Chapter 3
Three
Casimir
I shrugged the cloak back into place over my head with all the casualness I could muster. With a raging alpha dragon struggling to break free and storm back to the cage, it wasn’t easy. Scales rippled under my skin, threatening to push free and out me to any casual passerby.
Doing so would destroy the cover I had worked on for so long and ensure I couldn’t track down the elite whose trail I had been following. So I had to contain the beast. Taming it wasn’t an option.
The darkness of my monster was far too cold for that. I could only hold it back long enough to get the smell of vanilla and cinnamon spice from my nostrils. Maybe that would bring it back from the edge of insanity.
Mate.
The call struck my brain like an iron spike. A giant slammed his hammer down, forcing the spike deeper—nearer a part of me I had closed off long ago and vowed never to open.
Frosty air billowed from my nostrils as we struggled for dominance, neither side winning.
We were locked in a stalemate over a clippy.
A woman in a cage, who had no dragon. Who never mated.
We knew that, knew they could never be mated to anyone.
They were too weak for a mate bond to form, which meant my dragon was wrong.
It had to be.
The monster raked its claws across the backs of my eyes.
It stopped trying to move my legs, focusing instead on another part of my anatomy.
The rock-hard erection in my pants strained against the fabric like a damn weather vane, directing me to go back to her.
It ached to do nothing more than rip the bars off her cage and plunge deep into her.
We could use the swinging of the cage to move her back and forth against us until she screamed our name. Until we claimed her. Bred her. Made her belly swell with our seed.
That was what we should be doing instead of arguing in a darkened hallway.
It was a tempting image. The woman was beautiful.
She was dirty and dressed in rags, but that did little to hide the beautiful chestnut hair just begging for my fingers to slide through it and take hold as I thrust into her from behind.
She had the most perfect round face that I knew had to be hiding a killer set of dimples, and lips that—fuck, I could not wait to see them drop open into that sexy O when I made her cream.
But despite all that, her eyes really drew me in.
Eyes of the most unusual color. My fingers scraped against the wall, seeking something to hold on to as I pictured those uniquely violet circles.
I’d never seen anything like them, and even now I longed to dive back in, to swim in the picturesque abyss of her gaze for all of eternity.
Given all that, lusting after her wasn’t surprising in the least. This level of want—no, of need—was insanity.
She didn’t have a dragon to shift into. Her fangs could never drop, meaning we could never be claimed, never be marked. Which is why clippys never had mates! It was a known fact, not something I was making up. So why was my dragon so confused, why did it have the wrong impression?
The frosty snarl of defiance was so powerful the corridor walls rumbled slightly. My dragon did not want to be contained. It wanted her. To take her, touch her, caress her body with my lips, taste her with my tongue.
Her sweet, sweet honey, dripping from my mouth as her thighs squeezed tightly over my head. Her fingers threaded deep in my hair, pulling me close while she cried out in pleasure. Pleasure only we could give her.
Frost coated the walls as the temperature dropped with each ragged breath I sucked in. A shifter coming up the hallway hesitated, his already tight face wincing slightly.
My power was leaking through. I fought supremely to bring it back under control, to mask just how strong my dragon truly was.
Damn her.
“Women, eh?” the shifter said, trying to smile through the pressure, thinking he understood.
Apparently, I had spoken that last out loud. I grunted, hoping he would move past me.
“Amen to that.” He didn’t move on, instead pausing to clap me on the shoulder. His eyes were wide, I saw now, pupils dilated and filled with little sparks.
The dragon shifter was as high as the orb on electro-crystals.
“Whoever she is, pal, she ain’t worth it. She’s below you.”
Wrong words.
I lunged forward, my forearm coming up as I pinned the shorter, smaller man against the far side of the corridor with it. My eyes flared with icy promise, the growl tearing from my throat promising much, much more violence.
Another flare of my true power snuck through. I didn’t hold it back. Not this time.
How dare he say that about our mate? The arrogance to suggest she wasn’t good enough for me? That my mate would ever be anything but too good for me. I should rip his throat out for that.
My mate would be the only one for me. Ever. She was the one who would have to suffer away the centuries with a monster like me until our human essence faded and we became pure dragons. Then we would spend eternity together, eventually flying west over the Great Abyss and into the beyond.
That was what every dragon shifter yearned for. Longed for. It was what my mate would grace me with, if she could put up with my monster for long enough.
So to say that she was below me was the biggest insult, a near unforgivable one.
The lower-level dragon’s eyes were rolling back into his head amid the fear and desire to obey that my alpha power wrought from him. Combined with the scale-covered arm across his neck, he was rapidly losing consciousness. A dead or passed-out dragon was not something I needed right then either.
Forcing logic through the red haze of fury his insult had provoked, I let up the pressure on his neck. The instant his eyes refocused, I slammed a fist into his stomach and let him fall to the ground.
“Watch. Your. Tongue,” I ground out, gathering up my alpha power and forcing it within me once more.
I had been working hard on this cover. It had taken me over a year to gain the trust of the hunters so I could move freely through their markets. I did not want to waste that by killing a useless, brain-fried pleasure seeker. I doubted the man could reach his dragon anymore.
Ruining such hard work, such important work, when it came to my realm was not who I was.
I took a calming breath, the scent of the piss the dragon had stained his pants with burning any remaining vanilla or cinnamon from my nose.
Not that I would ever forget her smell now. But at least it was no longer fresh.
Stepping over the still-retching dragon, I moved deeper into the illegal market’s dizzying array of corridors and rooms. The more distance I put between myself and the woman, the easier it was to control my dragon.
I couldn’t calm it. The beast was furious with me.
It didn’t shut up. But I could force myself past it, using the disgust at my people.
Everything was for sale here. Clippys for servitude. Electro-crystal pleasure addicts, trained to do nothing but satisfy your darkest desires. Any weapon you could imagine made from dragon scales, the only thing that could pierce our hide. Weapons to kill one another.
But one of the worst things, in some ways worse even than the slaves for sale, were the heart scales. I followed the trace of the elite to that room.
It was faint, to the point I knew they were gone now. My distraction had allowed them to put too much space between us. But they had come here. To this room.
I struggled to contain my reaction to the sight of the heart scales. The large, plate-sized scales taken from over the heart of a dead dragon, imbued with its power.
When placed on the chest of a non-dragon, they could assume our form and become a dragon. They lacked the innate dragon soul that a true dragon possessed, and as such needed to learn how to use their new form like a baby would learn to move. But they could take our form on command.
I hated scale dragons. They were a stain on our race. And illegal.
So why was the elite down here? What could they have wanted? I scanned the tables, looking for gaping holes that might indicate a purchase, but nothing stood out.
I followed the echoes of their power through the room and out the other side. I didn’t know who they were, but when I found out, when I brought them to face justice, I intended to make an example of them.
Perhaps I would put them in the same cage that held the woman I had seen earlier. See how the elite felt to be treated like one of the wing-clipped. To be called clippy by those who sneered down at them.
If I treated some of the powerful the way they treated the weakest of our race, perhaps I could begin to effect the change I wanted. One would not be enough. But it would be a start.
My mind wandered back along my path through the market to the slave cages and one slave in particular. My blood heated at the memory of her. Of her smooth-skinned limbs and soft belly just begging to become swollen and round. To carry young.
I clamped my jaws shut as my fangs started to slide down, eager at the idea of biting her, claiming her as my own. I could do it. Tear the market down and take her out of there.
But it would ruin so much more, and for what? To rescue one wing-clipped, one grounded dragon too weak to even shift?
Mate.
The call came again. I couldn’t shrug it off, but I didn’t let it control me either. I couldn’t. Not here. If the ice tyrant came out, there would be chaos. My monster was the most powerful tyrant in a dozen generations or more. Perhaps the most powerful true dragon in Hollow Earth.
The Red King would surely dispute that, but it wouldn’t change things here and now. Unveiling my alpha power fully would flatten everyone. And then as soon as I was gone, the market would be too.
Like a hydra, I could shut this one down, but two more would take its place. No, I had to start at the top. Cull the elite who were used to doing whatever they wanted in places like this without fear of getting caught.
I grinned at the idea, the look sending more than one person careening from my path as I left the market, angry at myself for letting a prime opportunity to catch an elite in the act slip by.
No matter how far I went, though, the smell of cinnamon and vanilla continued to tickle my nostrils …