“Let me go,” she insisted, leaning toward one soldier and batting her lashes in much the same fashion she once had to Azriel in the Bistro. Though she had been drunk then, now it was due to her lack of coordination that she likely appeared quite foolish.
Confusion twisted his expression as he struggled with the complex mix of feelings and the orders he knew he needed to carry out. Bring her to Loren, yet there was a heady shadow in his gaze that told her the magic was unraveling his will to listen to that part of his brain.
But the grip on the other side tightened. The soldier grunted, then hissed through his teeth, “She is playing with our minds.”
Ariadne widened her eyes, which she knew were ethereal and white, turning to the one who spoke. “No! But you cannot hold yourQueenlike this, can you? What would His Majesty think of you?”
“What the fuck?” The soldier jerked back, releasing her as though she were hot to the touch. “Her eyes!”
The other Caersans did not seem to care. None of those at the foot of the stairs so much as flinched as she looked at them.
A long time ago, Ariadne recalled her father demanding a gelding for battle rather than using the larger, more sturdy stallion he usually rode around town. When she had asked why he could not bring his typical horse with him, he hesitated to explain. In the end, he told her a story of a soldier who insistedon bringing his stallion to the front lines. The soldier died when the male horse took off after a mare in heat.
The concept had been foreign to Ariadne at the time. Battle and the mating of horses were the farthest things from her mind at that age.
Now, however, she saw the very real reason stallions were not made for a fray. Caersan men, when given even a drop of desire, acted in much the same way: they could not contain themselves. Their erections only underscored their inability to truly do anything—at least for the time being.
Ariadne used that to her advantage.
Before the soldier not under her thrall could react, she yanked a poisoned dagger from her thigh and slashed it across the Caersan man’s neck with sloppy precision. Holding onto the dhemon power was difficult while she wielded the short blade, but she clutched it as best she could. Any semblance of control over the rest of the soldiers would keep her safer than nothing.
Though the soldier she cut did not die, Ariadne turned to the other who still held her arm. She slid the sharp blade dipped in liquid sunshine across his exposed artery before lunging forward and doing the same with the first of the six at the foot of the steps. Bit by bit, her bodily control returned, and the idea she had previously abandoned reemerged as her only option.
She had to get to Loren. Fast.
The thrall she had on the Caersans vanished in an instant. Ariadne grabbed the nearest soldier’s sword and ripped it from its sheath, cutting down the owner before he could realize what was happening. The next moved with discomfort as he grappled with the remnants of his desire while simultaneously attempting to fend off her strike.
It did not work. She swung the blade down on the man’s outstretched arm, removing his hand in one swift motion.
“Get herweapons!” a soldier cried, coming to his senses and remembering where they were: in the middle of a battle.
As though on cue, the doors behind Ariadne swung open, letting in the chaos from the fight outside. Soldiers from both armies flooded the tower as the Caersans searched for an escape from the inevitable death that followed them. Magic ripped through the space as an Algorathian mage all but cut a Caersan man in half with a slash of her hand. Blood sprayed in all directions, and she cracked the next soldier’s armor as she lashed her magic through the air.
With the vampires distracted by the sudden appearance of a woman capable of tearing them to pieces with her mind, Ariadne slipped between a pair and took the stairs two at a time. The air burned in her lungs as she hurtled toward her father’s old office—the Valenul General’s office.
Sliding the poisoned dagger back into its sheath, Ariadne adjusted her grip on the stolen sword that was much too large for her and paused outside the doors. No one had followed. No one had cared enough to see what she was doing. Or, perhaps, no one believed a Caersan woman capable of killing the King of Valenul.
Whatever the reason, she did not care. Ariadne shouldered open the doors and froze.
On the far side of the room, Loren stood beside the dying fire in gold dragonscale armor. Rhun’s scales. Though the thought of those monsters skinning the dragon repulsed her, it was not Loren’s latest gaudy fashion choices that made her pull up short.
It was the dagger he held to Camilla’s throat.
Chapter 38
The gates were meant to hold against an army, yet Loren heard them give way not long after he began tightening his armor. When the Hub was built, however, dragons had not been a possibility. Disorder erupted, echoing from the grounds below. Screams, metal clashing, and the more distant sound of fire colliding with stone.
“You are a bit late to the battle,Your Majesty,” Camilla crooned from the chair.
Loren adjusted his armor as he strode across the office to the doors. “I do not need to prove myself in battle,Miss Dodd. I am the King.”
“You will be ruling over ash by morning.”
Tempering the heat that flooded his veins, Loren turned to glare at her. Perhaps he should have sent her away—but then he would need to locate the sniveling bitch again in order to use her to force Ariadne to kneel at his feet. Keeping her within arm’sreach was the most logical solution, even if he hated the sound of her voice.
“Those dragons will either die,” he snapped, “or abandon those fools when I destroy them all.”
Camilla’s lips curled, the smirk punctuated by the sound of fighting entering the tower. She cocked her head and said, “You have no idea how those dragons came to be, do you?”
