“Siobhan, do you think it’s possible that we’ll be able to mate with humans? Tell me honestly.”
“Yes,” Siobhan said, without a moment of hesitation. “Of course.”
“I’ve been working toward it for so long,” Ronan told her. “And all it has led to is this moment, right now. Having Natasha has made the problem more real to me than I could ever imagine, but the fact is that if—when—I get her back, what if I can’t find a way for us to be together the way we need to be?”
Siobhan put her hand on his shoulder. “I have to tell you something, and I didn’t think I would ever say this to you, but I have to. I lied to you.”
He frowned at her, not understanding. “What are you talking about?”
“The day that I showed up at your place and brought you to Natasha …I did that because Julian had a vision of her. One of you two together. I wasn’t going to let on, because you needed to see it for yourself, but I brought you to her because she’s somehow not just the answer for you, she’s the answer for all of us, Ronan. She’s going to lead you to the answer.”
Ronan stared at her, thinking back to that day. “You didn’t have to leave to go help Julian with a vision at all, did you?”
“Nope.”
“You made up an excuse to get out of there and leave us alone.”
“Yep.”
“Siobhan, that’s two lies.”
“Yep.”
Ronan very carefully hugged her, unable to squeeze her tightly the way that he normally would have. “Thank you.”
She hugged him back, equally as carefully. “I’m always here for you, Ronan. And I believe that you can not only get her back but that you two can figure out the answer for us. Maybe she’s shown it to you already.”
Drawing back, Ronan nodded, looking past Siobhan as he remembered that conversation with his grandmother—the one that Natasha had suggested. “She may have, actually. She led me to Nana again, and Nana told me that it was simpler than I was making it. That I had to set my intention.”
“Any idea what that means?”
He shook his head. “No. Not yet. But when I find Natasha …I really want to be able to propose to her. I want us all to have answers.”
Siobhan smiled and touched his arm. “If you want to propose to her, Ronan, then just do it. Maybe what Nana means is …just do it. That is what the ancestors did, after all. They just started doing things …like finding a way to communicate. Like learning how to make their bodies agile. Like deciding that they were going to learn how to transition. You’ve been looking for spells and advice and ways to scientifically change our DNA. Maybe …just take a mate. Take a woman as your own who is a human, and mate with her.”
“Then why hasn’t it worked for any of you?” Ronan asked. “It has to be more complicated than that.”
“None of us have taken mates,” Siobhan pointed out. “Julian and I haven’t gone through the ceremony that joins us. We haven’t gotten married. We haven’t done any of that. Maybe …you and Natasha should.”
“She’s still married.”
Siobhan chuckled slightly. “That I can’t help you with. How about I get her back from Crazy-Pants for you, and then you figure out how to marry her?”
“Yeah,” Ronan said, still lost in thought, his mind exploring possibilities that he had never considered before. “Yeah. Help me find her. I need her back.”
Kean strode up, interrupting them, his face full of purpose. “I’ve got something. A lead.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Natasha
“That’s a lie!” Natasha strained against her bonds, furious with Abigail for what she was doing—and for how successfully she was doing it. She was chained to a basketball hoop located in the enormous high school gymnasium where Abigail had moved the rest of the LA Dragon Clan members for the night, now that she knew that Ronan knew where their hotel had been. And now, as the three men sat there, drinking in Abigail’s every word, she was telling them that it was Natasha who had killed Michael. “It’s not true, and you know it, Abigail!”
Abigail held up a hand, turning her face away as she pretended to get emotional. “Don’t make it worse by lying about it,” Abigail told her, voice shaking with the intensity of her nonexistent emotions. “You killed Michael in cold blood to try to get away from him. His guard was down. He didn’t think you were capable of something like that, but you were, you monster!”
“Then why do we have her here?” one of the men demanded, getting up off the bleachers and stalking toward Natasha. “Why the hell is she still alive? She killed our leader. She seduced Ronan away from Abigail and put all these ideas in his head about what the future of the clan should be. Why are we letting her live?”
Natasha felt a thrill of fear, and she huddled against the basketball hoop, her hands and feet both chained to it. She knew Abigail would kill her—or allow her to be killed—because she had seen Abigail murder Michael in cold blood, and as the man named Fischer got closer and closer, she knew that she might only have seconds to live. He believed everything that Abigail told him about her, and there was no doubt that he wanted to exact justice for his leader. She didn’t blame him for that. She blamed Abigail for twisting the truth.
“Please,” Natasha said, as Fischer reached her. “Please—she’s lying to you. Don’t do this.”
“Fischer, wait,” Abigail said sharply. “Don’t touch her. Yet.”
Fischer’s eyes flashed, and he drew his hand back. He had been reaching for Natasha’s throat. “She killed Michael, Abby. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t strangle the life out of her.”
“Because she’s bait,” another of the men—this one was Sean, Natasha thought—said, standing up too. “We have to take them on now, don’t we, Abby? That’s why we’re here, in this space.” He gestured around the school gymnasium. “There are plenty of other places we could have gone for the night. A different hotel would have been perfect, in my opinion. We’re here because you know that Ronan will come hunting her.”
Abigail smiled slightly. “Yes. He’ll come for her. He’s been completely taken in by her …charms. Apparently she has some.”
“Well, she is pretty,” the third man said, keeping his seat. Natasha thought his name was Benjamin, but she couldn’t be sure. The last few hours had been a whirlwind of chaos, and she was doing well to remember her own name after the beating her body had taken and the fear that her mind currently existed in. “You can see why he likes her.”
“Can you?” Abigail exploded at Benjamin, fury in her voice. “Can you, really, Benjamin? You see her charms? Her beauty? Great—you marry her then. Why don’t you just marry her?”
Benjamin blinked in surprise at Abigail’s outburst, looking around at his friends. “I just said that she’s pretty. That’s all. I don’t want to marry her, Abby. Geez.”
“Well then don’t say stupid things,” Abigail snapped. “She’s not pretty. She’s not anything. She’s bait. While she’s useful, we keep her alive. When she’s not anymore, we kill her.”
All three men looked at her a bit askance, and she quickly clarified.
“To avenge Michael, of course. Whom she killed.”
Fischer seemed most in line with Abigail’s thinking, and he glared at Natasha before walking away from her to stand beside Abigail. “So you think we’re ready to take them on then? All five of them? We’re a man down, thanks to her, you know. And how can you be sure they’ll find us here, tonight? This place is going to have kids in it on Monday, Abs.”
“Of course we’re ready to take them on,” Abigail snapped. “We’re stronger, faster, and better than them. Look at who they’ve had leading them all this time. Ronan obviously went soft long ago. He’s destructive to the health of the clan, and when we take him and his little companions out, we’ll be considered heroes. We’ll take over the branch here, become the dominant branch, and then we’ll be the ones who are leading the next wave of the Dragon Clan generation. But our way. A stronger,
better, more active way.”
“We’re going to kill them?” Benjamin’s tone sounded hesitant. “No dragon has ever killed another dragon before. We don’t do that.”
“Well, now we do,” Abigail told him sharply. “And I know that they’ll show up, because I didn’t exactly keep it a secret …”
“What do you mean?” Sean asked, and Natasha listened intently, desperate, at this point, for any hint on what might be happening on Ronan’s side of things. He would come for her—she was as sure of that as Abigail was. But at this point, she wasn’t sure that he should, given what he was going to walk into.
“I called the hotel we were at, and I gave my name and room number. Then I asked them questions about finding the school gymnasium where my nephew had a basketball game …”
Fischer frowned, crossing his arms over his chest. “Why would you do that?”
“Because they’re good investigators,” Abigail explained. “And they’ll question the hotel they know I was staying at to see if they come across anything useful. This will be …very useful.”
“That’s too much of a stretch,” Sean argued.
But Natasha knew that it wasn’t. She knew that Ronan and his friends were some of the best investigators around and they would run every possibility. They would take that information about the gymnasium and run with it, and they would end up walking directly into Abigail’s plan. The gymnasium was accessible from the outside, and at the furthest corner of the enormous high school campus, away from everyone and everything. It was the perfect place for Abigail’s coup, and Natasha was almost frantic with the need to somehow warn Ronan away.
Then she remembered to have faith in him. If he was as good as she knew he was, then he would understand that he’d come across a planted clue, and if he chose to walk into the situation anyway, it would be with full knowledge that he was walking into Abigail’s trap, therefore making it his trap.
Either way, Natasha knew that there was going to be bloodshed in the gymnasium and whatever happened there was going to determine the course of her future. Was she going to walk out of this hand-in-hand with Ronan, or was one or both of them going to end up losing their life because of Abigail’s psychotic obsession with power and revenge? Michael had already lost his for that exact reason.
The cuffs that were binding her to the basketball hoop were cutting into her skin. The guys that Abigail was with had brought them, having picked them up by Abigail’s request on their way in from the hotel. It had been at least two hours since she’d first been chained, and she was starting to bleed, her immunity to pain making it difficult to realize when she was pulling at the cuffs because of her anxiety. Her blood was red, not silver, and it looked garish, coating her arms and the cuffs themselves.
As she stared at the cuffs, a thought occurred to her. Instinctively, she kept pulling at the cuffs, the pain of no consequence to her. As a result, her cuffs were tight at the base of her hand, slicing into the skin there. But if that skin wasn’t there …her hands would slide right out and she would be partially free. Her feet would still be chained, but having her hands free would give her back some of her own control, and it would cost her nothing that wouldn’t heal itself.
She pulled harder at the left cuff, ignoring the resistance the metal provided and the cutting sensation against her skin. She ignored the blood that began to spill and the horrific visual of the cuff pulling at her skin, cutting and tearing at it. Biting her lip, she pulled harder, and with one final tug, her hand came free from the cuff. The skin around the base of her hand was destroyed and bloodied, but even as she stared at it, the healing process began. She would be whole again within mere seconds.
When she was, she pulled her right hand from the cuff, the same damage taking place and then also healing immediately.
Her hands were free, and Natasha was elated as she rubbed her hands together, loving the fact that she was able to. A glance over at Abigail proved that the four Dragon Clan members were deep in discussion, trying to figure out how they were going to take down Ronan and his clan when they arrived, and they weren’t paying any attention to her at all. She crouched, looking at the cuffs around her feet.
They were far more complicated, because she couldn’t just pull her foot out without taking the foot off altogether. She had never tested her body’s ability to regenerate actual parts, and she wasn’t about to begin doing that now. She pulled at the cuffs, seeing if she could find the strength in her fingers to pull them apart if she was willing to let the metal cut into her in the meantime.
But although her fingers healed from the slices, there wasn’t enough strength in her arms to pry the cuffs apart. Her feet were well and stuck, and that meant she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. She tuned back into the conversation Abigail was having, and her anger at the woman surged all over again.
“Ronan is the real reason that Michael is dead, Sean. Because he brought this …human woman into our lives. He violated every single rule that we have as Dragon Clan members. He’s a traitor. That’s all there is to it.”
“I still think that luring him to a gym to kill him is a little bit of an overreaction,” Benjamin said.
“He killed Michael!” Abigail screamed, throwing her arms up in the air. “He almost killed me out in the woods! What more do you need, Benjamin? Do you need to see him hold a knife to my neck?”
“I would be happy to do exactly that.”
The voice came from behind Natasha, and it moved through her whole body, warming her from the inside out and turning her world right side up again. She turned, and her eyes locked with Ronan’s. Instinctively, she tried to move toward him, but her cuffs held her back. He looked ill. Deathly ill. He was clearly barely standing, and yet he was standing there, ready to fight for what was right—to fight for her.
“I love you,” she called to him, before anyone else could say anything, as his friends filed in behind him, each taking their positions in the showdown that was no inevitable.”
“I love you too,” Ronan said, and he straightened slightly, seeming to take power and strength from her words. He used that to focus on Abigail, who had turned toward him as well, her eyes icy-cold. “And you,” Ronan said to Abigail. “You …I’m going to kill.”
“Not if I kill you first, husband mine,” Abigail said, a smirk covering her lips. “I’m glad you got my message about where to find me.”
“I did,” Ronan said. “And I have a message of my own. You messed with mine and you’re going to pay.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Ronan
The moment he spoke, Eamon, Kean, Siobhan, and Moira all shifted into their dragon forms, their collective roar echoing in the large, open gymnasium. It was all part of the plan that they had begun formulating the moment that Kean had discovered that Abigail had left them a trail for just how to find her. She wanted them to come to her, because she thought, somehow, that she had the upper hand on them. Little did she know the kind of army that Ronan brought with him. Little did she know that others were waiting in the wings, ready to help them take Abigail down. Isabelle, with her magic. Julian and Ophelia with their visions.
And Natasha. His beautiful, incredible, magical Natasha. Just the sight of her gave him back some of the strength that the curse was leaching from him.
He was ready to take Abigail down, and he was ready to send a message to any other branch of the Dragon Clan that might be likely to side with her. Nobody could push him around and not pay the consequences.
As his people transitioned, so did Abigail’s, and seven dragons snorted and stamped, each side ready to attack at moment’s notice. Ronan and Abigail locked eyes, both of them fierce in their intent to win, and Abigail’s mouth quirked upward, as though this whole thing somehow amused her.
Then she shifted into the rose-gold creature that had so viciously attacked him earlier and left him bruised and bloodied.
“Now!” Ronan shouted to his own troops, stretching out his arm. “Get them n
ow!”
His word was all it took. Eamon’s stark-white dragon form led the charge, and he tackled Abigail, tumbling with her across the gymnasium floor. Kean followed, and Moira, with her fire-red scales, and Siobhan, with her shimmering gold, went after him, each targeting one of the enemy dragons until the room was a mass of thrashing wings, swiping tails, and gnashing teeth.
Ronan rushed to Natasha’s side, and she threw her arms around him, their kiss fierce and desperate as he pressed her up against the pole she was chained to. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered over and over again. “I’m so sorry I let her have you. Are you all right? Tell me you’re all right.”
Natasha clung to him, kissing all over his face, tears in her eyes. “I’m fine. Don’t be sorry. She didn’t play by the rules—Ronan, she killed Michael. Then she said I did it. She kept me alive to use me as bait. So you would come here.”
“I was always going to come for you,” Ronan said, cupping her face in his hands. “That was never a question, and that was never about her. It was about you, and what we are. Baby, I need you to listen to me.” Looking into her eyes, he tried to show her how serious he was. They had so little time, and there was a battle being waged all around them, but he had to tell her this now. Before anything else could ever threaten to separate them again. “I know what Nana meant now. When she said to me that I had to set my intention …I know what she meant. It’s so simple, Natasha. I’ve been thinking about the whole thing so wrong, and it’s led to all of this. None if it had to be this way, except that maybe it did, because it was fated to be this way. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
“Ronan, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Natasha said, her eyes cutting over to where fierce dragons were brutally fighting. “Tell me what you mean.”
“I mean …will you marry me?”
That got her attention quickly enough, and she looked back at him, her eyes wide with shock. “What?”
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