Brother of Ash and Fire: Royal Dragon Romance

by Lauren Smith

  “He’s driving back to London, unharmed, but befuddled. He no longer remembers that he was coming here to meet you. We need to be alone, you and I, so I decided to take care of everyone in the village.”

  She could barely breathe. “Take care of?”

  The man laughed. “Dragons have other talents besides transforming. The village is in a deep sleep, which will leave us undisturbed while I conduct my business.”

  Asleep? That didn’t sound bad. Piper let out a breath, but the man chuckled. “Don’t relax just yet. I still need my questions answered, and I have means at my disposal to make sure you answer if you choose to hold your tongue.”

  She said nothing, but held still on the bed, her wrists aching from the heavy iron manacles.

  “Now, as I’ve been told from a reliable source, Mikhail Barinov stole the jewels. And you.” The man didn’t seem to require an answer from her yet, so she didn’t reply.

  “I had every intention of taking both you and the jewels, but now I understand who I’m up against. We’ve crossed paths before, though he doesn’t know it, and once again he has put a wrinkle in my plans. So when you came along, it was almost too perfect an opportunity. I plan to trade you for the jewels.”

  Piper shook her head. “He won’t trade me for the jewels.” She knew in her heart it was a lie—Mikhail would do that, assuming he forgave her for leaving him, but she didn’t want him to have to face that choice.

  The man gave an almost feline grin. “It’s charming that you think you can fool me. But I can smell lies. It’s like a stale scent of fear. Barinov will come for you.”

  “He won’t. I left him a note telling him it was over between us. He has no reason to come after me. I betrayed him.” She emphasized the word, hoping that this dragon would believe her, and she also hoped more than ever that it was true. She could only pray that Mikhail had read her note and was so angered by it that he would not come after her. At least then he’d be safe and have the jewels, and whoever this asshole was could go to hell.

  “Interesting. Now that you do believe, but I know something you do not, it seems.” The man’s curved smile was cold and serpentine.

  “And what’s that?”

  “Barinov has mated with you. It doesn’t matter what you do or say to him—he chose you and cemented the bond. It’s unbreakable except by death.”

  Piper’s lips parted. Mated? How could she be mated to a man and not know it?

  Then she remembered when she’d felt what it had been like to be him, to fly, to fall, to be imprisoned…to both suffer and know the exquisite joy of being one with him. It had been so much more intense than the other times they had kissed. It had felt…permanent, but she hadn’t wanted to face that, not when she’d been planning to leave while he slept.

  “He would never let anything happen to you now,” the man said. “But if I killed you, it would make him dangerous. Too dangerous. A dragon can be a terrible force after his mate’s death, especially to those who caused it. I don’t wish to fight him and am far too impatient to wait him out. A trade of the jewels for his mate will suffice, unless, of course, I have to kill him.”

  “Kill him?” she gasped.

  “It doesn’t have to come to that…if you help me in getting him to cooperate. As I said, I have no interest in facing a mateless male dragon. You love him, don’t you? You want to save his life, don’t you?”

  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…fo
r 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?