Alarm fills her periwinkle stare at the same time my lips peel back in a snarl, and I spring for her. Startled shouts and frenzied warnings sound off around me, but I shut all of that out, focusing only on neutralizing the immediate threat.
A roar fills the room, but whether it’s mine or someone else’s, I can’t say for sure. My dragon surges under my skin. It batters impotently against the bars forever caging it in, begging me to move faster, to kill quicker.
I obey.
Terror flashes across the sorcai’s face. She tries to stagger back, to get away from me, but Karis’s big body blocks her escape. A scream builds in her throat. She fumbles for something at her waist, but she’s too late, too slow.
I reach for my prey, delight detonating through me when I’m almost on her. The blood in this sorcai’s veins doesn’t sing like the ones I’ve been hunting all these years, but she’ll die all the same. She forfeited her life the second she dared to step intomylair.
A wall of black scale armor and muscle steps into my way. Strong arms catch me mid leap, and then my trajectory is altered as someone bodily carries me away from my target. I bellow my frustration and work to break free, but it’s just more noise joining the cacophony of chaos already crescendoing all around me.
“Get her out!” someone booms.
“Chastain, clear the scent!” someone else commands.
I don’t track who is screaming what, because I’m being robbed of my kill, and I’m fucking pissed. All I see is red. All I feel is a driving need to destroy, to protect. Flashes of memory ricochet off my rage, showing me another time sorcai stormed the royal tower I was in and everyone died. A keening snarl spills from my lips, and then suddenly everything around me goes dark.
Shock and bewilderment stall the desperate drive to end the sorcai and erase all evidence of her existence from the lair.
Did they knock me out?
No. I can still feel and hear.
My breaths are loud and harsh against the sudden onset of silence. A warm, vise-like body wraps around mine as it carries me deeper into the darkness. I stop struggling against the band of muscles caging me in, and the call for vengeance begins to quiet in my mind. The scent of sorcai and spells slips away to be replaced by something deeper, something masculine and soothing with a hint of char.
“Shhhh,” a deep voice comforts as a frustrated whimper slips out of me.
I feel off-kilter, untethered, but I have no idea why.
Soft lips press against the juncture where my neck meets my shoulder. I fight against the touch, rallying an internal war cry to kill the sorcai, but there’s no escaping this hold on me. My arms are pinned to my sides. My back is flush with an unyielding muscular chest, and I’m pretty sure my useless wiggling is only turning Aeson on.
I know that’s who has me. I want to be annoyed about it, but suddenly all I feel is…spent. After another surge offuck you, let me goproves pointless, I finally give up. A growl that feels and sounds like rolling thunder vibrates through my back. Aeson’s approval of my submission has me clenching my teeth and wanting to remobilize, but the will to fight is hemorrhaging against his warm body and rumbling assent.
“That’s better,” Aeson murmurs, his lips skimming the shell of my ear. “Breathe me in. Feel me. You’re safe. It’s just us. No one else is here.”
Every rich and resonant syllable douses my blazing anger until I’m left guttering and confused. Each second swallowed up by the dark and trapped in the arms of Aeson Noctis has my head clearing of fury and fog, and soon I’m questioning what the hell just happened. I try to make sense of my reaction, but I can’t.
Sorcai aren’t my favorite people by any means, but their presence doesn’t usually trigger…that. The female wasn’t Tainted. She didn’t smell like a blood broker or belong to the Relacour line. There was no reason for my violent reaction, and yet I can still feel the faint call for death thrumming in my blood while my dragon paces back and forth in the center of my chest.
Tension dissolves into defeat as I continue to breathe Aeson in. My lungs fill with him, and it has me melting like I’m nothing more than a pillar of ice that’s trying to withstand the radiant attention of the sun. But what chance does an icicle have against a flame?
Aeson’s hold loosens ever so slightly, and I allow myself this one moment of weakness. He can’t see me. I can’t see him. I can take a second and just…be.
My head rests back against his chest, and I close my eyes.
“She was here to look at your anklet,” Aeson tells me, the tip of his nose tracing the line of my jaw. “I know you like wearing it, and I didn’t want the magic to run out before you were ready. I thought you would be more comfortable doing it here because you’d have to take the charm off for her to examine it. I was wrong. It won’t happen again. No more visitors until you say otherwise.”
My eyes flash open and I try to look up at him. I can just barely make out the scruff on his jaw and the border of his full lips. His apology surprises me, but I’m more taken aback by the satisfaction that hums through me at his declaration. Why do I care if he has visitors?
I shouldn’t.
I don’t.
And yet Aeson’s capitulation undeniably soothes something frayed and jagged in my chest.
My dragon finally calms.
Aeson’s mouth ghosts over my shoulder and up the side of my throat. Need heats my blood and burns away the last of my bloodlust. Desire pools between my thighs, and I clench them. Aeson’s chest expands, the hard muscles of his pecs pressing against my back as he scents me. Another roll of approving thunder slips out of him and vibrates into me while he splays a hand across my stomach and presses my ass more firmly against his hard length.
