I did not slow.
Tyrin swept in behind me, banking low over the roots. Thealpha tracked him, firing twice. Both rounds deflected off the gargoyle’s stone-hardened hide, only serving to annoy him. Tyrin roared and dove, driving the two older wolves apart, scattering them behind the massive roots like prey fleeing into the undergrowth.
My attention locked onto the young male.
He stood his ground. I would grant him that. Feet planted, spear readied, jaw set with the determination of a man who knew he was outmatched and had chosen to die on the battlefield. Under different circumstances, I might have respected him.
But I had watched him at the porthole. The way his eyes had tracked Ziara with the quiet confidence of ownership. The way his body had possessively angled toward hers. Familiar. He touched her often. Held her. Knew the architecture of her body in ways that ignited something in my chest I refused to name.
And he had stood by while his alpha pushed her into that tree.
I tucked my wings and plummeted.
He hurled the spear. It struck my shoulder and skipped off scales that could turn aside cannon fire. The impact barely registered. What was a spear to a dragon?
What was a wolf?
The alpha screamed a warning. Too late. My foreclaw was already extended.
Talons punched through the young wolf’s chest with the wet, splintering crack of ribs surrendering to a force they were never designed to withstand. His mouth opened, but the gasp that escaped held no air. His lungs had nowhere left to expand. Hands seized my claw, fingers slick with his own blood, scrabbling uselessly to free himself.
Blood erupted from his lips. Hot and dark, it splattered against my foreclaw in a pattern I would later store the memory of in a gem.
I beat my wings and climbed.
Twenty feet. Forty. Sixty. He dangled from my claw, his weight barely more significant than a rabbit’s, his bloodpainting the pale limestone below in a macabre masterpiece. His legs kicked once, twice, then hung still, the fight draining from him with his blood.
Brown eyes found mine. Glassy with shock, wide with a pain that went beyond the physical, they held an expression I refused to examine. Not hatred. Not fear.
Something worse.
Below, rifles cracked. Bullets sparked off my belly scales as the alpha and the older soldier fired without pause, heedless of the wolf impaled above them.
My treasure slammed back into my consciousness without warning, so violently that it nearly folded my wings. Not the steady pull I had endured since the theft, this was a detonation—immediate, overwhelming, and so close that every scale on my body resonated with its frequency. My wingbeat faltered. My gaze wrenched downward.
Ziara.
She was alive.
Covered from head to toe in the same bloody sap streaming down the Ancient, she stumbled forward. The alpha vaulted back onto the root where she had emerged, shifting his rifle to grab her.
No. Not her. He ripped something out of her hand, heedless of her safety.
Ziara reeled, nearly falling from the elevated position before she righted herself, swiping at the substance covering her eyes.
The alpha pocketed what he had taken and yelled for her to follow as he headed down the root without a second glance at his pack member.
Seemingly stunned, Ziara shook herself and looked around, turning back toward the tree. The beat of my wings drew her attention upward, where she finally saw me hovering in the air. Her jaw dropped, and her gaze dipped to the male dangling from my talons, and horror widened her eyes. She swallowed, took a step back, and then stopped.
“Ziara! Come!” the alpha shouted from down the root, anger and annoyance sharpening his tone.
Where did he think they would go? They could not outrun a dragon.
And he was entirely too far away to stop her from doing what I knew she would.
Her hand slid into her dagger sheath, but rather than the weapon, she withdrew something small enough to fit in her palm. To fit into the box that now lay empty in my hoard.
My treasure.
