Her Dragon Captor (Her Dragon King Duet Book 1): 50 Loving States, North Dakota Pt. 1

by Theodora Taylor

  According to Fensa by way of Xenon, the Royal Geneticist had petitioned to make Earth a protected territory, due to our potential to eventually develop into an advanced civilization if left alone.

  Xenon and friends had been sent here to supposedly investigate those allegations—but really to get the planet set up with what they called fertility portals and to train us werewolves for the next royal hunt. To nobody’s surprise, the super corrupt investigation team sent back a report that Fenrir was wrong and of course the elite drakkon should be allowed to hunt us to their hearts’ content.

  But then to everybody’s surprise, Fenrir blew up the dragon’s home planet in response.

  “He was, like, an ecoterrorist before that was really a thing,” Fensa told me. “And before that, he’d designed us wolves to live amongst the humans, then aid in the fetching of them whenever dragons popped over to our planet to hunt them.

  Real hashtag, it had been #toomuchtoprocess. “Okay, I’m going to pretend like I never heard that,” I told her after she explained the origin of werewolves. “I’m just going to go back to what I believed before. That humans are basic, and wolves are, like, magic. Cuz there’s no way I’m going to start saying ‘what the Fenrir Dragon.”

  I’d done a good job of suppressing all of those true histories I hadn’t asked to know. But now they all come racing back to me.

  “Where are we going?” I ask again, my throat tight for reasons beyond the collar around my neck.

  This time Damianos doesn’t even bother to answer. He turns his hooded gaze to the window. Like I’m a gnat that somehow found its way inside his car.

  He looks even more Greek statue-like in profile. Long, sharp nose, eyes intelligent and hooded like a really hot Oscar winner doing a take on Julius Caesar. I can easily imagine him in any era. The finest man in every room and the best dressed.

  My wolf sniffs at him, curious and afraid at the same time.

  Okay, stop, girl, just stop! I know my wolf and me weren’t exactly on the same page about Akwasi, but her response to Damianos is crazy. You shouldn’t be eyeing up our family’s mortal enemy like he’s all that and a bag of chips.

  My wolf licks her lips only seeming to hear the part about a delicious bag of chips…also, why am I using my mom’s outdated slang all of a sudden? Kill me now.

  Actually, I decide, glancing across at my fathers’ mortal enemy. Don’t kill me now.

  Okay, I’ve got to flip this queen switch. Think, think, think…

  Without my biosystem online, I can only assume he’s planning to put me on a drone and take me somewhere super clandestine and remote. Like that Greek Island fortress of his that doesn’t show up on any maps, or even worse. Someplace, totally off the human or wolf grid that even my incredibly royal and powerful family would never know to look. Someplace they’d never find me.

  Which I absolutely can’t allow.

  A basic plan develops crystal and clear. Do whatever I have to do not to get put on that drone. It’s the only chance I have of being found before he hurts me…or worse.

  The car turns left up a service road. It’s too dark to see, even with wolf vision, but I think we’re on some kind of mountain or hill. The car tilts upwards as its tires snap and crackle over dead leaves and twigs. A thick tree line blocks out everything beyond the narrow road.

  I can’t help but be impressed. A mountain meadow is a perfect place to hide a private drone if you want to get in and out of the state undetected.

  The car rolls to a stop, and I resist the urge to pull on the old-fashioned door handle. Better to wait for the human driver to come around and let me out. I’ll act all docile, then make my move—wait a minute is that…

  My mouth drops open at the sight in front of me.

  There is a meadow with a drone gleaming under the moonlight in the far distance. But right in front of us sits a two-story French chalet log cabin with charming cedar gables and front walls made of glass. It features three bedrooms, two of which have ensuite bathrooms, and a large, warmly-lit two-story living room that could easily host a party for fifty or more guests. It also has smart walls in every room.

  I know all of this because last winter, I got in a huge fight with my uncles about authorizing the formerly small cabin’s over-the-top renovations.

  “Is this part of some ‘get your rednecks subjects to like you’ plan?” I’d asked them when I saw how much building an official gatehouse on Yellow Mountain would cost the kingdom. “Because we don’t owe those punk bitches shit.”

  “I don’t need them to like me,” Uncle Kyle had answered. “But I do want to keep them busy and comfortable building the new gatehouse. Most of them live below the poverty line, and angry, underfed wolves with nothing to do cause way more trouble than opinionated assholes with jobs. And remember you’re the one who refused to let Rafes black box us. We could have just left the old gatehouse a historic relic without running water or electricity if we weren’t required to post a round-the-clock sentry as part of our opt-out agreement.”

  Kyle had a point. But I still hadn’t liked the idea of funding the gatehouse project.

  Thanks to us, those fools had a gatehouse so grand, it could be used as a meeting place by the YMWs. As part of our agreement with Rafes, we’d even hired Kirk to live here year round. Like back in the day when security wasn’t just a matter of sticking camera buttons onto a bunch of trees and watching the feed from the security room at the kingdom house. And we gave the rest of the able-bodied YMWs enough well-paid construction work to pay the Wi-Fi bill and maybe even order themselves up a bride from some struggling underdeveloped country.

  Clyde assured me he’d been checking in on the YMWs every week of the school year, making sure that anyone who was out absent wasn’t being restricted from school and also keeping an eye for new she-wolves who’d been brought here against their will. He told me the YMWs had been surprisingly respectful during the check-ins, with no signs of foul play to be found. But still, the gatehouse project stuck in my craw, and I’d been planning to figure out a way to defund it as soon as I got my crown.

  I’ve got my crown now. It’s still resting, heavy and golden on top of my head.

  But instead of sitting in my kingdom office, allocating the money we pay Kirk to some much worthier program, I’m sitting in the back of a car, looking up at the brand spanking new gatehouse for the first time.

  What the Fenrir wolf? Why are we here at the gatehouse?

  The answers to those questions hit me like a drone nuke.

  I had been right about Damianos taking me somewhere my family would never know to look. Someplace they would never find me. But I was wrong about how he’d get me there.

  Our final destination wasn’t the drone. It’s the cabin.

  My kingdom’s own fucking gatehouse.

  “Sonovabitch…” I whisper.

  Chapter Nine

  This night seriously couldn’t get any worse, I think.

  Then I immediately regret issuing that challenge, when Kirk Waters comes bounding down the cabin’s front steps. Like this shitty night is saying, “I’ll see your creepy kidnapping and raise you a misogynist, tobacco-spitting gatekeeper!

  But he surprises me by bending down to greet me with a huge grin through the car’s window. “There you are, Queen Ola! I was expecting you over an hour ago. I was afraid Colby got lost, even though I was sure the directions I wrote down for him were good enough to get him here without a hitch.”

  “They were,” Colby assures him from the front seat. “But Master wished to see her dance.”

  “Oh, I bet that was a fun time!” Kirk says, throwing Colby a quick grin. He then turns back to me. “Here, let me help you out of the car. We had a terrible bad rainstorm yesterday and it’s still pretty muddy. Wouldn’t want you to slip!”

  Wouldn’t want me to slip? This prepper had looked like he was dying for me to slip earlier tonight at my coronation. Preferably off the stage, with a noose around my neck.

&nbs
p; I stare at him, confused until suddenly I realize. “He got to you. He’s hypnotized you or whatever he did to my boyfriend to make him do whatever he said.”

  “He wasn’t truly your boyfriend, Ola.”

  I glance over my shoulder at Damianos, who’s adjusting his cuff links. Like he couldn’t be any more bored as he informs me, “He was merely a thrall I put in place to ensure you were exactly where you needed to be when I was ready to make my claim. You may divest your mind of him now. I assure you; you won’t be seeing him again.”

  Even more unsettling than the idea that my first mate potential boyfriend had been hypnotized into dating me was the word “claim.”

  “You must be tired after that big coronation party and the long drive,” Kirk says before I can ask Damianos what the hell he meant by claim. “Master, is it okay for me to open the car door for her? I’ve got her room ready with her bed all turned down, just like you asked.”

  “Yes, fine,” Damianos answers, shaking out his sleeves.

  Let’s get me inside…the newly renovated house that’s at least a mile or two away from where my party took place. Where…no one…and I mean absolutely no one from my current kingdom town would ever think to look for me.

  Shit, shit, shit, Could Damianos Drákon be any more diabolical? I wonder as Kirk opens the door and holds out his hand to me.

  Then instead of taking Kirk’s hand, I punch him in the nuts.

  I run, run like my life depends on it. Because guess what? I’m pretty sure it does.

  But dammit, Kirk was right about the mud. I don’t even make it ten steps in my high heels. The crown I’ve been so proudly wearing all night tumbles from my head as I slip and fall like a skinny white girl in a horror film.

  But unlike those ever-fallin girls, I kick off my shoes and immediately push back up to my feet. No time for recovery. I grab back my crown, tuck it under my arm and take off again, determined to get away.

  Unfortunately, the fall gives the trillionaire’s English boy servant enough time to catch up with me, even with his relatively slow speed.

  Lucky for me, dude’s still a human and there’s a three-quarter’s moon hanging overhead. A quick football shove sends his gangly body flying into the closest tree as I continue running down the mountain. I’ve got to get back to the road Colby drove up to get here—

  KA-THUNK!

  The ground shakes with the impact of something landing right in front of me.

  It’s Damianos, with a huge set of dragon wings now sticking out from the back of his suit.

  Not enough time to hit the brakes, I’m running downhill and I’ve got too much momentum behind me. So another football shove it is. I dip my head, hold my hand out, and charge at him like a Sunday night bull.

  It’s like running hand first into a stone wall. He doesn’t budge and I go flying backward, dropping the crown and landing on my butt.

  Okay, she-wolf down. But still not a skinny girl in a movie. I roll to my knees, prepared to take off again.

  But this time when I reach for my crown, pain, sharp as a razor slices up my left arm. What the Fenrir wolf?

  Still not a crying-ass bitch. But there’s some major anime face teeth clenching going on when two large legs appear between me and the crown I was reaching for.

  Damianos crouches down, filling up my eye line. The front of his shirt now has a muddy handprint on it.

  “You’ve ruined my suit.” His voice is weirdly calm, considering the suit looks like it cost more than my dress and crown combined.

  Who cares about his voice, Ola? Run, run, we’ve got to run! both my wolf and my human scream at me.

  But I can’t…

  The pain in my arm, it’s bigger now. Acrid and bitter. It’s the sort of pain that can’t be reconciled even by gotta-get-away adrenaline.

  I raise my left arm, not wanting to see, but having to look….

  There’s a jagged edge of ivory sticking up where my wrist used to be.

  My bone, I realize inside the fog of pain and confusion. The broken edge of what used to be one long radius.

  Like crashing into a stone wall…

  Oh…my…Fenrir Wolf. Charging him at that speed broke my arm.

  I turn away from the sight, and every delicious thing I ate at coronation comes spewing out of my mouth.

  Damianos releases a heavy sigh. “And now you’ve ruined my shoes.”

  Pain…pain…so much pain. And because of the collar, I can’t shift into my wolf. My vision blurs, then darkens. Then I’m falling sideways…back into the mud.

  Damianos rises to stand above me.

  “Ola….” He retracts his wings and reaches down to pick up my crown. Then, with what only seems like a modicum of effort, he crushes the precious symbol of my sovereignty between his large hands like an aluminum can.

  “Don’t do that again,” he says, before tossing my crown away like so much trash.

  That’s the last thing I see before the world fades to black.

  Chapter Ten

  KNUD

  “I know you like the guy, but you’ve gotta let me kill him.”

  Layla’s pretty face crinkled up into a laughing smile as she chided, “Knud, my love, you can’t kill my father just because he asked us to move.”

  “This is what you call asking?” Knud hitched their baby son higher on his hip so that he can use both hands to point out to his wife, “He waited until we left our apartment, changed our locks, and had a robot hand us an envelope with the address to this place!”

  “To be fair, you did tell him we were thinking about finding a bigger apartment.”

  “Thinking about a bigger apartment!” Knud repeated with emphasis on the thinking and apartment. “Not a castle with a moat!”

  “It’s not a castle with a moat,” Layla argued, “It’s a Tudor style mansion with a private boat dock on a manmade lake.”

  “I could fit all seven members of my immediate family in here, their wives and kids included! It’s a friggin’ castle!”

  Anybody only overhearing this conversation would think Knud was exaggerating, but he wasn’t. They were standing in the nursery. Technically the smallest bedroom in the house, but it was larger than the main bedroom in the apartment they used to live in up until last Thursday when they made the mistake of leaving to attend the vow renewal ceremony with Knud’s triplet brothers.

  A fine art mural of their son’s name, RUSTANOV was printed in huge block letters across the interior wall. And there was a bed encased in what looked so much like a one-man rocket ship, Knud couldn’t say for sure it was only a replica.

  “Wocket! Wocket!” Rustanov squirmed down from his father’s arm, at the same time Knud asked Layla, “Jesus Christ, how long has he been planning this?”

  “I have no idea,” Layla admitted. “Believe me if I had, I would have told him it was too much.”

  “Too much is an understatement, babe!”

  As their son toddled over to the bed, Knud went over to the set of drawers underneath the ST in Rustanov’s name. He’d bet his favorite stethoscope that they’d already been pre-stuffed with clothes—and yep, sure enough, the first thing he found in the top drawer of folded-up shirts was a miniature hockey jersey with RUSTANOV printed across the back.

  Knud picked it up and waved it at Layla. “Is this a miniature version of Pavlov Rustanov’s jersey or did grandpa already buy Rusty his own hockey team?”

  “That is definitely my cousin’s number. Don’t worry!” Layla walked over to the dresser and rubbed her husband’s back soothingly.

  But then she admitted, “Though Dad did mention hiring a private coach at the vow renewal ceremony. And the new basement’s large enough to put in a rink.”

  “He’s a baby, Layla! He can barely walk. How is he supposed to pick up a hockey stick!” Knud wasn’t trying to yell, but it was kind of hard not to shout when you had the world’s most ridiculous father-in-law. “This is not how you ask anybody to do anything.”

  Layla
cast her eyes to the side, seeming to give his reservations serious consideration. “You’re right. Papa had no right to surprise us with this extremely generous, highly secure, and luxurious vow renewal gift. It would have been so much better if he had applied to be one of our bodyguards, then knocked somebody out on his first day in order to talk to us…”

  Knud rolled his eyes. “You’re never going to let me forget that.”

  “Nope,” she assured him with a laugh. “And neither is Papa. So you might as well get comfortable with stunts like this.”

  Knud thought about it. Then bargained, “How about a punch at Thanksgiving? Just one itty-bitty punch.”

  Layla must have thought he was joking because she only laughed and drew him into her arms. “How about instead of thinking about ways to get back at my father who will never change, we channel all this frustration into something else?” she suggested, pressing a kiss into Knud’s jaw.

  “I like the sound of something else,” he admitted, nuzzling his face into her lips. “Plus it’s almost time to put Rustanov down for his nap. What do you think the chances are he’ll be able to sleep in the new bed?”

  “Wocket! Wocket!”

  Knud and Layla looked up to see their son, jumping up and down on the bed he’d somehow managed to surmount on his own. Disproving everything Knud said earlier about him still being a baby without enough coordination to start taking hockey lessons.

  Yeah, this kid was definitely going to get his own hockey team as a college graduation gift.