His back stiffened. His fingers uncoiled and released Eduard from the pythonic hold. Her father gasped and wheezed. She rushed to Eduard’s side.
Rayse’s croaked from behind her, “You would threaten me for him?” Hurt drenched his voice.
Blood pumped through her veins in a staccato rhythm. “You were going to kill him. If I didn’t put that dagger to your throat, you would have squeezed the life out of him, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know. I might have stopped.” His humanity had returned, and even though she didn’t turn to look at him, she knew warm black tones had replaced the dragon yellow of his eyes they had been just moments ago.
Eduard reached up to his neck. He was sputtering. “De-demon, d-drago-ons… are…”
“He’s in shock,” she said. “I’ll get him settled. I need to make sure he’s well before we leave.” She tried to lift Eduard up, but not without struggle.
Rayse stepped in and took her father from her. “Let me.”
Her pulse quickened. She didn’t want him anywhere near Papa, not after what he’d just done, but he took the old man from her with an eerie tenderness before she could protest.
Rayse’s elbow brushed past her. “I’m not going to hurt him. Don’t fret. I’m regained some semblance of sanity.”
Chapter 14
Rayse’s wings beat against the cool air of the winds. His mate clutched to him as they flew silently onward.
He couldn’t fathom how or why this woman trusted him enough to fly with him. “I’m sorry.” The dagger to his throat and the distrust on her face had allowed him to lock his dragon away. It was trapped in a mental cell, caged behind reinforced steel bars. It would get out eventually, but for now, Rayse had tamed it.
She breathed out a soft sigh. “Bastion did the same thing to my mother.”
His body tensed.
“He choked her like you did Eduard just now. Then he dragged her away in a room. Her screams still cause nightmares.”
“Constance… I didn’t mean to.”
“I know.”
“When I saw Eduard hurting you, I lost all sense.”
She avoided his gaze. “I know.”
His heart sank into a deep, endless pit. “But I’ve changed your view of me, regardless of the intention.”
She nodded, swallowed, and clenched his arm. “Give me time. It’ll take a while to shake off that sight.” Maybe never. The unspoken words rang true to his ears.
He was angry, furious at himself for acting so foolishly. He would do anything to undo tonight. He thought he had crept into her heart, but his actions had slammed closed the entrance to it as soon he set one foot through the door. It would take a lot to win back this woman’s trust.
“Rayse, there’s a fire.” Constance pointed to a flickering glow of red in the distance.
He had noticed it only moments before she had. Fires like that never boded well. He could spot faint silhouettes of dragons in the chaos. They must belong to the rogue group of dragons they were investigating. His mate wouldn’t have been able to see the with her human eyes.
“It looks like a hamlet. It’s burning.”
“Forest fires are common around these parts,” he said. “Ignore it.”
“At night?” Her grip tightened on his shoulder. “We should inspect the place. What if it’s people needing our—”
“Ignore it,” he said again, hardness in his tone. The screams he heard in his youth screeched in the back of his mind. His heart ached for the innocent lives he was leaving behind, but he wouldn’t risk bringing his mate to such dangers.
She sucked in a deep breath and looked like she was about to retort, but then swallowed her comments.
They flew onward in silence for the next half-hour. He landed in front of their house and called his wings back toward his shoulder blades. He let Constance down. His mate was a little too eager to part from him.
A shadowed figure waited for them on the porch—Ranwynn’s mother, Frieda.
He wasn’t in the mood for this.
“Your lordship,” the woman said with a pleading voice. “Please release my son.”
He scowled. “He’s not dead. Isn’t that good enough?” His reputation obviously was not as terrifying as most dragons preached, for if it was, this woman would not have thought to visit him at such an ungodly hour.
“He is still young, barely thirty. He’s hotheaded and haughty and didn’t know better. He knows not to challenge you now.”
“Then he shouldn’t have harmed the femriahl. I’ve passed judgment; there will be no contest over it.”
Frieda lifted a small box she had been carrying at her side. “Maybe this will change your mind.”
He lifted a brow. “You think to bribe me?” The thought insulted him.
Her face paled. “I didn’t mean it that way, milord. It’s an apology—maybe I can start with that.”
“Do you want to join your son in the dungeons?” His patience wore thin. She asked too much of him.
“Please, it’s for the femriahl. She will like it, I promise you this.”
Constance received the package from Frieda before he could deny it from her. “Thank you,” she said, then shot him a cold glance. “This woman has gone through enough. The least we can do is accept her request.”
He snarled. “I do not owe her anything.”
But he found it difficult to refuse Constance after he’d done her so much wrong.
Constance loosened the brown strings of the gift and unwrapped it. Something wasn’t right here. His gut told him to be wary, and he trusted it. It had saved him countless times. Without permission, he snatched the item from her and stepped away to create a cautious distance. He opened it himself. A purplish smoke exploded around him and lashed at his skin. It stung.
Poison.
“You thought to blackmail me?” he said.
Immediately, he saw through Frieda’s scheme. The woman would poison his mate, and only she would have the antidote. After that, he would bend to whatever she requested, using his mate’s life as leverage. This was a common trick some of his warriors used to get other clans to do his bidding.
Luckily, he was far enough from Constance so only he suffered damage. Frieda had made sure the poison had a short effective distance, so it wouldn’t reach her when the exchange occurred. Few poisons could do much harm to a dragon, and its effects would wear off in a few hours. The same couldn’t be said for a human like his mate. She would suffer the effects ten times worse.
Nausea gripped his stomach. He wanted to sleep off the sickly sensations slowly creeping around him like thorny vines. But he wouldn’t be able to get enough shut-eye until he’d finished the mate bond with Constance. His temper was riled by the giddiness that swarmed him.
He seized Frieda’s arm and twisted it backward. She and her family would plague the safety of his mate no longer. Efficient brutality erupted through him. He would cut the infected wound from the flesh and purge his clan of the undesired.
Constance’s plea pierced him. “Stop!”
“Stop?” He choked back the ache the poison assaulted him with. That, combined with the stark lack of sleep and withholding his inner dragon, made it difficult to get a grip of himself. “This woman just tried to endanger your life.”
“Don’t be a monster, Rayse.”
He let go. “I’m doing this for you. I’m hurting people for you.” Why couldn’t she understand that this was the only way? Why did she always throw his insides into a jumbled wave of doubt?
“If it’s for me, then please stop. I don’t want you to do evil in my name.”
“Then what do you presume I do? Allow them to hurl their threats at you? I am a dragon. Dragons do not allow dangers near their mates.”
“You don’t have to be a big bully to prevent that!”
“It’s not easy to control the largest dragon clan in all of Gaia. You don’t do it by letting your subordinates walk all over you.”
She didn’
t voice them, but he saw the accusations and judgment in her eyes. It fueled his rage at her—at himself, at the Dragon Mother for pairing him with this individual who found it so difficult to accept him.
She clutched her wrist. “Please. You being like that… it’s scary. I don’t wish to mate with a man who is a tyrant, who only knows to take things by force. The story you told me earlier made you seem like you’re kind. You weren’t lying to me, were you? The fires we just passed… they belonged to a village, didn’t they? Do you truly care like you pretend you do?”
“It wasn’t,” he lied, not wanting to hurt her conscience. “And even if it were a village… I couldn’t bring you to it. Should anything happen to you, that would be the death of me.” He made a mental note to send a team of dragons to inspect the aftermath of that fire.
Her expression showed a mix of anger and disgust. “Stop using my name as an excuse for your selfishness!”
She failed to see how her words sliced him up and shattered his heart. “That is how I am, Constance Rinehart, and if you cannot accept that then maybe I don’t want you to be my mate.” He wanted to bite back his words the moment they gushed from his mouth.
“I didn’t ask to be here.”
“You signed up for the damn Offering.” He was a flood unleashed, and he couldn’t stop the insults, even though he knew he ought to shut his mouth before he escalated things too far. “You’ve been nothing but trouble since you came here. It’s so much goddamn easier to deal with things without you mucking up my mind with your weakness and lack of resolve.”
Her eyes widened. “I… I’m sorry.” Then she dropped her gaze to the ground. Would she go back to hating him like when she first arrived again?
He swallowed his guilt. He shouldn’t have lashed out. “I don’t want you to be sorry.” He wished for her to look at him with the love and affection of a proper femriahl. “I want you to understand.”
She pursed her lips. “I’ll try, but please don’t hurt that woman.” Her eyes flicked to Frieda.
He hadn’t forgotten about her, not with the dragon in his head screaming at him to get rid of the threat. His nausea continued to reverberate through him. He bit back a growl and moved toward the cowering woman.
“What are you going to do to her?” Constance asked.
Frieda stared up at him with beseeching eyes. “I’m… I’m so sorry, milord. Please don’t hurt me.”
He grunted, then hooked his fingers around the back of Frieda’s shirt. He called to his wings and levitated off the rocky path, dragging her with him. “I’m going to take her home,” he said, then shot Constance a dry smile. “Don’t want me to be ‘evil,’ right?”
“Thank you, thank you!” Frieda said. “Your mercy is boundless, milord.”
“Shut up before I change my mind.”
“Thank you,” Constance echoed.
“I’ll have Fraser guard you for the night. I might not be back for a while.” He tried not to show it, but his beast was now completely enraged. He would slam against her and force her to meet his desires if he stayed any longer. His dragon didn’t understand the concept of courtship. To it, all that mattered was to claim, take, and bend their mate to their will, so much that she would have no choice but to submit all of herself to him eventually.
“Rayse,” Constance said, “I just want you to know that I’m trying.”
He didn’t turn back to look at her. She only brought pain to him. He held back a retch the poison was forcing on him then traveled up into the night sky.
Chapter 15
Is anyone home?” Greta asked, swatting imaginary flies from Constance’s face.
“Hm?” Constance said, not waking up from her daze. Rayse didn’t come home last night, and he wasn’t there in the morning either. She had Marzia, Fraser, and Nanili for company, but they did nothing to warm the gaping hole her argument with Rayse had left behind.
She had called him a monster, which was a low blow to get what she wanted. And she had drawn all those horrible emotions out from him. You’ve been nothing but trouble since you came here. The memory of his words made her want to hide under a blanket and cuddle with herself in sorrow. She wouldn’t care if any others said the same of her, but hurting Rayse somehow reflected pain back.
When was he going to come home? Maybe it was better if he didn’t. She didn’t ask for any of this.
“Constance!”
She jolted from the thwack that hit her squarely on the top of her skull. “Ouch,” she grumbled, scowling. “That’s not very nice.”
Greta knocked her over the head again.
“You had my attention. Why keep hitting me?” Constance rubbed the aching spot through her hair.
The white-haired dragoness harrumphed. “For good measure. Wanted to make sure I had my claws properly tightened over your attention.”
“Well, you have it now.”
“I was asking you about the book. Have you perused through it?” Greta flicked her finger over her nose then whipped her head in the direction of Fraser and Marzia. “Are the two of you just going to stand there and flirt? You’re making my old-lady hairs stand on their ends. Make yourself useful.” She gestured at them to shoo, but the lovesick couple simply shrugged then went back to whispering who-knows-what to each other.
“The book,” Constance said. “Uh, yes. Read through a bit of it.”
“What spells have you learned, pumpkin?”
“Just the one for fire.”
Greta sniffed. “And I thought you had a hardworking air around you. Must be my imagination. Maybe I’m going crazy.”
Constance grimaced. She hadn’t managed to decipher much before Rayse distracted her for the night. Thinking about him shot a needle through her gut again. “I was… occupied.”
“By Rayse, I bet.”
She nodded.
“Dragons sure are horny bastards.”
Her hands shot up. “Not in that way! No.”
Greta snorted. “Look at you, acting all coy and ooh, I’m such a precious, shy flower. Bet you’re aching to spread your legs. I’ll bet two nuts that you do it all the time, too.”
The thought had crossed Constance’s mind, but the old woman’s proclamations left her flustered and at a loss for words.
“Better do it often, or Rayse will die,” Greta said.
Constance straightened herself abruptly. “Die? What do you mean?”
“He can’t rest well until you form a proper mate bond with him. His dragon will be constantly trying to get him to mate with you, and it takes a lot of concentration to hold back. He’ll either drop dead from exhaustion or get weakened enough to let his enemies kill him.” Greta made a swift chopping motion. “And then it’s bye-bye the Black Menace.”
Horror clamped down on Constance. “He didn’t say anything of the sort.”
“No worries, pumpkin. You look like you just about pooped yourself.” Greta cackled. “As long as you give him his daily romp until the bond forms, he should be able to get a modicum amount of sleep and control to keep him going.”
“But… we don’t.”
Greta’s brows rose. “Tough.”
“Tough? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Means that Rayse is one strong fellow and you’re a pretty lousy dragon wife.” Greta laughed again. “Don’t worry about it. This clan wants a new femrah anyway.”
Constance pressed her lips into a thin line. The old woman’s lack of tact slashed at her like a sharpened cleaver. Would she be the cause of Rayse’s death? She wasn’t ready yet, but did she have to be? Greta was probably exaggerating. The old woman did that too much.
Constance would have to defeat her inner demons for Rayse—that thought spiraled around her with an exuberant force. She couldn’t explain her sudden emotional investment in him, but sometimes feelings did that. They swept you up like the wind and all you could do was just go along, regardless of how hard you tried to fight back.
But he had said he didn’t want he
r around… and he had treated Eduard so horribly last night. She saw her mother’s death mirrored in that man’s actions. How could she love someone more brutal than even Bastion?
Greta brushed her hands together and stood up. “Hope you’ve got that fire spell properly memorized, because we’re going to practice it today. Come with me.” She walked out of the ashen-colored clinic, but not before slipping a jar of critters from her work desk.
Even though it was Fraser’s job was to watch Constance, his eyes were not fixed on her. All his attention remained on Marzia. Constance decided not to kill their joy and let them be. She pulled her coat—a different one that wasn’t her friend’s—from the hook on the wall and followed the dragon lady.
The winds had stilled today. It made her unsettled. Still waters always came before the storm.
Where was her mate? If anything horrible befell him because of their unfinished bond, she would hate herself. The lack of his presence chipped at her like a chisel. Being without him made her… unsafe, incomplete. She couldn’t understand these feelings. She was supposed to dislike someone like him.
She needed to get her head checked, and a cold compress to still her maddening heart.
“I’m not sure what’s wrong with your brain, dear,” Greta said, gesturing to her own temple.
“What’s wrong with my—”
“Fire spells! For protecting yourself from dragons. Funniest joke of the last millennium. No, I’ll have to teach you an ice spell. Best way to stop a dragon is to freeze their balls off.”
Constance raised a brow. “Do dragon men even have um, testicles, in their dragon form?”
Greta snorted. “Figure of speech, peach. That’s not how reptilian reproductive organs work.”
They rounded the castle to an empty, snowy patch, several feet from a cliff. “Greta, are you sure this is safe?” Constance didn’t walk over to peer down the steep cliff, but how close they were to potential death made her uneasy. That was the same thing Constance had asked the last time Greta brought her over yesterday, and the old woman responded with a similar phrase: “Safe as safe does, pumpkin.”
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