Auren falls to the ground. “No!No!”
My mother crumples to her knees, blood draining from her face, blood spilling through the front of her dress in terrifying blotches.
“That was your fault,” my father sneers at Auren. “Now you can either try to attack me or save Elore. Your choice.”
My heart falls right through my stomach.
Then my attention cracks as the soldier lands another blow to my dragon, and it feels like my own chest is being cleaved open.
A pained snarl rends the air and shakes the ground, bleating from the beast’s throat as it thrashes. Its blood starts to heap onto the grass as soldiers rush forward and start ripping away gold-plated scales from its chest, like plucking leaves from a stem.
Adrenaline, pain, rage, and fear, it all floods me, my arms and hands so riddled with veins that I can’t see the skin. Power tries to pump out, ready to rot the entire fucking world, but I’m rendered useless.
I snarl like a rabid animal as my father crouches next to Auren. When his hand wraps around her throat, my dragon and I rage. Fight. Even against the hacking at the beast’s chest. Even as pain consumes and the net traps, we fucking ragebecause howdarehe touch her.
“A broken-winged bird isnothingcompared to a Cull dragon,” he tells her. “Remember that. All winged creatures will bow tome. I’m looking forward to putting you in a pretty birdcage for all to see.”
He tosses her aside, making her cry out before she tries to crawl toward my mother who’s collapsed on the palace’s steps.
My father is doing to Auren what he did to me as a child—breaking her bone by bone, emotion by emotion. Making her feel helpless. Powerless.
And he just threatened tocageher, just like Midas did.
Fury makes my spikes tremble. My breath heave.
I will tear his head from hisfucking spine.
My father walks away while Auren drags herself toward my mother with the use of only one arm and one leg. Misery chokes me as I watch her pull herself forward, inch by painful inch. Stains of gold smear beneath her, her sobs a mix of agony and anger and fear.
And I’m trapped, unable to help. To get to them.
I have never felt so fucking helpless in all my life.
The dragon cries out again, and I look over with a stippled consciousness, and I finally see what these soldiers were after. Why they’ve been hacking at it.
Its heart now lies open and vulnerable in its gaping chest. The black, beating organ wrapped with gilded veins.
My father’s boots stop in front of me. I look up through the netting, meeting his cold, callous gaze. He stares at me where I’m crouched on my knees, knuckles dug into the deadened dirt, arms shaking, veins leaking.
“Still too weak,” he says with a shake of his head. “This is why I knew as soon as you sprouted those spikes and scales that you could never be a true king, even with a dragon.”
“You are already dead,” I pant out with dark menace. With vicious promise. “The second you touched her. The second you hurt Auren and my mother, you weredone.”
“No, son.Youare.” He rolls up one of his sleeves and drags the dagger down his own arm, opening a vein.
“Culls cull the weak,” he goes on. “Iwill be king of the skies.Iwill be king of Annwyn.”
He crouches down in front of me then, his dark eye boring into mine as my mind spins. “I will take your dragon the same way our ancestors did when they knew another Cull didn’t deserve the manifestation. And by doing so, I will finally divest you of your greatest weakness. Your heart.”
I try to surge up, to launch myself at him, but I can’t.
My dragon is dying, unable to even roar anymore. My mother bleeding, Auren threatened.
And I’m trapped. Fuckingtrapped.
His soldiers wait around my tortured dragon, while my father watches the blood seep from his arm before deigning to look back at me. “Pour the heartblood of the ward and its dragon into the veins of the victor…and the victor shall manifest anew,” he intones, his expression eager. The words sound like he’s repeated them thousands of times to himself.
Cold realization freezes me and makes my stomach roil.
