In the two months that he'd attended her fencing practice, he'd grown to like her effortless grace, her unconscious poise, and her lithe fluidity. It had taken him a month to decide he wanted to get to know her, and then another week to summon the courage to approach her.
Those who knew him would have scoffed at his shyness. He was the scion of the most powerful empire in the galaxy, and what he asked for was nearly always granted. His father had set some limits, but the young Augusto had quickly developed a sense of what was appropriate, and what was not.
He knew too that Emperor Maximilian Iberia would stop at nothing to have his son rescued alive. The covert operations carried out in the four other empires at the behest of Emperor Maximilian numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Once
