Caelus (Dragon Master Daddies #4)

Chapter 1

Wren

The bells meant death.

They rang at dawn, just like they always did. I pressed my face against the cold stone wall of my cell, counting the reverberations—twelve chimes, today.

Twelve girls dead.

Would I be the thirteenth?

My stomach clenched—not from hunger, though that was a constant companion now—but from the knowledge that those bells meant someone's name had been drawn. Someone's door would be marked with ash at midday. Someone would vanish by sunset, leaving only silence and another empty cell.

Just a few weeks ago, I’d been working at the Bronze Cat, as a junior pleasure girl—still a virgin, but skilled in the arts of pleasure by mouth and hand. Now though, all that was gone. Replaced by fear and dread,

I traced my fingers along the marks I'd scratched into the wall with a sharp pebble I'd pried from the floor.

Twelve girls gone since I'd arrived three weeks ago. I knew their names, whispered them sometimes in the dark: Merit from the fishing villages, who sang lullabies to keep us calm. Sage, barely eighteen, who said she’d been taken on her wedding day.

Violet with the scar across her throat who never spoke but tapped messages on the walls.

All gone. All sacrificed to whatever horror the Anointed Ones served in the temple's depths.

Through the narrow vent near my cell's floor—barely wide enough to fit my hand through—I heard Penny crying again.

She was sixteen, maybe younger, taken from a farming village in the Lowlands where she'd been helping with the harvest. The youngest of us, though in this place age meant nothing. We were all equally disposable.

"Penny?" I pressed my mouth close to the vent, keeping my voice soft. The guards didn't like us talking, though they rarely bothered to stop us. What did it matter if cattle lowed before slaughter? "Penny, are you alright?"

The crying hitched, then quieted to sniffles. "I can't," came her small voice. "I can't do this anymore, Wren. I want to go home. I want my mother."

My chest tightened. I wanted to lie, to tell her we'd escape, that someone would save us. But I'd learned young that pretty lies were worse than ugly truths. "When did you last eat?"

Silence. Then, so quiet I almost missed it: "Two days ago. Maybe three. They stopped . . . they stopped giving it to me because I couldn’t keep it down. The smell, the waiting, I just—"

She was giving up. I'd seen it before in the others. And now they were properly starving her.

I looked at my breakfast ration, delivered through the slot in my door.

Watery porridge in a wooden bowl, a crust of bread so hard it could chip teeth.

One meal a day, just enough to keep us alive and too weak to fight.

My stomach cramped, reminding me that I was already running on nothing, that three weeks of starvation rations had carved hollows between my ribs.

But Penny was sixteen. Sixteen and crying for her mother.

I didn't let myself think about it. Thinking would make me selfish, and I couldn't afford to be selfish. Not when I could still help someone else, even if I couldn't help myself.

I started with the bread, breaking it into pieces small enough to fit through the vent.

My fingers shook as I worked, from hunger or fear or both.

Each piece I pushed through felt like giving away a piece of my own body, but I kept going.

I could hear Penny on the other side, gathering the fragments with desperate little gasps.

"Thank you," Penny whispered through the vent. "Thank you, thank you—"

"Shh," I said gently. "Just eat. Get your strength back."

While she ate, I moved to the narrow window set high in my cell wall.

I had to stand on my toes to see out, and even then, I only got a sliver of view—a section of courtyard where the Anointed Ones trained.

They moved through combat forms in perfect synchronization, their obsidian masks catching the morning light.

I'd memorized their patterns over three weeks.

Dawn training. Midday prayers. Evening patrols.

The guard changed every six hours, and there was always a gap, maybe three minutes, when the eastern corridor was empty.

Three minutes. That's all I'd have when I made my escape. If I made my escape.

The temple itself was wrong in ways that made my skin crawl.

The stones were older than anything should be, carved with symbols that seemed to writhe when I wasn't looking directly at them.

Sometimes I'd wake to find new patterns on the walls, spirals and eyes and geometric shapes that hurt to perceive.

The other girls said the temple was pre-human, maybe even pre-dragon, built by something that should have stayed forgotten.

The Anointed Ones had simply moved in like hermit crabs claiming an abandoned shell, repurposing ancient horror for new atrocities.

I'd mapped what I could see and hear. Thirteen cells in our corridor.

A heavy door at the end that groaned when opened.

Stairs going down—always down, never up.

And somewhere below, that ritual chamber where girls went to scream and die.

Where their bonding potential, whatever that meant, was harvested for purposes I didn't understand and didn't want to.

I was going to escape. I had to. Not just for me, but for Penny, for all of them. Someone had to survive to tell what happened here. Someone had to—

Footsteps.

My blood turned to ice water. Slow, measured footsteps in the corridor, not the usual guard's patrol pattern. These had purpose. Direction.

They were coming this way.

My heart hammered against my ribs as I pressed myself against the door, trying to hear better. The footsteps stopped. Right outside. No—not outside my door.

Outside Penny's.

The scrape of ash against wood was soft, almost gentle, like a mother's hand smoothing a child's hair. But I knew what it meant. We all did.

"No." The word ripped from my throat before I could stop it. "No, no, no—"

Through the vent, I heard Penny's sharp intake of breath, the moment of frozen disbelief before reality crashed down. Then she screamed.

It wasn't a human sound. It was animal terror, raw and primal, the kind of scream that tears vocal cords and shatters hearts. I dropped to my knees, pressing my face to the vent, trying to see her, trying to reach through the impossible narrow space.

"Penny! Penny, listen to me—" But what could I say? What comfort existed for a child about to die?

Her cell door slammed open. I caught glimpses through the vent—black robes, obsidian masks that reflected her terror in fractured pieces.

Penny fought them. This girl who'd been too scared to eat, too broken to hope, fought like something wild.

She clawed at their masks, bit their hands, kicked with strength born of desperation.

"Please!" She was sobbing now, words tumbling over each other. "Please, I'll do anything, I'll be good, I won't cry anymore, please, my mother needs me, please—"

One of the Anointed Ones backhanded her. The crack echoed in the stone corridor, and Penny's pleas cut off into a dazed whimper. They dragged her past my door, and I pressed myself against it, fingers scrabbling at the gaps like I could somehow claw through solid wood.

"Penny! PENNY!"

Her eyes found mine through the tiny window slot in my door—wide, terrified, already going vacant with shock. Then she was gone, her bare feet dragging across stone, leaving silence so complete it felt like death itself.

I stayed pressed against the door until my legs went numb, until the sound of my own breathing became unbearable. Somewhere in the temple's bowels, Penny was being prepared. Washed. Dressed in ceremonial robes. Fed herbs that would make her pliant.

I knew the routine. We all did. The Anointed Ones made sure we knew exactly what awaited us.

But Penny's cell was empty now.

The thought hit me like cold water. For the past week, I'd noticed a crack in the wall between our cells, hidden behind where Penny kept her water bucket. Old water damage, centuries of dripping that had worn the mortar weak. I couldn't reach it properly from my side, but from both sides . . .

I scrambled to the vent, peering through. Penny's door hung ajar—the Anointed Ones hadn't bothered to lock it. Why would they? Dead girls didn't need locked doors.

And I knew from past experience that on ritual days, the guards wouldn’t return. My heart pounded in my chest.

My fingers found the sharp stone I'd been hiding, pried from my pallet's frame three days ago.

It had cut my palm when I'd worked it loose, but I'd kept it anyway, some instinct telling me I'd need it.

The crack was barely visible from my side, just a hairline fracture, but I could feel where it went soft under pressure.

I started chipping at it, using the vent to guide my angle.

The stone was old here, older than the rest of the temple, and it crumbled differently—like compressed ash rather than solid rock.

Each strike sent tiny cascades of ancient mortar to the floor.

My fingers cramped. The sharp stone bit into my palm, reopening the cut from before.

Blood made everything slippery, but I kept going.

An hour passed. Maybe two. The crack widened from a line to a gap I could fit my smallest finger through. I could feel air from Penny's cell, still carrying the ghost of her fear-sweat and tears.

The work was agonizing. Every muscle in my arm screamed from the awkward angle.

Stone fragments embedded themselves under my fingernails.

My blood painted the wall in rust-brown streaks.

But the crack kept growing. The width of two fingers.

Three. I could see into Penny's cell now—her thin pallet still bearing the impression of her body, the corner where she'd kept the rag doll she'd made from her dress hem.

As the sun began to set, painting my cell in shades of orange and red, I heard it begin.