Page 5 of Dragon’s Rebel

His Destined Mate, if the stories were true. But he didn’t believe in stories. He believed in facts and reason.

All the same, part of him couldn’t help wishing it were true. She would make an amazing mate.

his dragon pointed out.

Thorne didn’t have the heart to tell him that a huge blue dragon dick was almost certainly not going to fill any human woman with lust. Horror was more like it.

She feels sorry for us, he said. Even if I were human, the best we could hope for would be a pity fuck.

his dragon said complacently.

Thorne snorted, twin puffs of smoke coming from his nostrils.

“What?” Rebel asked. He shook his head.

His dragon was hoping for something that wasn’t going to happen. None of that Destined Mate crap was real. At least, not for Thorne. He did believe Rebel was the Keeper of the Seal. He even believed that there might be some magic that would reveal the Seal if the Keeper had sex with a dragon. Sex was very potent, magically speaking.

But the whole ‘falling in love forever’ thing was a crock.

Zane was different—he was part bear shifter, and everyone knew how they were about their mates. The fact that he and Blaze had bonded was no surprise. And Tyr was a raging romantic, with way more human blood in him than Thorne had.

He saw Tempest as a princess out of a fairy tale—one where the dragon was the hero.

Thorne was a grumpy-ass Wild Dragon whose Draken father had mated with a human woman and instantly regretted it. He’d raised Thorne and done his duty by him, but love had never been part of the equation. Thorne wasn’t sure he even knew what it meant.

They reached Thorne’s lair, near the end of the hall. The huge wooden doors were carved with battle scenes—strange creatures fighting one another in a landscape he didn’t recognize. He believed it showed his father’s birthplace in the Dragonlands—a place Thorne had never been.

This had been his father’s lair, and after his death Thorne moved into it, caring for his father’s hoard in his honor, tending it meticulously along with his own.

When he opened the door the gold hummed faintly, recognizing him as its caretaker.

His own hoard, carefully separated, was piled more haphazardly to one side. It still made a large pile, arranged to fit the contours of his dragon and cradle him when he slept.

Which wasn’t much, lately.

He turned himself around and faced Rebel. She was looking at the hoard with the same amazed half-smile she’d worn the first couple of times he’d allowed her inside his lair.

“I’m never going to get used to seeing enough gold to stock Fort Knox all piled up in a cave under Vista Ridge,” she said.

The gold in Fort Knox is probably lonely. It needs a dragon to care for it properly. It probably hasn’t sung in years.

That got a mischievous grin from Rebel. “I would kill to see the look on the faces of the security detail at Fort Knox if the gold in the vault suddenly up and started singing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus.’”

One day you can steal it, and we’ll make it sing.

“Damn,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “That would be epic.”

And he would do it, too, to see her eyes light up like that again.

He crouched down and wrapped his tail around his forepaws.

Tell me, he said.

“Okay,” Rebel began. “Hear me out before you freak. There’s this genetic research company just outside of Tacoma. It’s called BioGen, and was supposedly formed out of a merger between—well, never mind, because it’s a lie.” She took a deep breath.

“I’d heard rumors about it before—that it’s a reincarnation of a group called Gen-X. They were a super-secret organization doing illegal, off-the-books experiments on shifters. Studying their DNA, figuring out how their shifting abilities work, isolating other related abilities: visions, telepathic speech, immunity to magic, stuff like that.” There was another pause. “Some people even say they did experiments on unwilling shifters.”

Thorne felt the fire in his dragon belly start to churn. One of the reasons shifters kept themselves a secret was the fear of being exploited by humans—being used as lab rats in experiments to see how they could be useful.