Fugitives of Fate

Tenochtitlan, Mexico 1526 — but not as history remembers it...

“Malinali, isn’t it?” Cuauhtemoc’s voice was liquid heat on her ears. “From Paynala?”

Startled, she stared at him; a dire protocol violation, but he’d ensnared her with his questioning gaze. “I was born there, My Lord,” she choked out as she wrestled her wits back. Fluster and confusion heated her cheeks. Who told him where she was from?

Cuauhtemoc folded his arms and smiled behind the finger he curled before his lips. “La Malinche,” he murmured, bemused. “Working in my palace!”

Driven by fiery visions of the end of the world, Aztec Emperor Cuauhtemoc averted the Spanish Conquest, and now seeks to end the inter-tribal fighting that would have condemned the empire. When he discovers the slave woman Malinali — or, as history knows her, La Malinche, who once would have aided Hernán Cortés and the Spanish — working in his palace, he’s determined to win her trust, so she can help him turn his enemies into allies.

But to Malinali, he’s no different than the other noblemen who’ve made her life as a slave miserable. With time and work, suspicion turns into trust, and trust grows into love, but the shadows of an avoided past threaten to turn them into the enemies history meant them to be.