Naya frowned and followed as well. "What's wrong with it?" she asked, staring at the building.

"It's about to collapse," Akoro said. “It holds culturally significant documents that will be lost when it does.”

Naya nodded. It looked old enough that it could collapse. "What happened to it?"

Akoro exhaled heavily. "You said one of your duties is making your people feel safe."

Naya looked up at him, apprehension on the edge of her nerves. "Yes."

"Have you ever had to deal with the sudden collapse of a building?"

"I don’t think so," Naya said hesitantly.

"How would you prepare or deal with that?"

Naya stared at the building, her eyes running up and down it, trying to draw as much detail from what she could see. "This isn't sudden," she said. "You could’ve easily prepared for this if it was eventually going to collapse."

"This was only built three months ago. It’s one of our newest buildings. It was designed by one of our most celebrated new architects."

Naya inhaled, shock hitting her. She looked back at the building. It was old and weathered, as though it had been standing for hundreds of years. It was chipped and worn with weathered corners and stress fractures running up and down it. Even the surface was peeling. “How could it get like this in three months?"

“An attack.”

Naya nodded in understanding. “A magical attack?”

“Yes. This is recent but we’ve had attacks like this for years. People were working in this building. Now they are dead inside it.”

Naya exhaled in horror. “Is someone directing these attacks? Who would attack a building?”

Akoro looked at her. “Your people. It’s your people who are responsible.”

Naya’s brow rose. She shook her head. “No. That’s impossible.”

Akoro turned back to the building and said nothing more.

Naya watched him, her disbelief holding her in its grip. He had to be lying. The empire wasn’t at war with anyone, let alone causing this kind of damage to a world so far away. Was vengeance why he was planning to conquer the empire? Was this why he’d taken her—he thought her family was responsible for destroying their buildings? “My father doesn’t know you exist. You know that.”

“He doesn’t have to know I exist to cause this,” Akoro said. “He knows this land exists.”

Naya frowned, returning her gaze to the building. She’d never heard her father talking about a land like this. Could this be something that’d happened within the last six years that she didn’t know about? No. She’d been to every major meeting and briefing about empire business and all concerns across the Known Lands. If her father was aware of this place, she’d would have heard about it. Besides, her father wasn’t the kind to shield her from a serious threat regardless of what she might have been going through.

“How could it be attacked when some of the other buildings around it are fine?”

Akoro gestured to the ruins further away. “There was a problem. It’s being fixed now, but we never expected to have to replace this building so soon.”

Naya nodded.

After a few long moments, Akoro beckoned her. "Come."

They mounted his nnirae and rode once again out to the ruins, this time right up to the edge of the city, where the stretch of desert started. Akoro came to a stop near one of the stones and sat there. He said nothing… just waited.

Naya stayed alert. It didn't take long.

In the distance, right in front of them, dark clouds appeared with sand swirling up underneath, the same that she’d seen when they were coming back from the desert.

"What is that?" she murmured.

"We call that the nnin-eellithi. It means wild magic bolt."

Naya squinted at it as it inched closer, and she gasped. It looked exactly like the white fire from the Wastelands. Crackling white bolts shot down at incredible speed and it moved quickly. It didn’t have the cracked sky above it or the cracked ground like in the Wastelands. But it looked like the same thing. How could it be the same?

It came closer still, and Naya found she couldn’t breathe. She hadn't seen one directly since she had tried to tackle it six years ago.

Akoro bound his arm around her middle. "Don't worry," he murmured. "It cannot get to you.”

"Has it come into the city before?” Naya was unable to stop her voice from shaking.

"That is how these ruins were created," Akoro said. "It has destroyed entire regions. Much of what was in the city has been rebuilt, but we repel them here on the outskirts."

They watched the white fire coming closer still, and Naya became even more tense.

“This entire region used to have great power until these arrived. We cannot travel over the sands without having to contemplate how to deal with them. It has changed the way we live. And it was caused by your people.”

“What would be the point of us attacking you like this?” she asked, after the silence between them had stretched. “I don’t even know how we would do it. It looks like the white fire that killed Lili. How would we create it here if we can’t control it on our own land?”

“It’s possible to unleash a power you can’t control on your enemies.” He glanced down at her. "We are not aware of this white fire in your lands. Where is it?"

"It is in the southern region, the very southeast next to Saderthorne.”

He grunted. "We are not able to go there. When we saw reference to the Wastelands, we thought it meant that it was a desert or an abandoned land. We did not assume it was dangerous.”

With a horrible feeling in her stomach, Naya realized she shouldn’t have talked about Lili. If he hadn’t known about the Wastelands that could have been an advantage for the Lox.

“I don’t understand the attack, but I cannot guess the motives of a culture I don’t understand,” he said.

Naya breathed shallowly. So his insistence on all the different questions about her culture and people… he was trying to understand them. But he then was going to use that to destroy them.

For the next few days, they didn’t leave the nest.

Akoro kept her sated and in the aftermath of constant sex, clearly very pleased that she was present again.

Naya took comfort in her Alpha, pleased that she’d been able to unload what happened to Lili, even though he was still her enemy. It made her feel like she was making progress dealing with her past, even though it didn’t change anything between her and Akoro. In just the right mood, she could almost forget that she could never be with him. When he looked at her a certain way, took his time dragging his tongue on her skin, when he purred for her and chuckled at her obsession with fixing the nest. In those moments, she could push reality to the edge of her nest and hold it there. And just enjoy her Alpha.

She learned he liked when she stroked his hair or twirled it around her finger. He liked when she dug her nails into his skin as she orgasmed, when she crouched over him with her feet pressed into the soft bed, her ass smacking down onto him furiously searching for the rapturous high. He liked when she was tucked into him, when he could feel her breath on his neck as she slept, and he liked that she nested with him, plumping pillows, drawing the blankets around them, and positioning them just right. That was the reason he didn't take her back to his bedroom. He wanted to be in the nest she’d created organically.

As time wore on, she suspected that he was delaying the meetings, frequent knocks on the door that forced him to get up and speak to visitors annoyed him, so much so that she had to soothe him afterward. Obviously they needed him, and he was distracted.