Her family, Princess says.
And for once, I already knew that. They look like her, this family. The mother has white-blonde hair, cut short, but unique, just like Kiera. The father has dark hair, but the same startling blue eyes. And the brothers behind her had the same hair as their father, and his eyes.
Family. The word echoes in my mind.
My only family is Princess. But seeing these people together, I can understand why Kiera wants to leave this place. She has something to go home to.
I pick up a book and find a photo album. Settling myself against the side of her bed on the floor, I review the photos beneath the moonlight. They start with photos of a little girl who can only be Kiera. I find myself smiling as I see her messy, covered in mud. I feel a strange longing when I see her cooking with her mother, and sparring with her father and brothers.
Family. I don’t know why the word hurts.
Adam? Someone was here. Someone went through her stuff.
I stiffen and look around the room. He was right. “But why?” And then it occurs to me. “The berserkers in the tunnels saw her. What if they took her? What if they hurt her?”
Then you need to find her.
My gut tightens. He’s right.
“What the fuck?”
I stiffen and turn to the door. A man stands in the doorway. A huge man with a dark beard and an angry expression.
“What are you doing in Kiera’s room?” he asks, a threat in his voice.
I rise slowly. “What are you doing in her room?”
He closes the door slowly behind him. When he turns to face me, I can see that he’s come to some kind of conclusion. “Are you helping them, mutant?”
“Helping—“
He launches himself at me. I hear Princess hiss in warning, and he leaps to the windowsill as the man slams into me. But I don’t have time to spring free. His huge body is suddenly on top of me, and his fists pummel my face.
Unfortunately for him, if there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s take a punch.
I barely feel the blows as they land, but when he leans closer, I slam my head into his nose.
He cries out, and I roll so that I’m on top of him, then spring back. The man is easily twice my width. It doesn’t matter that I’m a hair taller than him. I stand no chance in hand-to-hand combat.
Turning for the door, I start for my freedom, but his voice stops me. “If you hurt her…”
I freeze and look back at him, even though I know Princess will think I’m a fool for hesitating. “You and your kind are the ones hurting her. I’ll protect her from you.”
He’s holding his nose when he looks at me, his eyes narrowed as he starts to sit up. “And who is Kiera to you?”
I don’t know what I’m saying when I say it. “I think she could be my family.”
His eyes widen.
“We had sex. I like her smell. And she’s special to me.”
He curses under his breath, but draws his hand back from his bleeding nose. “You slept with her?”
I nod. “She could be my family.”
And this time when I say it, I swear my heart sings.
He sits down on the edge of her bed and wipes the blood from his nose. He looks so tired, and so alone, that something in me aches.
“Are you okay?”
“It’s just…I’m working so hard to keep her safe but—“ He stops talking and looks at me like he just realized who he was talking to.
“You want to keep her safe too?”
He nods, then mumbles, “Fuck it,” before continuing, “I had some dragon asshole help me, and I’m pretty damn sure he screwed me over.”
“How so?”
“Kiera…hurt her teacher. They sent her to the discipline—“
“No,” spills from my lips, and every muscle in my body tightens. “They have flesh eaters for the students who hurt teachers. They—“
“We tried to get in before they could, but the fucking dragon shifter used the magic to go in and I was stuck out. I came here to see if he’d gotten them both out, or if he was just going to stay with her until her sentence was over, and found you here.”
My stomach twists at the idea of a dragon shifter with Kiera. “What does he want from her?”
“Probably the same thing we do.”
I freeze. “You care for her too?”
“Not that she could ever feel the same way…”
I move carefully and sit down in a chair beside her small desk. “You deserve good things.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I understand what it feels like to think you don’t deserve anything good.”
He looks up and our gazes hold for a long minute before he looks away. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. I know enough to know no one can be trusted.”
“I can be,” I say, and mean it.
His expression is uncertain as he rises. “Now, I have the berserkers who want to hurt Kiera to kill, and a detention room to get into.”
I rise too. “I’ll come with you.”
“No…”
“I’m going to go to her, with or without you.”
He studies me for a long minute, then says, “Okay, but this doesn’t mean I trust you.”
“That’s okay,” I tell him. “I don’t trust you either.”
We head back out of Kiera’s room, shutting the door quietly behind us. Anyone who wants to hurt Kiera will be dealt with, and then I want to see Kiera and this shifter. I need to know what all of this means.
Chapter Nineteen
Kiera
“You scared?” he asks.
I study Drake, still lounging on his bed. Am I scared? Maybe a little bit, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.
“No,” I lie, then take a deep breath and move closer to him.
He watches me with that predatory look of his, and I try to match it. All shifters think they’re such badasses. Most of them are like kittens to us. Unfortunately for me, I’d never actually met a dragon shifter before. I’d actually thought they’d all been hunted to extinction.
A cat shifter, a wolf, a bear…all of them I could take. I was a little more worried about facing off with a dragon.
Still, I sit lightly at the end of his bed.
He sits up and adjusts so that his legs are crossed, then he sets his hands on his knees, palms up, and looks at me expectantly.
“What?”
“We have to touch for this to actually work.”
Touch…oh, right. I’d never actually done this before. I’d heard something about it, but that wasn’t exactly the same thing.
Watching him closely, I shift on the bed, moving a little closer to him. I match the way he sits, crossing my legs and putting my hands on the tops of my knees.
“I’m doing this,” I say, “but if I want to stop, we’re stopping.”
Drake’s stunning eyes widen. “Always.”
His response reassures me a little. “You do know the first time I saw you, some woman was stroking your dick.”
“Jealous?” he asks, lifting a brow.
“No,” I say, but my response is a little too fast. “I just thought I’d point out that you don’t exactly scream ‘gentleman’ to me.”
He flashes me a smile that’s so brilliant it makes my chest ache. “Women are drawn to me. They want me. But from the moment I saw you, there was only you.”
“I thought shifters liked to have a whole bunch of women.”
His smile never falters. “Unless they find their mate, and then there’s no one else for them.”
“Berserkers aren’t the same way.”
His eyes narrow and his smile falters. “How so?”
“There are so few berserker women that we tend to have multiple partners. We choose more than one husband. Even my mother had two, until one of them died, long before I was born.”
I swear every muscle in his body has tightened. “It wouldn’t be easy for a shifter to share.” I
start to grin, but his words stop me. “But I can be…flexible.”
“Oh?” I lift a brow.
“If this…other person is someone you can’t do without.”
“I told you, Emory is no one to me.”
Triumph flashes in his eyes. “So there is something between you?”
I mentally let off a string of curses.
“Don’t answer,” he says after a long moment. “Just touch me.”
I take a deep breath, rethinking this plan of mine, but then force myself to reach out and put my hands in his. His big fingers close gently around mine, and I feel a strange prickling race from his touch, and every hair on my body stands on end.
“Whoa.”
“Imagine that in bed,” he says, softly, but his eyes have closed.
My mind wanders to just how good he might be with his hands, and then the image is snatched away. I find myself in a dark room, sitting in front of Drake. For a second it feels like I’ve fallen through the damned looking glass, and then Drake’s eyes meet mine.
“What do you want to know about me then?”
Oh, yes, I remember how this all started. I told him that I didn’t even know him, and he’d said he had a way for us to get to know each other. I said I didn’t trust him not to lie to me, and he’d suggested a way to be sure he was telling the truth.
Which had led us to Thought Sharing. Something only powerful shifters could do.
I study him and decide to start with something easy. “I want to know about your family.”
His expression falters, and then he fades away. I’m suddenly standing on the balcony of a massive mansion overlooking a huge forest. A little black dragon leaps from the edge and plummets straight down. A white dragon catches him before he can hit the earth, and then two massive dragons are soaring side-by-side, the little black dragon in the grip of the white one. For a time, they release the little creature over and over again. He almost seems to catch the wind, but falls each time.
Eventually, they soar back to the balcony and land lightly near me. They shift into a beautiful woman with blonde hair, and a man as dark as she is light, with brown, closely cut hair and a teasing smile. And a little boy who looks like some strange blend of both of them and neither of them all at once.
“I want to fly!” the boy says, his little hands balling up into fists.
His dad swings him into his arms, and his voice comes out warm and gruff. “You will, son. One day.”
The image fades away. The same boy, a few years older, stands in the forest. Up above, the same mansion burns. Through the trees, the bodies of a white and black dragon, tangled together, are visible, lying bleeding and broken on the blackened earth. The sounds of men’s voices filter through the trees, and then the boy is running.
Tears stream down his face, and his eyes are wild. In him I can see the loss of everything. The loss of his entire world, and my heart aches.
And then, I’m sitting in front of Drake again.
For a second, I can’t seem to speak. That was him? That little boy all alone who saw his parents die? I can’t imagine what that must have been like for him. How afraid he must have been.
“Oh, Drake…”
His jaw clenches. “My family. Your turn.”
Before I can say more, we blink away to my home town. I’m sitting on the porch with my mom, side-by-side on the swing. We’re drinking her famous lemonade and watching the show. My five brothers and my dad roll about the yard, fighting in their human forms.
My mom and I look at each other, and then we’re both laughing.
She slips her hand in mine, and we drink our lemonade and watch the sun set over the trees. Neighbors, friends pass by. And my chest squeezes.
I spent my whole life wishing I could see the world. I wanted to go to the human town. I wanted to meet other supernaturals and explore. I’d loved my home, but I’d never realized just how much until now.
And then we’re back in that nothingness, just Drake and I.
“Your family seems nice.”
I nod, and try to pretend tears haven’t rolled down my cheeks. “They really are.”
“More questions?” he asks, his gaze lingering on my tears.
“How did you end up in the reform school?”
His mouth curls into a protest, but we’re whipped away.
A large black dragon is pinned to the ground. Shimmering nets pin his massive form to the ground, cutting into his scaly body. Blood leaks all over him, and there’s something horrifying about seeing such an incredible creature immobilized. Men come. They surround him, knives in their hands. And I know, without having to ask, that the blades are made with dwarven steel.
My stomach lurches when they gather around him and start cutting pieces out of him, collecting them in bags as the dragon roars, but can’t escape. They move to his wings, and they smirk, horrible smirks. Their blades cut into the dragon’s wings over and over again, shredding the delicate substance that looks almost like massive white-gold butterfly wings.
“Put what we have in the car, then come back for the heart,” one man says.
They disappear, and the dragon suddenly shifts into a man. He’s injured. Horribly injured. His body shredded. But he waits in the shadows of the trees, and when the men come back, he slaughters them.
When he collapses onto the ground, he hears the sound of new voices, but he doesn’t have the strength to fight. Shifting to his human form took too much energy. They stand over him, just shadows of men. They kick at his form, they mutter about the dead men, and then the image fades away.
“Drake,” I whisper his name as we come back into the dark room.
Had he really been through something so terrible? Had they really destroyed his wings?
“What led you here?” he asks, ignoring me.
The world fades away, and I watch the events with the vampires replay. I watch my best friend die again. And when it ends, we don’t come back to the dark room. We come back to the bed in the reform school. Drake gathers me in his arms, and I hate that I come undone.
Lucy should never have died that day. She should’ve gone on to live a long life.
All of that was taken from her.
And Drake. He should have never lost his parents just because some fucked up assholes wanted to sell his parents’ bodies for parts. It was disgusting. A tragedy.
Made even worse by the fact that hunters came for him too.
None of this was fair. None of this was right. I want to fight back. I want to get angry.
But instead, I cry.
Drake says nothing, just strokes my hair, just holds me close. For the first time since meeting him, there isn’t a strange tension between us. It’s just…comfortable.
When I gather myself together enough to stop crying, I whisper, “I’m tired.”
The big shifter surprises me by drawing us back on the bed, wrapping me in the blanket, and settling silently under me, his hands continuing to stroke my hair.
The things I saw in his past run through my mind. I picture the boy who watched his parents die and his home burn. I watch the young man being torn apart for his pieces.
Is that the real Drake? Or is it the arrogant shifter I can’t seem to escape?
My eyes close. I have no idea. But I also know that I won’t be dismissing this whole mate thing quite so easily.
Being a mate to someone who wants me to get to know him seems like a hell of a lot better than being the queen to someone who wants me as his slave.
As my eyes close and sleep tugs me under, the last thought I remember is this: but being the woman to three handsome men, that’s the best. And then, nothing else.
Chapter Twenty
Emory
We reach the edge of the trees and stare across the field at the detention center. Outside the door, four men gather. I stare at the huge shapes for a minute before I recognize Mario and his idiots. The fact that they’re outside the door that Kiera is trapped inside means they’ve p
robably figured out who the hell she is. Even for revenge they wouldn’t go up against a bunch of flesh eaters.
But if my brother ordered them to, they would do anything he asked. I’d seen the fear my brother could instill in a person first-hand.
“This isn’t good,” I whisper to Adam.
“Us standing so close? Yes, it’s awkward.”
I silently curse and have to refrain from rolling my eyes. “No, not only do we need to deal with the dragon shifter, but now we have the berserkers from the tunnels to get through first.”
“They’ve figured out she was spying on them?”
I briefly consider lying. “Probably. But I can almost guarantee they’re here to deliver Kiera to King Maxen Wolff, as he calls himself, leader of the berserkers.”
“Why does he want Kiera?”
“As his bride.”
Adam frowns. “She wants to marry him?”
“She’s never met him.”
“Then…how?”
“He wants her as his bride, so he’ll have her as his bride. He doesn’t really care what Kiera wants.”
The mutant’s expression changes. Gone is his familiar confused expression, replaced by an angry one. “No one will force her to do anything.”
I’m surprised. Doesn’t he realize that one mutant means nothing to Maxen? Adam would be no more than a body to cut down if he stood in the way of Maxen getting Kiera. Which was why we needed to kill his lackeys and buy us some time.
“We need to kill them.”
“The berserkers?”
“Yes, or they’ll stop at nothing to get her.”
Adam frowns. “If we have to…”
“We do.”
I keep myself from going berserk as we rush across the empty field. Every second that passes, I expect them to spot us, but they seem completely focused on breaking the lock to the small building. When we duck behind the third detention building, we pause, breathing hard.
Adam, I’m glad, says nothing beside me. And I take a moment to wonder why the hell I enlisted the mutant’s help. Maybe because he startled me? Most mutants foamed at the mouth, couldn’t put together a sentence, and were as wild as rabid wolves. To see a mutant speaking clearly and showing a soft spot for Kiera had shocked me.
Untamed- House of Berserkers Page 11
