Chapter 2
Two
Ella
Run.
As far as I could, as fast as I could.
That, I told myself, was the only thing I could do. Nothing else would bring me the space and the time necessary to think, and process. I had to run, from everything, but more importantly, everyone.
Including him.
But I couldn’t. The slow, agonizing march of pain up my side had left me on the floor. I was reduced to a pathetic crawl across the kitchen floor. Above me on the stove, eggs splattered and began to burn.
My plan for breakfast was ruined.
The idiocy of that single thought threatened me with laughter that formed into sobs before I could process it any further.
Shouts came from out front. I tried to focus on them, but a fresh wave of agony swept up my ribs, carving its white-hot hooks through my skin as it went. I thrashed on the floor, trying desperately to pull myself to the back door as screams tore themselves free of my throat until I tasted blood.
It was too much.
Whatever locking eyes with Dirk had done to me, I needed to stop it. The overwhelming presence of something else in my head needed to go away. In the moment, I didn’t care that my dragon was finally ripping her way free, because her only concern had been him.
Dirk.
For decades I’d longed to be strong enough to have a dragon. But now that she had arrived, all she cared about was big, handsome, manly Dirk.
Not me. Not us. Just him.
I dragged myself forward, one arm and then the other. The back door was nearly in sight. Each inch was contested with the lizard-beast struggling for control of my mind and my body. She wanted to go the other way. To turn us around and run into Dirk’s arms … and the rest of him.
The memory of Dirk, naked and engorged on the landing field out front of the chalet returned to me, and she all but purred in my head, pushing blood and desire between my legs until my pussy throbbed with the need to be filled by him.
Mate.
That word surrounded every thought of him. We should be going to our other half, not running away.
But, I told myself, my dragon wasn’t in control. I was. The part of me that had always been there, who had suffered through every bit of life, when having a dragon would have made things immeasurably easier.
The struggle for my mind was touch and go, thoughts brushed aside by pain, or arousal, each one drawing me back to Dirk. I had dealt with pain before, and I could do it again. I reminded myself of all I had been through and survived.
Reaching out, I pulled myself forward. One foot, three, until I was at the edge of the kitchen, the back door visible at the end of the hallway.
Every second without the touch of my mate was loosening my grip. The rest of me wanted to go to him. The need for his touch was an empty pit in my soul, gaping wide and threatening to swallow me up.
And then there was the pain. I screamed again as it reached near my armpit, blisteringly hot and turning my vision to a field of stars. The chalet shook at that moment, and a terrible roar filled the air.
It was Dirk. He was mad.
Mad we were leaving him, perhaps?
It didn’t matter. He didn’t know me. My dragon didn’t know me.
I was in control. Not them.
Glass shattered somewhere, and the ground came up and slapped me in the face, but it was mere discomfort next to my side. The pan with the eggs toppled off the stove and the hot food barely missed my legs. I stared blankly at it for a moment, trying to figure out what was happening.
Nearby wood splintered under a heavy blow and more yells followed. What was going on? Surely this wasn’t all Dirk. Was he that mad that I was rejecting him? He didn’t understand. I had to.
Getting up onto my knees, I lunged for the back door but fell short as the biggest wave of pain yet shattered my mind and flattened me to the floor, ripping my throat raw from screaming.
It reached an apex, wrapping around my ribs to engulf my right breast in a vise grip of needles that reached through to my scapula.
I struggled to breathe through it all, which allowed my dragon to swoop in and take the reins.
Our progress was halted and I twisted at the waist, looking to the front of the chalet for Dirk.
My mate.
“No,” I hissed through teeth clenched so hard they might shatter. “No mate. Not him. Not any man. Am I clear?”
The beast roared in anger and frustration as I shoved her aside, once more in the driver’s seat. This time I used the pain, helping it clear all other thoughts from my mind and stopping the single focus of my dragon.
We would not be pulling ourselves across the floor to present ourselves. We would not be letting him mount us, and that cock he’d pointed right at us would be going nowhere near my body. It certainly would not be burying its thick, engorged shaft deep into my shockingly needy pussy.
Just the thought of being filled by him, being taken deep as his fangs descended and clamped onto my neck was too much. The pain vanished in a wave of pleasure so deep, so filling, and so unexpected that I arched up off the floor and screamed once more.
But this time it was in the beautiful agony of release. Sweetness stuffed me to the brim as I shook and moaned, writhing through a second orgasm that followed right on the heels of the first.
What is wrong with me?
A moment ago, my body was being torn apart by a thousand individual razor blades, but then the pendulum swung to the exact other end of the sensation spectrum. Meanwhile shouts and roars filled the air from everywhere around the chalet.
And I hated it.
As my dragon continued to try to free itself from my mental grasp, I loaded up on memories of why I didn’t let myself feel such pleasure anymore.
The overload of trauma and agony that flooded me was too much for my dragon. It couldn’t handle the knowledge of what had been stolen from me, let alone how. It trumpeted and roared in anger and fear and pain, and I didn’t stop it.
Maybe I should have let it out, like Anna clearly had done with hers. But I couldn’t. I wasn’t like her. I had memories of a dark room, and the smell of stale beer and straps that cut so deep into my wrists they bled, or …
I surged upward as the dragon retreated inside of me, the moment of clarity enough to lunge for the door and fling it open.
A surprised face appeared, narrowly missing getting hit. I recoiled from the olive-skinned stranger. Sulfur and ash filled my nose.
Fire dragon.
I inhaled to scream instinctively for Dirk as the Red reached for me, his claws extending from one hand. A wicked grin split his face.