Devoted to the Dragon (The Last Shifters #1)

17. Knox

Chapter 17

Knox

T he white-haired dragon looks like a bomb set to explode as she levels the king with a withering gaze, challenging him to stop being such a selfish fucker. White horns twist from her hair, sharp claws extend from her hands, and the fire she’s keeping in her throat makes her white scales glow an eerie red.

She’s terrifying and fucking gorgeous. Thank fuck she can’t see me hiding in the shadows.

Immediately, my serpent is intrigued, inching toward her and trying to taste.

Seeing a dragon—though not even fully shifted—ready to blast the Alpha King is top five on my life list. I know we’re here to form an alliance with the king, but I can’t help but wish she would unleash her fire. The Alpha King is a prick, and it would be something to watch the fucker burn.

She doesn’t though. Without waiting for him to explain himself, she turns on her pair of black spiked heels and leaves the room. Her hot Viking bodyguard follows her, and I watch the flex of his ass as he moves. That pair would taste delicious.

The king curses. The sound draws my eye back just in time to watch him launch his drink at the wall. The glass shatters and sends a river of dark liquid dripping down the wood.He picks up his phone, and I can just barely hear another person pick up on the line.

“The dragon arrived early and in a mood. She’s going to be a problem.”

“I’ll have a set of wolves we trust see to it. We only need to subdue her long enough to take a few scales. The snakes have promised the rest,” the man on the line says.

I recognize the voice on the phone as the man I’ve dealt with for shipment transfers: Jesup. He’s a councilman, and his use of the term snake pisses me off.

“See it done.” The king ends the call, pacing before letting out another roaring curse.

I slip through the shadows and walk the blur, emerging in the living room of the suite the Council has assigned my sister and me during our stay. Sloan is seated in one of the ugly-ass fur chairs, a mounted bear hanging creepily above her head. She types furiously on her phone, not looking up when I enter.

“The dragon is pissed,” I state the obvious. “But also seriously hot.”

My sister’s lips curl into a smile. “Not my type. Imagine the heartburn from her spice. It’d be painful for days.”

I shrug. I bet her energy would be deliciously hot and spicy. It’s a shame it’s a conflict of interest to convince her to let me have a taste. “The king will use Stef’s dart to knock her out. He’s planning to steal her scales.”

That causes my sister to pause her rapid fingers and throw me a questioning look.

“I don’t know when. Possibly tonight, but I doubt it. It would be an act of war if they could manage to take her down at all. If the king is smart, he’ll try to get her to agree to give up a scale before trying to capture her.”

“And the Council? What did you learn today?” She sets down her phone and leans back in the chair, side-eyeing the mounted bear.

I lean against the table. “Most are unaware of our presence. Only a handful know about the weapons. The territory leaders are unhappy with the king’s response and lack of resources, but most guards seem to favor the king. They talk of the dragon like she’s a gatekeeper withholding all the answers to their problems. They need her power, but as usual, they’re condescending dicks about it.”

My sister seems to decide something, returning to her phone. She’s always buried in it. Beyond her role as heir, her job as head legal counsel for our family’s hotels, clubs, and other human-facing businesses means she’s always working. “Follow the dragon tonight. See what she knows. Mother didn’t have any intel. She couldn’t even confirm for sure that the dragon was actually alive before we traveled here.”

She dismisses me, going back to her phone.

I slip back into the shadows and move through the Council’s headquarters. It doesn’t take me long to find the dragoness. I follow the scent of smoke mixed with her bodyguard’s sage.

When I get to her, the bodyguard is missing, but another wolf has taken his place. The couple is standing close, so much tension radiating from them that it makes the neck of my shirt feel like a tightening collar. The wolf looks as pissed as she is, his voice a growl so low I almost need to step from the shadows to hear them.

“I’m trying to keep you alive!” he whispers.“They pushed me out. They suspect that I’m loyal to you. This is enemy territory. Everything I learned today was secondhand, and none was useful. They’re plotting something, but even Jesup has found reasons to delay meeting. And unless you want to start a war, insulting the king upon arrival wasn’t the best first move.”

“He should be insulted. I knew it was bad. I’ve heard about the Outskirts and the lost wolves, but Fennik?—”

“I know, little dove, but you can’t take them all home.” The older wolf softens, reaching for her.

She backs away, grinding her jaw. “Silence isn’t the answer.”

The wolf’s face falls, and a stern wall comes back into place. “Neither is dying for a good cause.”

The dragon opens her mouth to argue, and the wolf leaps for her. It’s a punishing kiss, so hot that I feel it in my gut. There are teeth and nips, moans and tongue. It’s a battle between them that he eventually wins by pushing her against the wall.

The sexual tension is so thick in the air that my shadows can’t help but taste it. She is spicy as fuck, just as I imagined. Her energy is hot and red, full of sweet arousal laced with tangy anger, followed by a burning wrath that heats my insides and makes my dick hard.

His hands cage her head on either side, and he speaks softly. “You can be mad. We can disagree. But you won’t pull away again.”

Her energy pulses from red to blue, a love and loyalty so bright that it is its own kind of fire. The dragon huffs, but all her anger has been snuffed out. I’m fascinated by her essence and the way it pulls between her and the wolf.

I wonder if she’s even aware of how her energy reaches out to his, desperate for an anchor. Before I can puzzle her out, the door next to them opens and the hot bodyguard pokes his head out.

Without looking at the man, the older wolf calls, “Coming, pup.”

He steals another kiss from the dragon and leads her into the room with a hand to the small of her back.

I thought both couples were hot. Imagining them as a threesome is going to become my latest obsession. I try to follow, needing to see behind that door, but I come up against a barrier that tastes of magic. She’s put up wards—a clever, hot, fascinating, and off-limits dragon.

The off-limits bit might as well be a blinking arrow to my fuck-it attitude, and I linger at her door, knowing I shouldn’t. My shadows are impatient and unruly. They want an up-close taste of the dragon and to know how she fits with the older wolf and the hot Viking.Picturing what’s going on behind that door isn’t helping matters. My cock is hard and my serpent hungry.

Not for the first time, I wonder why my mother has bothered with the wolves. I understand the politics of it. She wants us to be the first family to make an alliance with other shifters. Serpents are somewhat obsessed with our outsider status. It pisses us off that we aren’t welcome in the wolves’ territory, the only shifter safe haven, no matter the money or status we have in the human world. Securing an alliance would launch Sloan’s rule and solidify our family as one to envy, even if the wolves are dying. But if I’m choosing, my pick is the dragon.

Eventually, I return, defeated, to find my sister exactly as I left her.

“You’re back early.”

“The dragon has wards,” I grumble, still pissed I didn’t get to see what happened next.

I bet it was hot as fuck.

My sister nods absently, engrossed in her email. “The king says she works with a powerful witch. I’m not surprised. Did you get anything before you hit the wards?”

For some inexplicable reason, I don’t want to tell her what I saw. It feels too intimate to share.

“Just wards,” I say, shrugging. I take the weird fur chair beside her and let my shadows expand. They’re restless, dancing around me. My serpent wants me to return to the dragon and stand guard at her door. “Remind me again why she isn’t the one we’re wooing?”

Sloan’s laser focus darts to me. “Why?”

“Curiosity.”

“It wasn’t on the table.”

“But if?—”

Sloan narrows her eyes. “It’s not. Whatever scheme you’ve got in your head, forget it.”

I blink at her innocently. “There is no scheme.”

My sister snort-laughs.

“Fine. Whatever.” I get up, but I find myself walking toward the shadows instead of going to my room.

“Where are you going?” Sloan calls, her voice far more amused than is called for. “Don’t spend the whole night fucking and feeding. I need you to be of use tomorrow.”

“No promises,” I toss back, letting her think what she wants.

But I don’t feed. I slip into the blur and hover in the shadows outside the dragon’s door.