Dragon Mated: Sexy Urban Fantasy Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds Book 4)

by Kara Lockharte

  Dragon Mated

  Kara Lockharte

  Cassie Alexander

  Copyright © 2020 by Erin Cashier and Kara Lockharte

  Cover design by Croco Designs

  All rights reserved.

  Note: This book is a work of fiction. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  To Ruth Bader Ginsburg

  Not that she has anything to do with dragon shifter romances, but she was awesome. Thanks to her, we can have our business and checking accounts without our husbands’ names!

  About DRAGON MATED

  I always knew getting involved with a billionaire dragon shifter would eventually involve broken hearts.

  I just didn’t know that I would be the one doing the breaking.

  My family’s secrets are devastating, dangerous — especially for a dragon.

  To keep him safe, I have to destroy us, but that will destroy me.

  I don’t want him to save me.

  I can’t have him save me.

  But he will save me.

  Because that’s who he is.

  My dragon mate.

  This is the final book in the Prince of the Otherworld series! Happily Ever After guaranteed! Talking magical cat included!

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Prince of the Other Worlds Series

  About the Authors

  Also by Kara Lockharte

  Also by Cassie Alexander

  Chapter 1

  Andi fought not to play with her phone in her pocket, saying a silent prayer that its recording app was still running as she sat down. Could it hear her uncle clearly? Why hadn’t she thought to check it at home? Why had none of her uncle’s men searched her? Was the fact that she didn’t smell like dragon enough now…and how sure was she that she didn’t smell like dragon and wasn’t putting Damian in danger? Her knee bounced and she stopped it, watching her uncle walk around to the far side of the table with narrowed eyes.

  Uncle Lee had demanded that she come alone to talk to him, and she’d done so. She needed to know just how much of her past was a lie and why her mother had hidden a whole other life from her. And how come Danny, her brother, was a dragon now himself.

  She hoped like hell she was finally close to getting answers.

  “Are you ready to listen, niece?” her uncle asked, sitting himself down in a chair that looked more like a throne.

  “Yes. Assuming you’re ready to tell me the truth, uncle,” she said primly.

  He gave her a pained smile. “I think the first thing I should tell you is, I really am your uncle, Andrea.”

  Andi frowned. She’d been surrounded by “aunties” and “uncles” since she was born, and she’d always known that none of them were actually related to her. If she could believe he was really telling the truth, then it made knowing he was a deliberate murderer—a hunter of sentient, unearthly creatures—even more painful.

  “Your mother and I were siblings. We were orphaned after the Shaanxi earthquake in 1556.” He paused to let the date sink in as Andi did the math.

  “You mean to tell me you’re over four hundred years old?”

  “Four hundred sixty-four, to be precise. Your mother only made it to four hundred sixty-one, alas.”

  Andi opened her mouth to say, I don’t believe you, but after seeing her mother’s photo album, with all the photos of her mother in exotic locales wearing historically accurate clothing, from black and white film into color, she wasn’t sure anymore. “Go on,” she said, crossing her arms.

  “The chaos after the earthquake…it was phenomenal. They say now that eight hundred thousand people died. All we knew was that our village was wiped out. For the few who survived, it wasn’t that we didn’t want to help one another, so much as that we couldn’t. We were just two more small hungry mouths to feed. Everyone was just desperately trying to get by.” He brought a pipe and a silver match holder out of his pocket, both highly engraved, and took his time lighting his pipe while Andi waited. He sucked in a breath through the pipe’s stem, then released it in a cloud of familiar smoke before continuing.

  “We were, quite frankly, about to die. I went into the wilds, fully expecting not to return. My arms were the diameter of this pipe bowl,” he said, gesturing it at her. “I could see the cut of your mother’s cheekbones below her eyes. There was nothing left for us—not in the world, and not for our stomachs.” He took another long draw on his pipe.

  Andi steeled herself. She knew just how persuasive her uncle could be to get his way. “And then?” she prompted.

  “And then…I found it. At the bottom of a deep ravine I’d practically fallen into myself—one I didn’t think I’d have been able to scramble back out of alone. The corpse of a dragon. Green, luscious, meaty…dead. I did what anyone would do—and what you would’ve done too, if you had been there, if you’d known what life was like. I carved a piece off of it with a sharp rock, ate it raw, and for a moment, I felt like an emperor.”

  They’d eaten a dragon. Andi bit her own lips in horror.

  “I expected to be sick. I could almost feel the meat land in my stomach, same as dropping stones into a shallow pond. But what happened to me afterward….” She watched his face go beatific at the memory. “I felt better. Stronger. Whole. And I knew I had to do two things immediately. One—go find your mother and give her some, and two—never tell anyone what I had found.” Her uncle’s dark eyes unfocused to look through her, at a past only he could see. “That’s maybe the only thing I’ve felt bad about this entire time. Should we have shared? Probably. But if we had, would I still be alive today? I don’t know.” He inhaled deeply. “I told your mother, though, of course. She came into the wilds with me and helped me flay the beast. It was forty feet long, and we were small, so it took a long time. We smoked pieces of it in small caves on windy days, so that no one else could find it, and we set other pieces out to dry. It never seemed to rot or catch flies, no matter how long we waited between times to be safe, or when we hid it when we had to.

  “I won’t recount each century for you, Andrea, but as we carefully rationed the meat, we realized we didn’t age as others did, nor did we ever fall ill. And eventually, we met others like ourselves—people who’d been graced by luck the same as we had, who knew the truth of the world and the others, and, as the Christians say, the scales fell from our eyes.”

  Andi now hoped her recording app was working for her own sake, because she couldn’t begin to process all of this right now. “And so what, you worked your way up, from eating a dead dragon in the woods to killing innocent sentient creatures?”

  Her uncle chuckled. “Well, the answer is that they were never so innocent, were they? What do you think caused the earthquake to begin with? My bet would be on the dragon that crashed down to earth. And to think that people thought it was a comet.”

  “But it was dead, uncle…if I even believe you! Why
kill all the rest?”

  “Because, my dear niece, the world back then was a rougher, crueler place. And every early civilization experienced them. Marauding centaurs and chimeras in ancient Greece, qalupalik waiting to drag Inuit children under the ice, nian attacking people in our China, the grootslang of the Afrikaans. All those stories—and so many more—came from somewhere, don’t you think? And someone had to kill them, even eat them, so that humanity would survive. We may not have been as sophisticated as we are now, and we certainly didn’t kill all of them, as their continued presence here attests. But if we hadn’t tried, if those before us, like us, hadn’t tried, neither you nor I would be sitting here today.”

  Andi let his words echo inside her, the sheer horror of them building. Over four hundred years of killing had led up to their meeting tonight, and she realized there was no way she could ever hope to make him change. Her uncle had eaten a dragon once, and he wouldn’t think twice about eating one again. Her pulse picked up in fear. “And now that you know you’re hunting down living, talking people? Neighbors? Friends?”

  “And now we are into the ends justify the means phase. Which is something you find intolerable, I know.” There was a knocking behind her, and Andi almost jumped out of her skin. “Come in,” her uncle commanded someone else.

  The man who entered was a gentlemen dressed in a well-tailored managerial suit. He had darker skin and appeared older, his brown hair shot through with gray, but Andi realized that she couldn’t rely on her sense of that anymore, what with the magic they were ingesting. He didn’t look decrepit, but he could be a thousand and three for all she knew.

  “Lee,” the man announced, moving to sit at one of the tables like his seat was pre-assigned.

  “Joshan!” her uncle said, sounding pleased. “You’ve heard of my niece, yes? Mei Li’s girl, Danny’s sister?”

  “So much of you, yes,” the man told her, giving her a warm smile. Andi was about to tell him she’d heard fuck-all about him when he went on. “Your mother saved my life once.”

  The words hit her like a punch. It wasn’t fair that this man had stories about her mother that she didn’t even know. Nor that those stories may or may not have involved her mother killing someone—not something, but someone, a person—to save him.

  More people began showing up: men, women, scattered in ages and races, greeting one another with quiet handshakes and nods. Completely outnumbered, she felt shy, especially realizing that her uncle had placed her in the U-shaped grouping of the table’s center.

  “All right,” her uncle announced when all but one of the seats were taken. It was hard not to feel like all eyes were on her as the group settled down. “This,” he began, while waving in her direction, “is my esteemed niece, Andrea.”

  Everyone present murmured and made sounds of acceptance. Andi had to put her hands between her knees to not instinctively respond.

  “While she’s reluctant to join us,” her uncle granted while nodding at her, “I know what’s best for you, Andrea, and you belong here at my side. As your mother was. As your brother is.”

  Andi risked looking around at all the people intent on her. “But…I’m human.”

  Her uncle laughed. “So was I, once upon a time! And your mother, too. But the powers that we have access to can change all that.”

  “If that’s true, then why did my mother die?”

  “Because she chose to have you.”

  He couldn’t have hurt her more if he’d shot her with an arrow. “That’s not true,” she gasped.

  “It is. We rationed that dragon meat for centuries, Andi—a bite here, a bite there. We even aged in the meantime; look at me. For all that I’ve lived, I am not a young man. But it wasn’t until the end, when we knew we were running out, when she decided to stop eating her fair share and give her portion over to me. She met your father and the rest, as they say, is history.”

  “And her cancer?”

  “Inevitable, really. I understand magic more than I do biology, but I suppose you can only betray your own cells for so long. Though you had good times before then with her, right?”

  Andi didn’t want to answer that right now because the answer was yes, even if everything had been built on lies. She’d loved her mother and known she was loved back. But…she stood so quickly, her chair teetered and whirled on the surrounding room. “Was my father one of you?”

  Her uncle snorted. “Hardly. He was a commoner. An unfortunate decision, born of nothing but well-timed infatuation.”

  “Well…if your organization is so strong and powerful, why did you let him use her?”

  “Oh, Andrea, let me make one thing clear. Your mother was using him. She got what she wanted. Your brother and you.” Uncle Lee gave her a tight smile. “Monogamy’s a fairly recent concept when you’ve lived as long as we had. She wasn’t bothered by his other family in the least. Although I suppose she had no idea the effect discovering it would have on you two.”

  Andi reeled. “He left her to clean toilets, uncle!”

  “And did that matter to her? No. No matter what your mother did, she always had pride in her work.” Andi took another look around the room and found twenty pairs of eyes looking at her expectantly. “Andrea,” her uncle went on, ever so reasonably. “I won’t stop you from leaving. But you need to know that I want you here.”

  “Why?” she said harshly, the thought of it bitter on her tongue.

  “Mei Li was quite the alchemist and herbalist. I feel sure you could be too. And you have modern medical training! We could use someone like you. There’s been a hole in our little congregation since your mother’s passing,” he said, and pointed to the empty chair beside himself.

  “And why isn’t Danny in it?” she asked, crossing her arms.

  “Because there’s a chance Danny could change and take out the antique table, if not everyone else in the room,” her brother answered from the shadows, stepping forward. He looked much worse than when she’d seen him last, at the cemetery beside their mother’s grave. He was sallow, like a drunk with a bad liver, a shade not normally found in any “skin tone colors” of a crayon box, and his bright eyes were rimmed with red. The way he held himself said that he was tired, and he was hunched forward slightly like he might lose his balance at any moment.

  She turned to face him. “Aren’t you afraid they’re going to eat you, too?”

  “Nah. I’d fight back too hard,” he said, giving her a lopsided grin, despite his apparent exhaustion.

  Andi turned to her uncle while pointing at Danny. “How?”

  Her uncle shrugged. “As I said, your mother was a master alchemist.”

  “While cleaning toilets.”

  “She was not without resources. She just chose not to access them, in her efforts to provide you with a normal life.”

  “A normal life?” Andi mocked.

  “Andi-bear, just ask the question you really want to,” Danny said wearily. “Why did Mom choose her degenerate son for her experiments and not you?”

  Andi inhaled sharply and grit her teeth. It was too horrible to ask, knowing what those experiments were borne of and what they’d led to, and yet, he was right. She couldn’t have admitted it to herself beforehand, but it was definitely why she’d lied to Damian and why she’d had to come here. She wanted to learn her uncle’s plans, yes, but she needed to know why her mother had betrayed her more. “Okay, fine,” she spat. “Why you?”

  “The answer’s in the question, Andi. You were going to get out.” He looked at her and shook his head in the way that always infuriated her, like he knew something she didn’t—some fact she was too stupid to understand. “You know, when she and I started the experiments, and she swore me to secrecy and said I could never tell you or anyone, I actually thought I was the special one. Me. You would be out playing with friends, and she’d be compounding oils to rub on me, making me eat strange things that didn’t taste good, putting stinging drops in my eyes. Always trying to summon out the dragon
that she hoped was in my blood.” He chuckled ruefully. “And to think, I felt so lucky. Like I was the chosen one.”

  “Because you were,” Andi whispered, and she couldn’t hide the tinge of jealousy in her voice. She’d always known Danny and her mom were close, just like she’d always known Danny was the favorite one. Everyone had! It was obvious! He didn’t even have to learn how to peel his own oranges until he was freaking twelve! Even their dad wanted him! The world had been handed to Danny on a silver plate, and he’d taken that plate and spit on it and thrown it out the nearest window.

  “No, Andi,” Danny said, and his voice had a serious timbre she was unaccustomed to hearing from him. “You were.”

  “Yeah. Right,” Andi said, with maximal sarcasm.

  Danny tossed his hands up in the air in frustration at her, a familiar gesture from him. “I don’t care what you believe, Andi, but it’s the truth. She chose to keep you ignorant and safe, to save you from this…and yet, here you fucking are.”

  “Now, now,” her uncle chided, as Andi wavered.

  Was Danny telling the truth? For once in his life? She couldn’t ask her mom anymore.

  Andi was struck by another fresh pang of grief, like a knife in the center of her chest. She used to get them all the time right after her mother had died, when she’d reach for her phone to call to tell her mom something and then realize that her mother wasn’t there. The pain never went away or felt less sharp. The only thing time had dulled was that she didn’t get stabbed as frequently.

  Even if her mom had tried to save her from all of this, she knew she would’ve wanted Danny to be safe too. And she didn’t have to be a nurse to look at him and know he wasn’t well. Whatever was wrong with him—whatever had happened—she could undo it, somehow, if he gave her a chance, if he’d just give her time. “Danny, come with me,” she began, reaching a hand out for him. “It’s not too late.”