My lips pulled back in a snarl. “I’m not letting you give up now, Mil. Not after so much.”
Focusing in my head, I sent out a call to Caz. With everything I had. I poured every ounce of energy and emotion into that call, telling him to come now. That it was time to rescue me.
It was time for him to show up.
“How do you plan on getting us out of here?” Milly croaked, slipping her hand from mine. “We’re trapped. This Caz won’t get through the elite’s guards. It’s a death sentence.”
I chuckled.
“What’s so funny about that? You want him to die for you?”
“No, not at all. Though he probably would if he thought it would save me.” I sent another call through our bond. And another. I wouldn’t stop until I was dead. “But I may have left out one tiny little bit about Caz.”
“Yeah, like what?”
“Well, hisfullname is …”
Forty
Casimir
“This istaking too long,” I growled under my breath, my fingers drumming on the stone arm of my throne.
“We don’t know how long it might take,” Dirk whispered back. “You knew that going in. Now calm down and focus.”
“That’s like asking a fae to just touch some iron, saying it’s notthatbad,” I growled once more.
“Alpha?”
I glanced down in front of me, working to restrain my dragon at the sight of the useless dragon, lord of something or other. Just another one of father’s former admirers, begging for things to return to the way they were.
My dragon stirred, flicking its tail restlessly as we both toyed with the idea of what our most preferred method would be to kill him.
Whatever it took to free us up to focus on Anna.
“Continue with your whining, Lord Farcuahde,” I ordered, gesturing tiredly at theshorter but rather broad-shouldered elite. “I promise I’m not listening.”
A stir ran through the other assembled members of the elite who were sitting in attendance today, but I didn’t care. Only one thing was on my mind, and that was my mate and her safety.
“I should be able to feel her,” I hissed at Dirk. “She’s gotten fainter, not stronger. I know she’s alive, but that’s about it. No emotions, no thoughts.”
No comfort. That was what I longed for the most. That closeness of body and mind that we had shared right after the claiming.
For most of my life I had been alone and content that way. Now, just a few days without this new part of me, and I was incomplete. Almost broken, without Anna by my side. I didn’t want her. I needed her. She completed me, and my dragon and I were both feeling the effects of her absence in our mind.
“Maybe she had to move farther away to find what she was looking for,” Dirk suggested, leaning over slightly from where he stood at my left and back a step. “Focus on this, here and now.”
“Alpha, if I may, I—” Lord Farcuahde started to say before I cut him off with a glare.
“Yes, I know what you actually want, mylord,” I spat, making a mockery of his title. “You wantto change the laws so that you can pay yourstaffeven less than you already do. You want to extend the abusive laws toward clippys to other levels of power as well, all to fatten your own wallet so you may spend more money primping your hair and trying to hide your own … lackings, you pathetic excuse for an ice dragon. I’m surprised your own peers haven’t taken you to task already. Get out of my sight. You disgust me.”
Farcuahde sputtered and stammered, looking around to the audience for help. I rolled my eyes. Surely he didn’t think those who had put him up to this sham would actually step forward andsupporthim now. Did he? They were going to hide in the background and avoid catching any blowback. That’s what people like Mirko or, more likely, Damon did. They got their way by using lackeys.
In the Ice Kingdom, only the strongest come out on top. Farcuahde should have known better.
Apparently, he really is that stupid, I decided, watching him gather himself to speak again.
“Alpha, I …”
