Kiss of a Dragon (Fallen Immortals 1) - Paranormal Fairytale Romance (20 page)

She shivered in the cool air and dragged her gaze back to the fae who had rescued her… although she suspected her kidnapping had been
his
plan all along.

“Being human, I expect you to know very little about the immortal world.” A hint of a smile played at the corner of his lips. He was beautiful but in a cold and cruel way. “We traveled here by way of a doorway. Not an ordinary one, to be sure, but normal transportation for a man with my powers.”

She swallowed. “Why am I here?”

His almost colorless eyes glittered, reflecting the softly glowing light that bounced all around the room.
His bedroom…
or at least a room with a bed in it. He stepped closer and reached for her hand again. She almost pulled it away, but if he could whisk her around the world using magic alone to wherever this place was, there wasn’t much use in physically fighting against him.

“You’re here because you’ve charmed your way into Lucian Smoke’s bed.” He upturned her hand and softly stroked her palm with the fingertips of his other hand. “So delicate and fragile. I can understand the allure.” Then he looked up and lifted his hand to her face, cupping her cheek and running a thumb across her lips.

She gasped as they warmed under his touch, flushing pleasure through her as if the brushing of his thumb was the most erotic of kisses.

He smirked. “If you think a dragon’s bed is filled with pleasure, it’s only because you haven’t been in mine.” He leaned closer, close enough to kiss her, but he held back.

Her heart stuttered, and an embarrassing heat flooded between her legs. How could she feel attracted to this man who had basically kidnapped her? But her body was betraying her… and her mind seemed just as intoxicated by his commanding presence.

“I can taste every pleasure you’ve ever had, my sweet, innocent little human.” He was whispering now, his lips nearly brushing hers. “Your dragon’s most seductive powers come from the fae blood in his veins.” The heat had blossomed and flowed up her body. “Just think what a full-blooded fae prince could do for you.
To you.”

Her mind was awash with a sudden, intense desire. A
need
for him to close the last millimeter of distance between their lips, to feel his hands on her body, to having him thrusting hard inside her, filling her like no man had before… she leaned forward…

Fae prince.
That thought blared through the haze that was fogging her mind.

She jerked back. “I know your name.”

His eyes widened for a split second, then narrowed. The runes at his temples surged and shifted. “I doubt that very much.”

But she did.
She remembered Lucian saying he had to meet a fae prince. “You’re Zephan, a prince of the Winter Court. Lucian told me about you. He doesn’t trust you.” She pulled even further back. “And neither do I.”

Her mind instantly cleared, as if the fog had been burnt off by the memory of Lucian’s words.

Zephan smirked, but it was cool again, not heated like before. “No doubt because I could bed you with a simple touch.”

A shiver ran through her.
A touch?
He was using magic on her, messing with her head somehow. Lucian already had amazing magic, and he was only part fae; who knew what a fae prince could do.

His smirk grew even colder and more haughty. “But I’m not the one you should be concerned about, naïve little Arabella. Come, let me show you.” He swept his hand toward the bed.

She frowned and held her ground.

Zephan rolled his eyes. “Not the
bed,
simple girl. The
mirror.”

She looked again, and the screen over the bed had transformed into an enormous mirror. “I don’t understand.”

He beckoned her forward, and she grudgingly went along. When they reached the edge of the bed, the mirror transformed from a flat, silvered surface that reflected her and Zephan standing side-by-side to a close-up video of Lucian’s face. His expression was dark and angry with an intensity she’d never seen on him—it made her recoil and pity the poor fool in his way.

She whipped a look at Zephan. “What is this?”

His smirk was still ice cold. “A memory. A glimpse of the past through the prism of magic. Something to help you see the error of your ways. And why you should never be seduced by a monster like our irksome and brooding dragon prince.”

She frowned again, but her attention was caught by Lucian moving. The view shifted to show him kneeling next to a very pregnant woman. Her belly seemed nearly ready to burst with the size of the baby contained within it. Lucian’s back was to the mirror frame, but Arabella could see him lay a hand flat on the hugely rounded belly. The runes on Lucian’s hand swarmed around his skin, pulsing and warping, and the pregnant belly underneath his touch surged with them. The woman arched her back, pushing up into Lucian’s hand. Arabella could finally see her face as she threw her head back, her long reddish-brown hair spilling all over the floor. Her mouth was wide in a silent scream. Not a whisper of sound came from the mirror—Arabella heard her own heartbeat yammering in her chest, but nothing from the scene splayed in front of her. Lucian’s hand shoved the woman down, holding her belly secure as he raised his other hand.

It shifted into a fistful of talons.

Arabella gasped and covered her mouth with her own hand.

His claws slashed at the woman, splitting her belly wide. Blood gushed everywhere, great buckets of it, all over her belly, the floor, Lucian’s hands and arms.

Oh God.
Arabella’s hand trembled against her mouth.

The woman’s endless, wordless scream finally forced her up off the floor, her eyes popping open.

They were green.

Oh, holy fuck, they were green.

Lucian kept slashing and tearing at her body, opening it up wide, digging deeper, then finally, when Arabella thought for sure her own stomach would empty out onto Zephan’s pristine white bed, Lucian reached with human hands into the gaping, bloody hole and lifted the baby free.

A dragon baby
—tiny and golden and lashing out with fire.

“Oh, God.” The words leaked out of Arabella.

Zephan held up a hand, and the image froze—Lucian holding the bloody infant dragon over the horribly empty womb of its mother’s body.

“No.” Arabella didn’t want to know this. Whatever this was, there was an explanation for it. Something that gave some reason for why Lucian tore a baby from its mother. But her mind was already spinning the tale. The woman was his mate. His
previous
mate. And the golden baby dragon was Lucian’s. Only he had no mate now, and no dragonling, either. Unless all of that was a lie, too.

Tears crowded her eyes, and she fought to blink them back.

The mirror returned to plain silver, reflecting back her red-blotched face as if she had already lost the war with crying.

“Sadly, the baby died.” Zephan’s voice was cool. “Although, that’s typically the case. The mate dies. The baby dies. Truly a horrific business, reproduction in the House of Smoke.”

Arabella just stared at him, horrified. “All of them?”

Zephan shrugged. “Well, the man
is
five hundred years old. If there had been a successful spawning of a dragonling, you wouldn’t be standing here, now would you?”

She shook her head, back and forth, back and forth… then stared at her reflection in the mirror. “He was trying to save it—”

“He was trying to save the
dragonling.”
Zephan paused. “He tore the mother apart. You see, he doesn’t need
her.
Only the child.”

Her stomach heaved.

She didn’t want to believe it. She
didn’t
believe it. But the idea had snuck into her mind like a poison that had seeped through her skin and worked into every neuron fire of her brain. A poison that was killing her from the inside out.

Lucian was using her.

She was shaking her head, but no words came out.

“I thought you should know.” Zephan touched the bottom of her chin, lifting her gaze to meet his. “It’s easy to love a dragon, little human. It’s very hard to
survive
loving one.”

She yanked her face away from his touch. She wanted to deny it. She wanted to believe Zephan was lying. But all of it rang with too much truth.

Which meant Lucian had been lying to her from the beginning.

Lucian was on bended knee
before the King of the Winter Court.

“Thank you for permitting an audience, your highness,” Lucian said, keeping his head bent and his gaze fixed on the strange, translucent flooring of the royal receiving chamber. The customs hadn’t changed in a dozen millennia, and he was walking a tight-rope with this situation as it was—better to give the arrogant fae royalty some deference than quibble about who should be bending to whom. Besides, the king was well-known as a tyrant. And being a mere five thousand years old—and thus younger than the treaty itself—he was rumored to be bitter about how it had been bequeathed to him, binding him with magic to an agreement he never fashioned.

“You may rise,” the king said, his voice echoing off the translucent walls of the chamber and climbing through the column of air above them.

Lucian rose to standing.

The king peered down at him with nearly colorless eyes, his long, black hair floating in the unseen magic that also hovered his glass throne well above Lucian, such that he had to peer up at him. Typical fae, and so much like Zephan, his son—flaunting his power, ensuring that Lucian, a mere dragon, knew his place. “But make no mistake, Prince of the House of Smoke. I permitted Brokk to bring you to court only to satisfy the precise terms of the treaty, which require me to demonstrate that this vile accusation you’ve made is utterly baseless.”

Brokk was a high-ranking fae in the king’s court—as well as Lucian’s temporary guide and guard, the one who appeared when he made his request through the limited fae magic Lucian possessed in his DNA. Brokk stood next to Lucian, flexing his hands, which were crawling with runes just waiting to strike against the Summer Court blood running through Lucian’s veins. Treaty or no, if Lucian stepped one millimeter outside Winter Court protocol, the king’s enforcer would take great pleasure in meting out some kind of punishment. Strictly speaking, according to the treaty, Lucian couldn’t be killed or irreparably harmed. But if Lucian acted first, committing some offense against the court, they could plausibly make him suffer for it without triggering a war with the Summer fae.

“Your son has taken my treasure.” Lucian kept his words even, in spite of the hammering in his chest. If Zephan had harmed her, Lucian would have a hard time controlling himself. “The treaty strictly prohibits interference of any kind in—”

“Do not
lecture me on the wording of the treaty!” The king’s bellow pounded Lucian’s ears, enhanced by the magical space of which the entire court was comprised. The court itself, and everyone within its walls, existed in a netherworld that was neither heaven nor earth, but somewhere in between—
magic space.
Another dimension, as the humans would call it. The Court was as much an
idea
as it was a
place
—a powerful construct of energy, wards, and magic—and while Lucian was in it, he was even more vulnerable to the fae’s considerable powers. He could travel here only with the expressed permission of the court and when accompanied by a fae guide; this realm was only accessible to fae, true angels, and the devil himself, beings Lucian seldom had occasion to encounter and always wished he hadn’t.

The king drifted down from his floating throne, his pointed ears tipped red with his anger. “I’ve summoned my son. You may have your plaything back. Although, having visited my son’s bedroom, she may prefer to stay.”

It took every restraint Lucian had not to snarl, growl, or otherwise breathe dragonfire on the king’s smirking face. “You must leave her free of your mind fuckery; her choice must be a true one.”

“I understand the terms, dragon.” The king’s clear eyes bored into him. “See that you follow them as well. To the letter. And then
leave.”
He lifted his chin and wrinkled his nose. “Your kind pollutes the magic of my court every moment you’re here.” Then he turned his back on Lucian and disappeared—Lucian knew he had opened a trans-dimensional door and flitted to some other location, but it all happened so quickly that, even with his enhanced senses, he couldn’t see the transition. The king was simply gone in less than a fraction of a second.

Brokk stood coolly next to him, his rune-covered hands curled into fists, waiting.

And Zephan would no doubt make them wait. It would both annoy his tyrannical father and show the proper disdain for Lucian, the treaty, and all the mortal realm.

As they stood awkwardly in the king’s chamber, Lucian finally had a moment to reflect on what in the name of magic he was doing. He had hurtled after this girl—this beautiful, strong, innocent girl—without hesitation. Without thinking it through. He was risking the entire treaty just to bring her home unharmed. He could have left her to Zephan’s devices—she was human, and he was forbidden to kill her—but instead, Lucian was turning over half the world to get her back. To get her out of that asshole’s clutches. And to bring her home to Lucian’s lair. To reclaim a treasure that not only didn’t belong to him, but that he should, by all rights, leave completely alone, for her own good.