No. You can’t. This isn’t for you. Not yet. Not while Milly and Ella are in danger. Maybe not even after.
The thought of my friends threw a cold towel over the rising arousal, giving me the strength I needed to fight it. I ran from the room, and then, breaking all the rules I had promised to abide by, I left Caz’s private quarters entirely. I needed space. Air. I needed to beawayfrom him, or I was going to do something I said I wouldn’t.
Nineteen
Anna
Dirk andthe other guard were gone, and the corridor was empty. I took a breath and paused. Running through the citadel unescorted was probably not wise either. I needed to be out of there, but I wasn’t about to run wildly through the corridors either.
I was still a tiny fish surrounded by bigger ones. As a clippy, I never forgot that. Ever. Letting my guard down for even a moment could be the difference between another day free, and ending up in a cage in a hunters’ market.
Caz changed things, yes, but old habits didn’t just disappear after a week-long distraction. I wandered down the hallway some more, hoping space would help remove the pull to pivot back to him and jump in the shower.
It didn’t. My body was tingling all over, every bundle of nerves filled with pins and needles. It was like they didn’t know what arousal was before Caz. Before seeing him … like that.
What I needed was fresh air. Open air. No roof over my head. The imagination that I could just spread my wings and fly away from it all.
The view from the balcony in Caz’s quarters was unrivaled, but that wasn’t going to happen. If I went back to him, the only thing I would get would be him. All of him. It would be so good …
Chest heaving from the mental effort to keep goingawayfrom Caz despite even the very air around me making it tough, I instead headed to the next best place I had discovered. At the end of the hall was the terrarium.
I opened the heavy door, leaning a shoulder against it to shove, and walked in among the plants. Dirk had brought me here on my first foray. It was close, and had everything I needed.
Nature, to help ground myself with the wilds from which I lived.
Open space, to loosen the restrictive press of the heavy citadel walls that constantly pressed in around me.
And most of all, no ceiling, to lift the claustrophobia building in me brick by brick. I’d lived for years in the wilds, the empty areas on the edges of the Ice Kingdom. Never with a ceiling over my head, rarely more than a single rock or cliff wall at my back.
Having more directions to run was the smart play. As clippys, fighting back wasn’t an option. We lost every time. It was better just to flee, as fast as you could. Know the terrain, and have a plan. Those were the basic mantras.
Grow complacent, get captured. That was alsoa mainstay of thought.
Now, though, under the orb’s light and without a roof over my head, I was fighting the urge to leap into the sky and soar high. To stretch my wings and float through the air.
Which was impossible. Nonetheless, it was a growing, pulsing need hiding just behind my breastbone, aching to break free.
My dragon was awake, and she wasn’t going back to sleep. So I was going to have to learn how to deal with her and her little idiosyncrasies.
Slow strides eventually brought me to the center of the terrarium, an open space of pure grass from the surface world. Somehow it still lived under the orblight. Perhaps magic had been worked into it to preserve it. That would make more sense. Not much from the surface could survive in Hollow Earth without some form of help.
Movement drew my attention upward. In the skies above the citadel, a large contraption was lifting into the air. A long, egg-shaped object made of brellwood was lashed to the bottom of four large, bulbous sack-like things.
Flames roared under them, and the craft lifted higher. I could see a quartet of goblins through the side slats, moving with slow steps in a circle and pushing a bar in front of them. In response, four large fans, two per side, rotated and thrust the craft up into the sky.
The sacks inflated more as the air inside them heated, and the entire thing swiftly gained height, heading for one of the cracks in the rock, and beyond that, a path to the surface.
I stared silently at the trader ship. Most things from the surface withered and died rapidly without sunlight.
Except humans. They could thrive anywhere. Even under millions of tons of rock, surrounded by dragons, wolves and other predators too numerous to list. The surface traders were just some of them. I’d even heard rumors of a human town forming far to the east, beyond the Red King’s land.
I took a deep breath and let it out as I watched the contraption move out of sight. It had been the perfect distraction from Caz to help me come down from the high of seeing him naked. And hard.
For me.
“What am I going to do?” I whispered to nobody and the world together, crouching before flopping on my back amid the thick grass to sink in and stare upward.
That I couldn’t keep doing this seemed obvious. It was insane to even begin to accept that I might be mated to the ice tyrant, of all people.It’s insane just to consider that I might be mated at all. Period.
