by Lauren Smith
Piper nodded, her heart racing wildly. She would do anything to save Mikhail, because it was true. She did love him. She’d been so blind, telling herself that what she felt was lust when it had always been something more. She could only pray her love was enough.
“Good.” The man came toward her with an evil glint in his eyes. “I’m afraid you won’t enjoy this next part, my dear, but it’s all part of the show.” He lunged for her, and she had only a moment to scream.
15
They say dragons never truly die. No matter how many times you kill them.
―Suzanne G. Rogers, Jon Hansen and the Dragon Clan of Yden
RANDOLPH BELISHAW STUMBLED down the alleyway, falling against a trash bin. His cold body shook. He couldn’t think. Couldn’t speak. Blood trailed down his cheeks as he clawed the sides of the metal dumpster and tried to stand.
Must get to Jodie. Must warn Mikhail.
The thoughts were a shining glow in the darkness that consumed him. Conrad Sinclair’s poison still filled his veins like black sludge, preventing the dragon from coming to his aid. He was just a mortal man—no, weaker than a mortal man—and for the first time in his life, he felt true fear.
Fear was something a dragon almost never experienced in its life. Being mortal had never been a possibility until tonight. And now it hung over his head like the sword of Damocles.
“Bloody…fucking…hell.” He stumbled like a piss-poor drunk down the alley until he finally reached the street.
He squinted at the street signs. It was evening now, the sun a soft pale glow behind the townhouses. The streets were deserted, and a fine layer of fresh snow covered the road and the cars parked along the street. How long had he been with Conrad?
He squinted at the light glowing from the streetlamps. He’d lost too much time. He cradled a wrist against his chest. Blood dripped down his fingertips. He’d ripped himself out of the iron cuffs. It hadn’t been easy. One of his thumbs was still dislocated, judging by the way it ached. Whatever was in the drug Conrad had given him had numbed him to most of the pain.
Lucky me…
Belishaw took several faltering steps into the street as he got his bearings. The clouds were pale, the growing moonlight behind them making them glow like luminescent pearls.
Pearls. He sighed at the thought. He did so love pearls. If he survived this, he was going to retrieve a cask of freshwater pearls from his private vault and cover Jodie’s naked body with them. The thought warmed him, and he kept walking. As he reached the next street, he realized that he was only half a kilometer away from where Jodie was staying.
“Sir? Are you all right?” A woman ahead of him had paused by her parked car. She was bundled for the cold weather, her breath coming out in gray clouds as she stared at him, keys in hand. He moved closer, and the light of the streetlamp behind her illuminated him. She gasped and stepped back in horror. He knew how he must look, bloody, beaten, and cut up.
The woman took another step back. “Oh my God.”
“I’m…fine…” The words were slow to come out, but he couldn’t get his tongue to cooperate to say anything more.
“You’re bleeding. I should call an ambulance.” The woman reached into her purse, but he got to her first, clasping his good hand around her wrist.
“I need a ride, please. It’s not far from here.”
The woman continued to stare at him for a long second. “Are you sure? I can take you to the hospital.”
“No.” He cursed Conrad for numbing his dragon. Otherwise, he would’ve been able to make this woman do his bidding. Right now all he had were his human instincts to get him through this.
“All right, but I really think you need a hospital.” The woman unlocked her car. He climbed into the passenger side and didn’t bother buckling himself in. The woman didn’t say another word until she started to pull out onto the street.
“Where am I headed?” she asked.
Belishaw gave her the address and then rested his forehead on the window, briefly closing his eyes. Everything was fucked up. Conrad was after the jewels, and he would kill Mikhail to get to them.
And I’m the bastard who gave him up.
He opened his eyes again, the lights outside blurring into white and yellow lines. He recognized Jodie’s townhouse and pointed. “There. Stop there.”
The woman pulled over, and he fumbled for the door handle. The woman got out and helped him to the sidewalk. Uncertainty shadowed her eyes.
“I really don’t think I should leave you like this,” she said.
“No…I’ll be fine. Thank you…for the ride.” He cradled his left hand and walked up the steps. He gave her as much of an English stiff upper lip as he could manage, and she nodded. He heard the car drive off once he started to knock on Jodie’s door.
A few seconds later the door opened. He fell heavily against Jodie.
“Randolph!” She braced him with her arms. “Oh my God, what happened? You’re bleeding.”
“I need a phone, quick…” he panted.
Jodie stared at him. “Phone?” He moved in slow, shuffling steps to the stairs that led to the upper rooms, collapsing on the second-to-last step.
“The phone, love, please.” His ragged whisper sent her running. She came back with her phone, and he dialed Mikhail’s cell. It rang for a long time, but there was no answer.
“Fuck!” he growled. Then he tried Mikhail’s landline. When he got the answering machine, he spoke quickly. “Mikhail. Conrad Sinclair is coming for you and the jewels. He knows where you are. Watch your back—he is one of us. I’ll be there as soon as I can, and I’ll bring help.”
He hung up and realized the room was silent. Jodie was watching him, barely breathing.
He rubbed a hand across his cheeks, wiping off smears of blood along his palm. “Jodie…”
“What’s going on, Randolph? You’re scaring me.” Her beautiful dark eyes were wide with terror.
Belishaw rubbed his good hand over his eyes and exhaled. “It’s a very long story.”
She moved to sit down beside him on the narrow stairs. Jodie took his hand in hers, ignoring the blood, and held it tight. The connection gave him much-needed strength.
“I’m listening.” The soft, warm pools of her eyes drew him in.
“I’m not exactly…human.” It was the first time he’d ever told a mortal woman what he was, and he prayed she wouldn’t run away screaming.
“Okay…” There was confusion in her eyes, but she hadn’t run and hadn’t let go of his hand.
“I’m only half-man. I’m…a dragon shifter. I’ve walked this earth for more than two thousand years.”
MEG STRATFORD PARKED her car half a block away and watched the injured man disappear inside the townhouse. Her mind raced as she tried to puzzle out what she’d just seen. Eventually, when she felt she had no other choice, she pulled out her cell and dialed a number.
A woman’s voice came on the line. “HQ. Please provide your identification.”
“Stratford, Meg. 3592BFHS,” Meg said.
“Voice print verified,” the woman said. “What is your status?”
“Surveillance,” Meg answered. “I need to file a code orange.”
The woman on the line paused. “Code orange?” she clarified. Orange wasn’t the highest level, but it signified that the hunter deemed an incident to be significant and required further instructions.
“Yes.” Meg stared at the house, knowing that everyone at headquarters in Detroit would be scrambling. As a supernatural hunter for the Brotherhood of the Blood Moon, she was always on guard against creatures who posed a threat to humans. The dragons in England had been her latest assignment. And it was clear after tailing Randolph Belishaw that something was very wrong. Whatever this was, it went beyond inter-clan squabbling.
“Please stand by. I’m connecting you to MacQueen,” the woman replied.
A few minutes later her boss, Damien MacQueen, was on the line.
“Meg,
everything okay?”
“I’m fine, but there’s something crazy going down in London. I don’t like it.”
“What are you seeing?” Damien asked.
“I had eyes on one of the Belishaws yesterday, and he was attacked by…well, you’re not going to believe it.”
“I think you forget what line of work we’re in, Stratford. Tell me.”
“It was a member of Parliament. Not his security detail, but the Right Honorable Conrad Sinclair himself. Alone. He shoved Belishaw into a car and drove off. I followed them to an unregistered location, a townhouse with no ties to the government that I could find. I waited twenty-four hours outside. Sinclair left twelve hours ago, but Belishaw only emerged from a side door in an alley half an hour ago. He was in rough shape, Damien. Sir, I don’t have Sinclair down on any of my records as an SLF. And whatever happened in there, it didn’t happen over a polite cup of tea.” SLF was code for supernatural life form.
“But a dragon’s healing ability should have kept him unharmed.”
“Should have. But he wasn’t healing. He’d been tortured, from the look of it. I know we aren’t supposed to interfere unless humans are in danger, but—”
Her boss’s usually laid-back tone turned gruff. “Meg, what did you do?”
“I had to help him. He saw me. It might have been suspicious if I didn’t react to him stumbling and bleeding everywhere, right? I gave him a ride.”
“To where?”
“A townhouse nearby, rented by an American woman named Jodie Harkness. She has no SLF connections that I know of. But then, neither did Sinclair. Belishaw went inside her place and hasn’t come back out,” she said.
“And Mr. Sinclair just took him?” Damien’s disbelief was evident, but Meg was positive about who she’d seen shove Belishaw into the car.
“Yeah, that’s the most messed up part of this. I mean, politicians have made alliances with shifters before, but how did he subdue and torture one on his own?”
“Fuck,” Damien cursed. “I’ve had my suspicions about him for a while. Looks like I was right.”
“Suspicions?” She didn’t like where this was headed. If her boss was worried, then she was too. Very few things upset Damien MacQueen.
“I have reason to believe Conrad Sinclair might be a dragon shifter.”
“We don’t have any intel on a Sinclair line. Why wasn’t I informed?” Meg was positive. Before she’d taken on her current assignment, she had studied all the noble lines of dragon shifters in England and mainland Europe. She knew almost as much about Randolph Belishaw as he did about himself.
“The last Sinclair dragon we know of vanished five hundred years ago. He was a close confidant of Queen Elizabeth,” Damien said. “But then one day he just disappeared.”
“Any idea what happened?”
“A hunch. We have records of Elizabeth imprisoning a dragon of the Barinov line several years earlier, though how she did it was a mystery. Then around the time Sinclair disappeared, Barinov was moved to more comfortable quarters, and an unnamed man took his place. I suspected that was Sinclair, but there was no record of him ever being released.”
“Wow,” Meg muttered. “A human queen stuck it to two dragons. Pretty impressive. Wonder how she did it?”
Damien’s laugh lacked mirth this time. “That’s something we’d like to know as well. Conrad Sinclair has all the right papers proving his birth and citizenship, yet we could find nothing about him from his youth, not even a yearbook photo. Word is he has eyes on becoming the next prime minister. Perhaps that’s what this meeting was about, to try to ensure the Belishaws’ support.”
“Sounds like a piss-poor way to drum up campaign donations.”
“True. It doesn’t track. Which means it’s something else. Something far more serious.”
Meg bit her lip. “You think it might mean a war?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Damien said with a sigh. “And we really don’t need a war on our hands. Something in the dragon world is off. A month ago, our office in Saint Petersburg told me that two families, the Barinovs and the Drakors, had a massive battle. All but one of the Drakors died. We’re lucky it happened in a rural part of Russia. If it had gone down in Moscow or Saint Petersburg, we’d have been up to our eyeballs in damage control. But here’s the thing—what really got me looking into Sinclair was his recent diplomatic trips to Russia, where he met…”
“…the Drakors.”
“Bingo. So I’ve got to ask myself, what does he have planned? And none of the answers I come up with are good.”
A shiver racked Meg’s body. She couldn’t help but picture London burning, smoke filling the skies and people dying.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked.
“Continue observation of Randolph for now. I’ll have the London office bug Sinclair’s phones. If the dragons make a move toward war, we’ll need to be ready. I’ll reach out to every department that can send hunters at a moment’s notice, just in case we have to intervene.”
Meg stared at the dark windows of the townhouse where Randolph had gone.
“Be careful, Meg. If a war starts, bug out. We’ll send in support. I don’t want you anywhere near ground zero.”
“But—”
“I mean it, Meg. You’re too valuable.” Damien’s voice gentled. “Stay on Randolph and report if anything else happens.”
“Understood.” Meg ended the call and continued to observe the street. Above her the clouds thickened, and when she glanced up, snow began to fall. It was going to be a long night.
16
My task is set before me, girl,
My mission clear and true.
There’ll be black knights and dragons, girl
But I will always come for you.
―Emme Rollins
MIKHAIL STRETCHED IN HIS BED, seeking the warm feminine form of his mate.
Mate. He had mated Piper. The thought of it made him grin, even half-awake.
“Little dove?” He rolled onto his back, opening his eyes. But she wasn’t there. His bed was empty except for him. He sat up and let the sheets slip from his body.
“Piper?” he called out as he slid out of bed and retrieved his clothes. He listened to the sounds in the house as he dressed, ears straining to catch any sign of her.
Nothing. A small knot of tension grew in his stomach.
“Piper?” he called again and left his bedroom. He searched every room, his anxiety spiking each time he came up empty. Where could she have gone?
He reached the kitchen and froze when he saw a small piece of paper, folded up, his name scrawled across it.
His stomach pitched south to his feet. “No…”
Mikhail opened the note, his hand shaking as he started to read.
MIKHAIL,
I never thought I would ever fall in love with a man like you, or that I’d have to give up a dream come true. But I had to. Please believe me when I say I never wanted to do this. Belishaw told me about dragons and human mates. You have hundreds, maybe thousands of years ahead of you. I don’t. I refuse to be the reason that you will die before your time. I care about you too much.
I hope that when I’m old and gray, I’ll still have the dreams that I flew with you and how we would watch the sun rise and set together. Maybe you won’t forget me, even if humanity has crumbled to dust and all that’s left are the gems we once shared, but I hope you’ll look back on me fondly and not hate me for leaving.
My life is in shambles, and I have to fix things, or at least try. I have your letters, the ones between you and the Belishaw family. I have a plan that will hopefully clear my name and yours. With luck, you’ll be free to go home and be with your brothers, and the jewels will finally be yours. If I can set you free of the past, maybe you will someday find a way to forgive me.
Piper
THERE WAS a blotch on the paper. A tearstain. She’d been crying when she wrote the note.
Mikhail tried to catch hi
s breath. The knowledge that his mate had abandoned him burned through his chest. She didn’t know they were already mated. His life was bound to hers, his heart, body, and soul. She could not undo the bond. Only death could separate them, and even then only for a little while.
He had to find her, explain to her. He had no regrets. This life was his choice to make, and he’d made it with open eyes. He would win his little dove back somehow. He had to. Mikhail started for the stairs, but the phone rang. The landline.
He froze. Only a handful of people had that number. He rushed back to the kitchen and answered it.
“Hello?”
“Mikhail Barinov.”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“My name is Conrad Sinclair. You have something that belongs to me.”
He knew of that name…he’d seen him on TV. A politician. He couldn’t fathom why a member of Parliament would be calling him.
“What are you talking about?”
“Come now, Barinov. There’s no need for secrecy. We are past that now. I know you have the jewels, the Cheapside trove. In exchange, I have something you want.”
“How could you have anything I want?” Mikhail asked, his voice turning cold.
“Because I know what happens when you take a mate, dragon,” Conrad said with a chuckle. The sound grated on Mikhail’s ears.
“My mate?” Mikhail choked on the words. He couldn’t have Piper. She was on her way to London. Conrad had to be bluffing.
“Yes. Ms. Linwood. You see, I was looking for you when your little dove fell right into my lap. That is what you call her, isn’t it? Your little dove? She told me that was your nickname for her.” Conrad’s voice was velvet-covered steel.
There was only one way Conrad would know that he called Piper his little dove. Piper had told him. What had he done to her to make her give up that information? Mikhail’s throat constricted, but he had to keep his dragon calm. The beast was already snarling inside his head.
“You want the jewels? Very well.” He would give them away without hesitation. Piper was the only thing that mattered.