Drakken
Iwas on the first train back to the capital the moment the garrisons rolled into Greyhold.
I need to keep an eye on Max Morning, I told my dragon. I still don’t trust her bloodline.
You just can’t stay away from that female, the dragon answered lazily. Keep lying to yourself, but I’m bored.
I sneered at him. A rift had been growing between my beast and me since Max arrived, and it was widening.
He’d been warming to her since the Sorting.
His fire had played with her that day—flirted, even.
Given the chance to brand her a liar and burn her where she stood, he’d stripped her bare instead, just to get a good long look.
I couldn’t write him off, though. The honest difference between animals and men was that animals didn’t pretend.
A beast showed you exactly what it was. Men lied, worst of all to themselves, dressing every choice and every betrayal up as something noble.
I’d bet my life the White Witch slept soundly, certain that dropping the bomb that gutted a continent and buried billions had been a mercy. For the greater good.
I dragged my mind off that bitch before the old rage took the wheel. She was the reason for the black thing living in my chest. It wouldn’t quiet—not ever, not until I took her head off myself and set it on a spike where the whole broken world could watch it rot.
I went straight to the war room off the train, sat through a fast war council with the other three, and was about to head for my quarters. I didn’t keep a penthouse like the rest of them. I kept a cabin at the edge of the Leo camp, close to my soldiers.
I changed direction and struck north instead.
Julie, whom I’d set to shadow Max and report her movements, came jogging up with word that the cadet was holed up in the library.
I should have gone home and changed first. I was still in travel-stained fatigues, the grime of the front on me. But I couldn’t shake the picture of one of the others reaching her ahead of me.
The image turned my stomach. Caspian swinging his cock around her like a prize, sniffing at her like a beast in heat. Nikolai watching the pulse jump in her throat like a man reading a wine list. I couldn’t hate Aelindor for his gentleness toward her, which was worse.
By now she’d probably forgotten my face. Out of sight, out of mind.
I couldn’t allow that.
I needed eyes on her, to see what she was up to, so I could move against it the second it threatened the alliance. I was still the only one of us not under her spell. She’d already turned three battle-hardened killers into lovesick boys.
The library came into view. Pale stone, a wide sweep of marble stairs climbing to double doors twenty feet tall, the Zodiac Covenant’s sigil carved deep into the facade in gold and silver. Leo, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Aries wound together. Four houses made one.
It was where I’d held the Sorting. Hard to scrape that day off the inside of my skull: my fire eating her disguise away, layer by layer, until what hung revealed in the air was all woman, all curves, and for one breath I’d forgotten how to use my own lungs.
The memory sharpened the need to reach her.
I strode through the doors like I owned the air. That was more of the beast’s bearing than mine—his confidence bled into any room I entered, the alpha dragon’s need to claim the ground before anything else.
The Coldiron armguard warmed against my left forearm.
The first thing Aelindor had done when I walked into his residence was fasten it to my wrist. A gift from Max, he said. All it took to seal it was a drop of my blood and a measure of my pain. Max had already given her own blood to the metal.
My pain ran deep, and the place I kept it was black and bottomless. Coldiron reached in and found the memory of agony and loss immediately, settled like a fire curling around fresh wood, and then the warmth of the bond settled into the armguard.
Max had set an armguard on each of the others herself. With her own hands. Not me. She was avoiding me as much as possible, and I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction.
Stop being a dick to her, my dragon warned.
This from the beast who had once locked his burning eyes on her and let smoke curl from his snout. Now he wanted her even more than after the Sorting. Since she’d ridden him into battle, he’d been running his own filthy little fantasies about her.
The Coldiron shrieked in my skull.
Max! She’s here!
The armguard blazed with heat at her nearness. With her blood bound into the metal, I felt her like a second heartbeat—a bright point in the dark of my head. Now I could map her exact location, a path lit end to end.
Civilians bowed as I passed. I didn’t even nod, taking the stairs two at a time.
Let’s go to Max, the dragon urged impatiently, already moving through me.
If I could feel her, she could feel me. But the dragon had cloaked us and was smug about it.
Sneaky bastard. He wanted to surprise her. When he put his mind to it, he moved as quietly as Caspian’s wolf, and by the time prey understood a dragon was in the room, it had already been burned or swallowed.
I found her on the top floor.
The space opened under a wide skylight, golden daylight falling across shelves that ran back farther than the eye could follow. Iron stairs spiraled between the stacks, the air thick with old paper and cracked leather warmed by the light.
She stood leaning against a shelf with a book in both hands, turning pages without looking up. Deep in it. Couldn’t drag her eyes free.
She’d changed since the mine. Still tall—barely an inch below me—but the gauntness was gone, replaced by a build meant for endurance and impact: long lines, full curves, a body that had learned to take a hit and hand one back.
Midnight-blue hair to her shoulders, threaded with a strand of glowing white the Sorting fire had left behind.
High cheekbones. Full lips parted around whatever had her so absorbed.
I’d gone hard in my fatigues before I could stop it. The way I hadn’t managed for any woman since the day she’d turned up at my fortress.
My dragon pushed up under my skin, lending me his sight.
We both wanted to know what had her so spellbound.
What? What the—
Fuck.
She was hiding up here reading smut. Smut. While my soldiers broke their backs readying for war and the cadets ground themselves down in training, Max Morning had her nose buried in a dirty paperback.
Her face was flushed, her lips parted, like she couldn’t quite believe the words on the page.
Unacceptable.
And yet my cock throbbed, straining against the front of my uniform, hot and furious and entirely unconcerned with what was or wasn’t acceptable.
She was lost in it. Gone. Dead to the grim little world still grinding on around her.
A few of the women I’d taken to bed had told me what books like that did to them.
I never listened. I had no interest in the daily weather inside a woman’s head.
I wanted a warm body and an appetite to match mine, and the more I knew about what went on behind her eyes, the faster the wanting died.
Some had even offered to read me the filthy parts first, like I needed priming.
Ridiculous. A fuck was a fuck. It had nothing to do with what sat in anyone’s chest.
And here was Max fucking Morning, reading the same trash.
An idea lit up in me, mean and bright.
I drew my ebony broadsword from the sheath across my back and charged her.
Her survival instinct kicked in just in time, but I was already on her in a blur, my blade up—for the scare of it, nothing more.
Her midnight eyes flooded deep sapphire and blew wide in fear and alarm.
“What the fuck, you psycho?” she yelped.
No one had dared to call me that.
The paperback dropped from her shaking hand, and she ducked low, faster than I’d expected. Her Coldiron armguard poured off her wrist and reshaped at a speed the eye couldn’t track. Two daggers shot up and caught my blade between them, locking it dead.
Still crouched, she swept a leg and cracked her heel into my chin. The girl had real strength in her; the hit rang through my teeth and down into bone.
I sprang back, laughing, and in one clean motion sheathed the broadsword like I’d never pulled it.
Rage blazing in her eyes, she came up off the floor and pressed a dagger flat to my throat. No other woman alive could have managed it, but Max stood only an inch or two under me.
I looked her over, lazy, unbothered. I didn’t step back. I didn’t push the blade away. She wasn’t backing off either. We held there, locked, eye to eye.
Dragon! Dragon!
The Coldiron in her daggers announced me at volume. My own armguard flared hot in answer, the metal recognizing itself across the room.
Should we murder the dragon? Her Coldiron consulted her, gleeful about it. Vicious little metal.
Her eyes flickered. She was talking it down. I caught the shape of it without hearing the words. My armguard vibrated, something between alarm and outrage.
He’s mine, it protested, indignant. Blood bond has been made. His pain belongs to me. I shall defend him.
The air had gone cold with a specific chill that came off her loaded daggers.
My armguard held only a drop of Coldiron, as Aelindor had explained.
The daggers were loaded with the DarkVeil variety, the kind she’d carried back from inside that place.
The difference in weight was something you felt in your teeth.
Max stepped back half a pace, watching the blades as much as me, uncertain whether the DarkVeil Coldiron would move without her command.
“No,” she said, and swirled the twin daggers once.
They flowed together, melted back into a bracer, and flew home to her forearm. The cold lifted.
I wouldn’t say it out loud, but watching her work the metal was something. The fluid control, the speed, the precision, the way it answered her like it had opinions and was exercising them. I’d seen a lot of weapons work in a lot of wars. Never like this.