here. She was nine years old, and she knew it the way animals know weather.

Rudriv Itara patted her hand. His white hair fluffed the way it always did, and his cheeks were pink with pleasure. "Don't be frightened, my child. I promised to show you something wonderful, and so I shall. You're a very lucky girl."

They stopped at a heavy door. He rose on his toes to look through the small barred window set into it, and whatever he saw made him smile.

That smile had always warmed her. Her daddy loved her — hadn't he always taken care of her? But the moment they'd passed the first landing, something in him had shifted, like a picture hung one degree off level. Same face. Different man.

He unlocked the door. It swung without a sound, and the silence was worse than any creak would have been.

The room was dim as a cellar. The first thing she saw was the glow: an elevated tub, glass-covered, lit green from within. She drifted toward it despite herself. Inside, a thick, transparent gel turned over in slow motion, fat bubbles rising and breaking at the surface, the holes they left behind sealing over like wounds healing in reverse.

"It's a genetic pool," Rudriv said, cheerful as a man showing off a new toy. "Ordinary life forms go in. Extraordinary beings come out." He touched her shoulder. "It's for you."

Bali turned to look at him — and froze.

There was a boy chained to the wall behind him.

Not chains for a boy. Chains for a monster — links thick as her wrist, cuffs bolted to rings sunk deep in the floor. Shaggy hair hid half his face, but nothing could hide his eyes. They burned gold in the dark, and a low sound came from his throat that never quite stopped.

She stepped back. Rudriv's hand closed on her wrist.

"Don't be shy, dear. He's one of the finest examples of my work." His voice dropped, confiding, teacher to favorite student. "The pool works best on the young, I've found. My prisoners of war have mostly been older — but this fellow is big for his years. I suspect he lied about his age to enlist. Didn't you, lad?"

The boy lunged. The chains snapped taut with a crack that echoed off the concrete, and Bali flinched into her father's grip.

"Don't worry. He's Draconian. They can't bear a cage — more animal than reasoning being, really, which makes them ideal subjects. I made certain to perfect the procedure before trying it on you."

"Daddy—" Her voice cracked. He couldn't mean it. Not on her.

He walked her to an upright frame beside the pool and buckled her wrists and ankles into it with the same gentle efficiency he'd once used to tie her shoes. She fought. It didn't matter.

"Don't cry, child. It's no worse than having your teeth cleaned. A little discomfort, and then — think of it. You'll heal from almost anything. You'll live longer than anyone you know. You'll thank me."

"No—" She twisted against the straps, and for one instant her eyes found the boy's. Something moved in that golden stare — something that might have been pity — and then it was gone. He couldn't save her. Nobody was going to save her.

Rudriv flipped a switch. The frame hummed, lifted, tilted her onto her back, and carried her out over the pool. The glass cover slid aside with a soft breath.

The platform began to lower.

"Daddy, no—"

Warm gel touched her back and climbed. "The pool is oxygen-rich," he said, patient as ever, as if this were an ordinary thing to do to a child. "You'll be able to breathe. Just relax."

The green closed over her face.

It burned her eyes first, then her throat as the gel forced its way into her lungs. Then it was everywhere — an itch that became a crawling and then a searing, sunk past skin, past muscle, all the way to her marrow. She strained against the straps and screamed into the glow, and the pool swallowed the sound. She kept waiting to black out.

She never did.

When the platform finally lifted her clear, she was a lifetime older. Rudriv unbuckled the straps and she fell to the floor and vomited gel until her ribs ached. He reached to steady her; she shoved him off with the little strength she had left. Fever rolled through her in waves, and in the end she couldn't fight him as he helped her to a cot in the corner.

"Rest now, while I run a few tests." He smoothed her wet hair back from her forehead. "You're a very lucky girl, you know. Not every child gets to experience this."

Bali closed her eyes.

Across the room, the chains shifted, and the boy's low growl went on and on. She understood him now.

* * *

Chapter 1

Earth, 2786

"How do you feel about your father's assassination?"

Bali stopped on the courthouse steps. Rain dripped from the edge of her hood; wind pulled at her coat. The reporter held the microphone close enough to kiss.

Of all the questions.

Encouraged by her silence, the woman pressed on. "It's well known you and your father were estranged for years. Now that he's dead, would you care to comment on the reasons?"

Her lawyer would tell her not to answer. "He thought he was reinventing the human race. I thought he was a fanatical psychopath." She made it two steps.

"What about the lawsuit against his research company? If the mutant faction wins its case, you stand to lose a substantial inheritance — yet you've refused to align yourself with the company. Why?"

Bali looked straight into the camera. "As far as I'm concerned, they deserve everything they can get." And then some. She kept walking.

"And the rumors about you?" More microphones swung her way, lenses crowding in. "They say you're a mutant yourself."

Sweat prickled under her collar despite the cold. That one was new. Years of practice kept her face smooth as she turned, spread her hands, and smiled. "Do I look like a mutant?"

She left them shouting at her back, and only when she'd driven a block did her breathing come easy again.

Rudriv Itara had gotten more than he'd bargained for with his prisoners of war. Once the treaties forced him to release them, the world had nearly gone back to war over what came home. He'd shredded his files, burned what he could — but the military had moved faster, and too many of his experiments had walked out of that lab alive and talking. He'd fled ahead of the war-crimes tribunal, leaving thirteen-year-old Bali parked at an exclusive boarding school like luggage.

She'd been grateful. There had been more sessions over the years — Rudriv forever tinkering with his favorite creation. He'd rebuilt her eyes for darkness and left her flinching from daylight; the implant helped, but a sunny afternoon without her protective contacts still ended in a migraine like a spike behind the eye. In the end his legacy came to this: night vision, a body that healed almost anything, nightmares, and a terror of green water that no amount of reasoning could touch.

She'd seen the chained boy exactly once. She still wondered what had become of him. She'd never learned the fate of most of her father's subjects, and what little she had learned made her grateful he hadn't done worse to her.

There had been rumors — amphibious men, men with several times a soldier's strength and speed. Military funding explained that much. But Rudriv's dream had been bigger. In the lab, in his other voice, he'd told her what she was for: someday she would mate with one of his creations. A new race, superior, and every drop of it his blood.

Not in my lifetime. Her grip tightened until the wheel housing cracked. She hissed at the damage, hit the freeway, and accelerated until she was one more blur in the traffic.

She needed out.

Blue lights flickered at the edge of her vision. She slowed to watch a ship settle onto the spaceport tarmac, vapor curling off its hull, the city glare drowning whatever stars it had come from.

The idea lit small and grew by the heartbeat. Why not? She had her pilot's license and money enough to buy a ship. Nothing held her here. Somewhere out there were whole worlds that had never heard the name Itara.

Could she build a new life? Adrenaline hit her bloodstream, and with it the first clean surge of joy she'd felt in years.

She swung the transport around and floored it for the spaceport, honks and shouted insults scattering behind her.

She had a ship to launch.

Chapter 2

"What you need is a man."

Bali's head came up. Icki's exam room smelled of antiseptic and the floral tea he was never without, and she'd been staring at her own hands while the diagnostic bed hummed through its cycle. Her friend and personal doctor had always had a wicked sense of humor, but this was a stretch even for him. "Unless he can pass my flight physical for me, a man is the last thing I need."

Icki snorted and picked up one of her hands, holding it between them like an exhibit. The fine tremor that had gotten her grounded was still there, pending further testing. "You have your father to thank for this. Your genes are coming apart, kid. Think of your body as a building he renovated too many times — knock out enough load-bearing walls, and eventually the whole thing starts to lean."

"Can you fix me?"

He shook his head — then reached for a stack of magazines and binders and dropped the pile in her lap. He tapped the glossy cover on top. "This is what you need."

Bali stared at the golden-eyed alien looking back at her. Black hair to his shoulders, a stylish goatee, and a wicked smile. Behind him, red cut-glass letters spelled out a club's name: DOMINO'S. She was a little breathless just holding the picture, which annoyed her.

"I've been researching this for a while, anticipating today. The binders cover the other therapies — experimental, dangerous, failure rates you don't want to read. This man — his race, rather — is the only treatment I can recommend."

"I don't follow."

Draconians. The only true aliens in the human sphere — they'd crash-landed on Antarctica and promptly declared it theirs. No Earth government had argued. Nobody had been using it, and every attempt since to dislodge the Dragon Lords had ended badly enough that nobody tried anymore.

And then there were the rumors. Men muttered that Dragon Lords were secretly vampires who devoured their women — it would explain why they had so few. Women swore that Draconian wives must die in bed, of pleasure, and pursued the males with a zeal that infuriated human men. Doomsayers warned they'd out-breed humanity inside a century, because Draconians always bred true.

Bali had seen exactly one, ever — a boy in chains — and the guilt of it had never let her go. Somewhere in the back of her mind lived the conviction that any Draconian would take one look at her and know what she was, what she'd witnessed.

But Icki said they could help.

"So what do they have? Better medicine?"

"They have fangs." He grinned wide, showing his own unimpressive canines.

"What?" She frowned, wondering if he was messing with her.

He slid a slim binder from the stack. "This report says it all — and I promise you, it was hard to get. Don't worry, I charged it to your account." He smirked at her eye-roll and flipped the cover open. "Hollow fangs. Needle-fine spines inside, loaded with a compound called adaptogen. When a Draconian male is sufficiently moved, the spines fill, and instinct takes over — he bites his mate. In a Draconian woman, the bite triggers... completion. In an alien woman, it delivers the adaptogen and rewrites her to be compatible." He closed the folder.

"Freaky." Bali had no desire to be bitten, and even less to be rewritten. "Why do we care?"

He sighed as if the answer were obvious. "Because your genes are killing you. Slowly — and painfully, if you want the hard truth. Adaptogen is the most powerful adaptive agent I've ever seen in a report. It might be strong enough to override everything Itara did to you. You won't come out fully human, but you'll come out alive."

She hated her options. Either she charmed a Drac into biting her, or she died by inches, maybe mad at the end of it. She rubbed her arm nervously while she thought. "Can you give me something to hold the line until...?" She couldn't finish the sentence. Probably lacked the nerve to finish the plan, either.

"I've ordered you a drug that will settle things down, buy you time. I hate the side effects, but it'll hold until you find your man."

She scowled. "You don't know that I will."

He snorted. "Speaking strictly as a man — you've got what it takes. The hair, the eyes, the figure. You're a catch, kid." Then he frowned and looked her up and down. "We've just got to do something about the granny clothes."

She glanced down at her brown sweater and tan slacks. "What's wrong with my clothes?" No one had ever complained before. Come to think of it, no one had ever noticed, one way or the other.

He winked. "Nothing — if your goal is attracting your better grade of computer nerd. For this project, you need clothes that say jump me." He sighed with theatrical burden. "It's a tough job, but as your personal physician, it's my duty to help. We'll go shopping. Don't worry, I'll bill you for my time." He always said that. He never did.

Grunting with ill humor, she eyed his tailored jacket and slick hair and conceded that the man probably knew what he was doing. Guaranteed, he dressed better than she did.

She surrendered to the inevitable with all the grace she had, which was none. "Fine. Do your worst."