1
Julian
Dragon shifter Julian Rouse stared into the eyes of his fated mate, and his doom stared back at him.
She was beautiful. And irritated. Something had annoyed her—very possibly, the team of security guards with their guns trained on her.
And she didn’t know she was his doom. Not yet.
How had she found him? His captors—guards,he reminded himself—were meant to keep him hidden. They kept him locked up in a remote house somewhere so thick with forest he sometimes thought he would choke on all the green.
And yet here she was. She’d appeared out of nowhere, a demon or an angel or both, and whatever she’d expected from this encounter, finding her fated mate wasn’t it.
He saw everything he should have been feeling reflected in her pale gold eyes.
The sudden heart-lift of wonder. The pinch of doubt—no, surely not—and then the blazing star of certainty. The knowledge that the person you had only just laid eyes on forthe first time was your soulmate, chosen for you by fate and whatever strange magic played with the hearts of shifters.
The mate bond blossomed into tentative existence, a glowing shackle behind the bars of his ribs, and her lips parted in a gasp as she felt the same.
Sourness twisted in Julian’s gut. What a revelation this must be for her. A blessing. Not only to find her fated mate, but that he would be a type of shifter no one in the outer world thought existed. A dragon shifter. Because that must be what had brought her here to this cage-house in the middle of an ocean of trees. He was the first dragon shifter to make himself known to the outside world in hundreds of years.
A strange ache pulled in his chest, nothing to do with the bond, as he watched her truly understand what that meant.
She was a dragon’s mate.
“Son of a bitch,” she breathed. “This makes things more complicated.”
Julian blinked. “Excuse me?”
She smiled. It was a beautiful smile, and though there were no creatures in Julian’s frozen homeland of Antarctica who smiled like that, he’d come to recognize it in his years in the outside world. It was a snake’s smile. The smile of a spider who’d just woven the last thread of her web.
A cat who’d just found something new to play with.
Inside him, his dragon raised its head, transfixed.
“Freeze! Ma’am, step back, right now! Put your hands where we can see them!”
He wondered how it had taken his guards this long to realize somebody had broken into the complex where he was being held—what was the term they’d used?
Not captive.
Safe.
Her smile didn’t falter. She raised her hands, palms out and open, a gesture of submission absolutely at odds with everything else about her. Her voice was buttery and smooth. American.
“There’s no need to be so violent. I’m here to see Mr. Rouse. Didn’t Lance tell you?”
Julian’s security detail had been in the grounds of the ‘safe house’ when the woman appeared, patrolling as light seeped out of the forested landscape and night drew in to take its place. Yet, somehow, they’d missed this intruder until she was at the front door.
One of them, a stag shifter Julian still knew only as Collins, stepped forward. He kept his small firearm pointed at the woman, and she regarded it with a sort of irritated indulgence.
“We weren’t expecting anyone,” Collins barked.
“Clearly,” the woman drawled. She glanced at Julian, raising one eyebrow as though sharing a secret joke with him.
“Ma’am, I need you to return to—”
“Didn’t I justtellyou that Lance knows I’m here? He is still your boss, isn’t he? Unless you’re working for both sides like that other one was.” Her smile still didn’t move, but it was suddenly sharper. “Wouldn’t that be embarrassing. Flush out one mole, and another one pops its head out.”
