Copyright © 2016 by Morgan Rice. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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      CHAPTER ONE

      Even without every noble in Delos staring at him, Thanos would have felt the nerves of a groom on his wedding day. He stood by the altar that had been set up in the castle’s largest feast hall, and somehow he managed to stand perfectly still – but only because his soldier’s training kept him from showing any fear. Standing out in front of all of them, he could feel his stomach knotting with the pressure of it.

      Thanos looked about while awaiting his bride. The feast hall swam in white silk and shone with diamonds, hardly a surface there that didn’t glitter. Even the servants attending the nobles wore clothes that would have shamed most merchants. As for the nobles themselves, today they looked like something out of a bard’s tale, dressed in silk and velvet, dripping with gold and silver.

      To Thanos, it was far too much; yet he hadn’t exactly been given a say in it. Delos’s royals had gotten the wedding the king and queen decided they should have, and anything less than perfection would have disappointed his bride. He glanced over and saw them: King Claudius and Queen Athena, sitting together on thrones carved from ironwood and covered in gold leaf. They sat proudly, obviously delighted by his decision to accept their choice of bride.

      The high priest, decked in a robe of gold reflecting the rays of the sun, stood beside him. He seemed like a kindly man, and Thanos, feeling more alone than ever, wanted to take him aside and ask him: What do you do when you aren’t sure that you belong somewhere?

      Yet he could not.

      It wasn’t just that Thanos was nervous about the wedding. It was so many other things as well. There was the fact that back on Haylon, the rebels there were relying on him to help them to free the Empire. That thought brought a flash of determination with it, because he would help