Sold To The Dragon Beasts
~ Bonus Story ~
A Dragon Shifter Menage
Ria Stevenson, five years ago, was captured by a cruel wolf shifter. She suffered under his hands, as did the others who fell into his grasp. But she endured, and survived, and never quite gave up hope. When dragom shifters invade from the nearby mountains, Ria seizes her chance to get noticed by them, and to escape. A red dragon spots her and takes her to safety, though she's still in a way, a prisoner. Just with better living conditions. Under the ice blue eyes of the dragon shifter in his handsome human form, who has an additional purpose for her...
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Chapter One
It's been six years since I was captured, to the day. I stare out the window to face the falling snow, where the cold bites so deep that without the proper protection to step outside, I'd freeze to death in a matter of minutes. The mountains are beautiful in the background, with wisps of white clouds over and on them, and the dark evergreen forests which speckle along the steep landscape.
Below, in the stone village, wolves walk the lanes – the shifters responsible for my capture when I was on holiday in France.
Before the capture, I was simply Ria Stevenson, a seventeen year old girl with her friends on a school trip to Paris. We had two shifter kids with us as well, a bear shifter and a panther. Kids trying their hardest to live ordinary lives, to fight past the stigma of untrustworthy shifters , and that ever since they'd been integrated to human society, more and more women went missing every week. I'm talking of mysterious disappearances, of people who vanish without a trace so suddenly that you don't know if they're alive or dead – all rumored to be a result of shifter activity.
To be fair on shifters in general, the ones who truly integrate are for all intents and purposes, human.
They learn our ways. They learn respect.
The ones who still cling to the old ways, to their isolated societies in hard to find places – those are the ones we need to watch out for.
There's really not much you can do when a group of them break into a hotel, drug you and bundle you out without taking any of your belongings. No mobile phone, no nothing. You're left with nothing but your body, mind and soul.
I still remember the terror and fear when they threw me into the back of the van. I still feel it knifing inside, along with the other trembling girls, weeping and crying and scared they might die.
I remember when our captors auctioned us – actually auctioned – to an assembly of shifters. They sold women like commodities, inspecting us like mules, prising open our teeth, examining our eye and hair color, then selling us off to the highest bidders.
A wolf shifter rested his eyes on me then, taking in my green irises, my dark hair and creamy pale skin. My mother and father used to say I had Celtic blood, a mix of Irish and Scottish ancestries, and that I'd better be careful not to have any children, because they might be red heads and have no souls.
My dad's a red head, but as far as I've seen, he had some kind of soul, buried deep in the flesh of his body.
All I could think about was my parents and what on earth they'd be thinking. When the news of the hotel abduction resonated across papers, and they found their only daughter amongst the missing.
It makes my heart heavy, and my eyes dry and empty from suppressing tears. As for my new “home,” it makes me feel as if I've been deleted from the world and thrown into a bygone time, where technology doesn't exist, and only the brutal, minimal society of the wolves drowns instead.
One snowflake falls close to my fingers, and I touch the glass for a moment, my pale fingers smudging the frost build up.
Kallen, the one who bought me, is not a kind master. There are bruises upon my wrists from the number of times he's chained me up. My back is sore from whippings, and my virginity long since lost and ravaged. At first, I suffered. It was pain, it was violation, exactly the kind of activity that might make you break down on the spot and pretend that you existed somewhere else, away from reality.
But when I saw the two other pupils that Kallen had brought with him break down and go raving mad – it changed something in my heart.
Katie and Lily did not deserve what happened to them. None of us did. They might have been the popular, bitchy cheerleaders in school, but that didn't mean they needed what befell them. To be captured by a rich, cruel old shifter, who revelled in suffering and their piteous cries.
Katie, in the end, retreated so far back into her mind that she couldn't claw herself out again. She became a lifeless doll, and Kallen soon tired of her, and sold her off to someone else.
Lily, well. She took the easy way out. At least, that's how I think of it in my head, because there's been a few times when my mind had tended down that route as well. It's the easy way. The sad and pathetic way. The loser's option.
Sometimes, though, I'm a little envious of her.
As for me, well. My defense mechanism was to permanently let in darkness. If I stayed as who I was, I would become Katie or Lily. So I needed to change. I needed to embrace darkness.
It became my greatest protector in the end. When I hear him coming, those steps of his echoing up the ancient stone stairwell to my room, I allow the blanket of cold to cover my soul. I tuck it somewhere safe, so that there is no harm. And then, when Kallen walks into the room, dark, greedy eyes scouring my body, mind whirring through the things he plans to inflict on me, I'm ready.
The darkness allows me to step into his mind state. To enjoy it. It breaks off the suffering, because you cannot suffer if you are immune. If you embrace pain, and allow that darkness to be punished.
Maybe, in a way, I went mad. On my normal days, I can feel my darkness settled in the corner of my mind, ready to be summoned at will. I hope one day I'll never need her again, but for now, it's the only thing that keeps me going.
I know about five years has passed since I was taken. Five years since I got sold to this disgusting miser of a man, who every day I consider various different ways upon how to kill.
I don't act on any of them, because I still don't know what my next step will be. There's a cold mountain that would kill me just as surely as a dagger to the heart.
Kallen is aware of the resentment in my skin, so he leaves me no warm clothes to protect myself in. All I wear right now is the summer clothes that I was captured in, certainly not enough to protect from the icy winds, and from whatever other wolf decides they want me.
I know Kallen intends to get more slaves soon, and he's arranging to go to one of the auctions, the same kind that I was bought in. He'll get more girls like me, snatched away from their beds or hotels, more people for him to break. The thought makes me furious.
The village is emptier than usual, and I briefly consider smashing the glass. Doing something impulsive and destructive, simply because I have nothing better to do. Kallen locks me in this room when he's not around, so God help me if I need to empty my bladder or intestines. I've learned to control what I eat and drink and prepare for expected moments of departure over the years.
I've learned a lot of useless trivia, it seems, being in this hated position. Including how to read someone better. To see the subtle expressions in their faces which betray the bottled thoughts inside. It allows me to break Kallen down into meat and bones, a creature with predictable reactions and patterns. To steel myself for the worse, or take advantage of the best.
Still looking through the window, finger twiddling my growing dark hair, I see a small procession of wolves bringing back women strapped to their enormous backs. I see Kallen, with his white-gray fur, with a blonde haired, substantially busty woman limp on his back, and sigh.
Just as I'm reflecting on how to help make her life easier, so she doesn't snap or remove herself from existance like Katie and Lily, I see figures streaking through the clouded sky.
At first, I'm not aware of what I'm witnessing. Then, as the figures fly closer, I realize, with a chaotic leap of my heart, that I'm staring at dragons.
Dragon shifters.
There must be hundreds of different types of shifters in our world. Some impressive, some... less so. Like mice and squirrels, creatures that might not be great at bringing you down, but still make great thieves.
Dragons, however, are of the mythical branch. Mythical shifters are the rarest in the world, and generally have bloodlines. Royalty. An ancient structure as a result of their sacred blood and powerful forms.
I know this because my history teacher once sat us down for a lesson on royal families of the day.
He went through The United Kingdom, Belgium, Holland, mentioning them as mere figureheads of their societies, and then he mentioned the mythical shifters who were scattered around, including ones settled somewhere in the Balkan mountains, in areas untouched by man.
There are many small “royal” towns scattered around the world, micro-nations with minor influence on matters. But then you had the whoppers in Europe.
I know the dragon shifters own a territory called Balteria, wedged somewhere between Bulgaria and Serbia. Far enough away for Americans to not care, isolated enough so that the other countries still maintained otherwise normal functions – but Balteria had officially been registered as a nation twenty or so years ago.
Not that they traded with people outside their nation. But it was big and self sustaining enough to make them a force to be reckoned with – and no army in their right mind would assault a nation of dragon shifters.
Not that seeing them here meant anything but more chaos for me.
Still, I watch in fascination as the front dragons spewed up great gouts of flame, sweeping over the wolf shifters, who howl and scream their rage. I see several dragons swoop over the streets as though searching for something, and then watching as they scooped up women who were exposed.
Of course. Shifters hardly ever chose any other reason to raid. With the scarcity of women in their clans, and the fact that women couldn't produce females when mated with a shifter, it always left them desperate. I twist my lips in a bitter curl.
One dragon soared towards the section of village where I am, and I lock gazes with his eyes for a moment, as he observes me pressed up again the glass. A huge, fearsome red beast, with scales dipped in the color of blood.
It takes me precisely one second to raise up my elbow and smash it against the window, until the glass shatters.
The dragon's eyes seem to widen, and he actually stops and hovers just outside the house as I force the gap, grab the blanket from the bed and squeeze myself through.
My heart's racing a thousand beats a minute as I let the dragon tenderly scoop me up in his talons, and I wrap myself up in the sheets, even though I already feel the cold slicing deep. The dragon flaps away with me, away from the carnage unfolding below. The wolves are fighting for their lives now, but as powerful as they might be, they simply can't compare to a fire breathing monstrosity with scales that can deflect bullets.
Might be nice to have a change of scenery, I think, rather hysterically. I'm not kidding myself that the dragon won't want me for the same purpose as Kallen.
But as it is, I saw little chance of my situation ever changing in the wolf village, with Kallen and his ways, and the wolves around.
Perhaps, with a new captor, I might have new opportunities. To escape. To kill. To find my way home again.
Chapter Two
I wish for a moment I might have seen Kallen burn to death. It's the least he deserves after everything he's put me and the others through. The lives he has shattered.
Hatred pulses within when I think of him and the other wolf shifters. Shifters in general. They're not making it into my good books, and I'm already wondering what to do, even as I'm carried in the dragon's claws, with a blanket that does an inadequate job of keeping the cold away. Still, by the time we touchdown possibly an hour or so later, I'm freezing, but not dying.
My suspicions are correct. I believe I'm in Balteria, the dragon kingdom, namely because the wealth bottled up in this place is noticeable. Instead of drab stone and barely constructed huts, there's masterfully crafted abodes, ranging from little cottages to mansions, with the biggest building of all, the Palace of Eyes – looming over everything else.
The Palace of Eyes looks as though it's cupped within the open wound of a mountain, protruding out of the tip of what might be a dormant volcano. Buildings are carved into the rock face, and snow-dirt tracks exist to connect the place together.
There's no obvious way out, much to my disappointment. You need to be a flier to reach these places, which also explains why no one on foot has been able to assault the dragon clans as of yet.
The dragon allows me to clamber onto his back, rather than walk behind him on bare feet, and he ambles towards the Palace of Eyes, which seizes my attention.
High ranking dragon? Or what? I keep my attention peeled for any information that can help me out. I see women in fur robes on the streets. They pause to give the red dragon I'm riding on a wave, and he lifts a wing to them in response.
Already it's so vastly different. In the wolf village you didn't see any women on the streets. They got confined just as I did, not allowed to breathe in the fresh air, unless the wolf with them was merciful, or as kind as you likely found a shifter to be.
The women here seem to have more freedom, and they're out on the streets, talking to one another, even trading at the markets.
I wonder if it's to do with the fact that the dragons are supremely confident that no one can get away from them. It's possible, and I store that information in my head reluctantly, though I know I have to keep watching. I'll find my opportunity, one way or another.
Straddled on the back of the red dragon, I briefly admire the blood red scales, which actually flush in tone from red to almost black at their root attachment. I dig my finger underneath one scale with difficulty, and it flakes off, revealing a newer one beneath. I grab the flake, which is shaped like a guitar pick, wondering how such a flimsy looking object could be capable of reflecting bullets. The dragon also appears to not notice me loosening the scales upon his body. Men and women are now waving at the red dragon, and any shifters utilizing their full dragon forms are scraping and bowing.
Somehow, I think the person underneath me is important. Probably a noble, part of the higher blood of this clan. It's a big territory, with thousands of houses and streets and castles, though the Palace of Eyes looms over everything else. Instead of the gray stone or black and white shadings of the houses along the mountains, I see the palace shrouded in silver and green, with buttresses and sloping dome roofs, possibly to make it awkward for dragons to lie on.
By the time we've made it through the palace gates and into the palace, I'm fairly certain that I'm sitting on someone important, though I try not to get my expectations up. Better to be pleasantly surprised than bitterly disappointed, though to be fair, my life for the last five years has been nothing more than bitter disappointment.
I doubt my mother and father would recognize me if I came back to them. I can't imagine I'll have any other friends still longing for good old Ria to return, and if they did have any candles lit up in school, it's been five years, and everyone I knew would have graduated and started getting on with their college or other lives. Forging careers.
Whilst my mind has effectively rotted, forgetting equations and most of the lessons embarked in it, I've become somewhat of a sexpert.
You see, I spent long, lonely hours locked up in that room discovering what I needed and what I didn't. What reactions thrilled Kallen and which ones didn't. When you don't have any other kind of stimulants, no phone or computer to tap away at, no books to read or toys to play with, there's other things to do to alleviate the boredom.
I honestly think though that if I didn't have a window, with the option to break at any point, I probably would have gone the same route as Lily.
I close my eyes for a moment, feeling the rocking motion of the dragon underneath me. I wonder what kind
of master he'll be, or if he plans to trade me up. I wonder if my life will be better or infinitely worse.
As long as he doesn't have too many skeletons in his closet, I should be okay. Shifters do consider it a waste to kill women – unless they're sadistic bastards like Kallen.
The palace entrance is wide open, and there's two dragon guards positioned on either side. They give grunting, snuffling noises at the red dragon as he ambles past, and I casually work at flaking more of his scales off. I manage to prise about two more off before he stops in front of a door too small for a dragon, and rears up slightly, so I get the hint and start scrambling off.
When I do, he morphs at last into his human form. I hold my breath, hoping that he's handsome.
Not that being handsome makes much of a difference in hating someone or not, but I'll take what I can get in this situation. Wintery blue eyes glint out of his face, so brilliant and noticeable, that it captivates all attention. I've never seen a shade of blue like this. They're so light, they could be chips of ice, and I'd swear at this point they glowed in the dark. It gives him a dangerous look to a rugged face, one with jet black hair finely crafted around distinctive, wide cheeks, which slope down into an oval face.
He has a distant, imperious expression to a softly noble face, and hooded eyelids which give him a perpetually sleepy slant to those crystals. My breath catches in my throat, even as I go past the short black curls of his hair to the high collar line of an expensive suit, a deep brown in shade.
Jesus Christ, this dragon in human form is stunning. My heart's in slight turmoil, though I'm fairly sure that from the moment he speaks, I'll slip into ceaseless hatred. Something to jerk me away from those gorgeous eyes and cheeks, which I'm tempted to touch, just to make sure that they're real.
“I'm Kostya Mirova.”
Mirova. That's the royal family name in Balteria. I'm most certainly in Balteria, and this is a prince. A damn handsome prince.
Sold To The Dragon Princes: The Novel Page 54