Page 61 of Bad Blood Alpha

He was pretty sure that was fury. He was shaking with it himself.

“I recognized them.” Her voice was trembling, which seemed to infuriate her more.

“Ragnor?” he said.

She stared at him. “Who?”

“Ragnor,” he said. “The sorcerer who put this goddamn binding on us. That was him.”

She shook her head. “No. I mean, I didn’t remember him. I recognized her, this time. Not her face, or her voice. Her…essence.” She turned to look at him. “It was Mayah. My little sister.”

The moment she said it, he knew she was right. There had been a faint feeling of familiarity when he looked at the woman—she was a younger, softer version of Kira. And the dragon…she was right about that too. The shape of the head, the placement of the horns—if that wasn’t an Al-Maddeiri dragon in that cage, he’d eat his fucking combat vest.

Which almost certainly made him Emon, Kira’s younger brother.

All the children of Al-Maddeiri were alive. And Kira had been luckier than she ever knew.

It could be her in that room, screaming, not knowing anyone could hear.

Begging for help that never came.

Flynn wanted to turn cat, to let his lion rage and rip that motherfucker Ragnor into a thousand pieces and leave him for the jackals.

“He’s going to kill them,” she said. “And that liquid he was making in the test tube—that’s poison. He’s going to use it to kill all the rest of the dragons.”

“He’s going to try,” Flynn said. “That’s a long way from a perfect plan.”

“It wouldn’t be that hard,” Kira said. “Dragons are almost invulnerable to normal dangers. I mean, you can blast one out of the sky with a big enough missile, or they can kill each other in battle, but that’s about it. But a poison made from dragon blood…”

“He hasn’t managed to kill your—the black dragon,” Flynn pointed out.

“He probably hasn’t been trying. He’s been refining his formula, using small doses to test the toxicity. When he thinks he has it right…”

“Then he’ll kill them.”

She nodded. “After that, all he has to do is take it to the Dragonlands and introduce it into the water supply. They don’t guard things like that—why should they? And if it’s made of dragon blood…”

“It will pass through any magical wards they have up.”

She nodded.

“Shit,” Flynn said. He was no fan of dragons, but he was sure as hell opposed to some insane asshole wiping out a whole species just to get his fucking rocks off.

Nobody deserved that.

“We’ll find them,” he said. “We’ve got everyone looking. We’ll find them, and we’ll take that fucker down. If we have to scour all the fucking worlds for them, we will. I swear it.”

Kira shook her head. “We don’t have to,” she said. “I know where they are.”