by Ashlee Sinn
Danika turned and saw me watching her. She smiled and took a few purposeful steps to reach my side. Brushing her hand against the side of my face, she leaned in and gave me a quick, but deep kiss. Then she pulled back and grinned, “You should shave.”
“I think I’ll grow a beard.”
“I’ll burn it off if you do.”
While she walked out of the bedroom, I called after her, “What about a stash?”
“Never.”
I laughed as I pulled on my briefs and climbed back under the covers. I really hated feeling like a worthless patient, but I guess as long as Danika was willing to stay with me and help take care of me, I should enjoy every minute of it. Plus, now that we’d fucked, I had a feeling my time in bed would be a whole lot more pleasurable.
I was about to turn on the television when I heard a loud crash at the front of the trailer. Danika let out a small screech that was quickly silenced. The panic seized hold and I pulled on everything I had to get my animal to help me up. Jumping out of bed, I stumbled to the side, using the wall to stop my fall. I scrambled out of the bedroom and down the short hallway, scenting the air and listening for any clues as to what just happened.
“Don’t touch me!” Danika shouted and I almost fell when I reached the living room.
Immediately, two sets of hands grabbed my shoulders and pushed me against the wall. The photo behind me, the one of me and my clan at Scarlett’s birthday party, cracked underneath the pressure of my bare skin. The broken glass dug into my back but I could only see red as I stared down the two men holding me still.
“Danika?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
“She’s fine,” a man with a thick Russian accent and a body that filled my doorway said.
Danika stared at the man, but there was no denying the resemblance. I presumed we’d just met her father. “What do you want?” I asked him.
He turned his head slowly to look at me, as though I wasn’t worth the energy it took. His bright red eyes glowed with his animal and the dominance in the air thickened to a point that I physically gagged. He said nothing to me and I thought it would stay that way. Until he walked over to Danika and yanked on her arm. He dragged her around the kitchen peninsula and pulled her to the door. I struggled underneath the grip of the men holding me, but it was like I was a human and had no power against these two.
“I am taking my daughter,” the man finally said. Then he turned and nodded at the two men before yanking Danika outside. She never looked back and that broke my heart more than I thought possible.
“No!” I shouted, trying to break free. But I didn’t get a chance to speak again. In the next instant, I felt a sharp pain slam into the side of my head and then I felt nothing as I fell to the ground and into another dark sleep.
I smiled as I walked out of the bedroom, even when I heard Zane’s next question. “What about a stash?”
Shaking my head and wondering how it was possible a man could make me feel so content, I replied a simple, “Never.”
His laugh carried down the hallway and I realized that was one of the things I liked about Zane. He was always happy and found a way to enjoy life even when faced with trouble. I’d been researching for weeks, but had yet to discover what type of chemical they’d injected him with. Whatever it was, it had caused him to undergo partial changes while kidnapped, and now he couldn’t seem to find his animal at all. It scared me—the thought of losing my animal. And I was scared for Zane. He should have healed by now.
Pulling down the hem of the tee shirt, I found myself chuckling again when I looked at Zane’s face surrounded by a bunch of hearts. His red hair, stubble cheeks, and burly wild-man look in his eyes certainly had me understanding the appeal. I’d thought he was the most handsome of all the shifters I’d met in Alaska since the day I arrived. But my job, and my family promises, prevented me from acting impulsively. I’d fulfilled my duties at the expense of my happiness for a very long time. Until I saw Zane broken and battered. And that’s when I let my dragon take control.
My dragon was a killer. All dragons were. I had known what would happen the second I decided to show the shifters exactly what I was. And I’d also known that once I let the animal take control, I wouldn’t be able to stop her.
Zane. It had been for Zane. And dammit if I was going to worry one more second about what might happen to me. Instead, I focused on my time here, hiding out with a broken grizzly shifter who’d been lusting after me for months. I’d known all along how Zane felt about me, but it wasn’t until the moment we’d just had that I realized how willing he was to be mine. He didn’t even try to fight my dominant dragon, and that in and of itself had her purring with satisfaction.
A wave of excitement trickled over my skin thinking about what just happened between the two of us. I couldn’t wait until he was completely healed to fully show him what I was capable of. Right now, I held the dragon back, but once he was healthy…boy, did he have a whole lot of fun in store for him.
I opened the fridge and pulled out the eggs, bacon, and milk. Shopping and caretaking had never really been part of my life before, but somehow, being here with Zane, helping him recover and…playing house…felt right.
As I bent forward to grab the skillet, I heard the rumble of a car outside. In Zane’s trailer park, the neighbors were fairly close together. But this car brought with it a heavy fog and I immediately knew what was happening.
My father had found me.
The front door flew open and two large men dressed all in black and reeking of dragon busted into the tiny living room area. The walls shook with the impact, and I dropped the skillet when I saw their eyes. How was that possible? There were no more dragons…
One of the men immediately glared at me as he reached across the kitchen counter and tried to grab me. “Don’t touch me!” I growled. He paused, fully understanding what the scent was wafting off of me—dominance and warning that I wouldn’t hesitate to char his ass right now.
Just then, Zane barreled down the hallway, stumbling around like he was drunk. The two men moved faster than they should have been able to and slammed Zane against the wall. His breath hitched when they knocked the air out of his lungs and I had no doubt that his back would be torn up from the glass frame that had just shattered behind him.
“Danika, are you okay?” Zane asked.
I wanted to answer him, I really did. But I felt the weight of my father’s presence and his unbelievably strong dominance that forced me to keep my mouth shut. “She’s fine,” my father spat.
Anton Drakov still looked the same as he had five centuries ago when I was born. Tall and broad, with jet black hair that he kept cropped close to his head, and a permanent scowl etched into his features so that everyone knew they should fear him. At six and half feet tall, there was no mistaken where I’d gotten my height from, but my mother’s petite and docile Japanese dragon features had found their way into me ever so slightly—lessening the presence of the powerful animal inside. Whereas my father looked like a beast, just like he wanted.
“What do you want?” Zane shouted. He shouldn’t stand up to my father. He wouldn’t win. And from the look on my father’s face, I knew he was thinking the same thing.
“I’m taking my daughter with me.”
I wanted to say no. I wanted to run and shout and scream at him. I was a grown woman, a five centuries old woman, who could make her own choices. But my feet wouldn’t move and I still couldn’t speak. My father had certainly been practicing ways to use his dragon magic for his own good. So when he grabbed my arm and yanked me around the counter, I couldn’t fight back.
I tried to spare a quick glance at Zane, to warn him not to fight. But the two men blocked my view, and just as my father and I stepped out of the trailer, I heard him scream and then crumple to the floor.
Tears blurred my vision as I moved like a zombie under my father’s control. When we reached the large, black SUV he spun me around and slammed me up against the side d
oor. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?”
“Good to see you too, father.” I spat the last word at him and then immediately regretted it. His hand whipped up so fast I couldn’t stop the slap across my cheek. It stung like a mother and I immediately called on my dragon for protection. She rumbled in my chest and I felt my eyes shift. But my father knew of this tactic all too well, and a moment later, my dragon was being snuffed by the beast that lay inside of him.
“How dare you challenge me,” he growled.
I dropped my gaze. I was forced to submit.
“And look at you,” he continued. “Slutting around with a grizzly, dressed in…” His eyes took in Zane’s tee shirt and I couldn’t help but wonder what he thought about the groupie arts and crafts project. “Dressed in whatever that is, and reeking of his seed!”
By this point, most of the neighbors would have heard the shouts. But since Julia had moved in with Derrick, Zane’s neighbors didn’t understand what to do with shifters and shifter politics. I hoped they would stay inside. For their own sake.
The front door of Zane’s trailer slammed shut and the two muscle bags stomped over to my dad. They were almost as large as him, but they were also something different. I studied their eyes. I scented the air. And I had a horrifying revelation.
“Oh my god, father. What did you do?”
He glanced behind him at one of the men. “Boris and Alexei have been programmed to protect.”
“Protect? Like a dragon?” No, it wasn’t possible. Dragons were born, not made. And since I was it for the females, I knew these two hadn’t been created naturally. “What have you done?”
“Get in the car.” He grabbed my arm again, and when Boris opened the back door, my father shoved me inside. The tee shirt shifted up onto my hips, letting all three men see the string thong underneath. I should have covered up, but I was too angry. All of my life, I had constraints and expectations to live up to. I was always so put together and perfect and in control. And the one time I finally let my hair down, my father shows up to end it all.
Boris and Alexei climbed into the front seats, my father joined me in the back. He said something in Russian to them, and Boris started the car. As we pulled out of the trailer park and turned toward the main part of town, I finally swallowed my fear and started asking questions.
“What did you do to those two?”
My father didn’t look at me. Instead, he pulled off his gloves and shifted the dark brown trench coat up over his shoulders some more. “Danika,” he sighed. “I believe I should be the one asking the questions.”
“How did you find me?”
His lip curled up into an evil smirk and I hoped it was because I refused to be quiet. There were only a few ways I could defy my father, and I would take any little chance I had.
“How do you think?” The frigid tone in his voice had my blood running cold. “You were sent here for one reason only. But you couldn’t keep her under control, could you? It’s embarrassing, Danika. It’s embarrassing for the Drakov name and for all of the work I’ve been doing.”
“What work?” My stomach dropped in fear because I knew, deep down inside, what kind of work he might be referring to.
“Don’t be so naive,” he snapped. “Boris, turn here.”
I looked out the window to see us heading out onto the spit toward the industrial part of Homer. “Where are we going?”
Anton sighed and brushed his hand over his chin. For being so ancient, he still managed to keep little bits of his humanity in his mannerisms. “You’ve tied my hands, Danika. I’ve had to call in a lot of favors to the ISC for them to allow you to live.”
“What?” I cried.
“Did you really think you could kill thirty-three humans and get away with it?” He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes for a minute. When he opened them again, they were glowing red. “Your carelessness has cost me a fortune, not to mention the fact that I lost one of my best laboratories.”
“Oh, my god,” I whispered. “No.”
“Jesus Christ, Danika. You knew I had people working on a way to carry on our family bloodline. What did you think I was doing?”
My stomach churned with sickness and guilt. Not guilt over killing so many humans, but guilt that my father was the reason Zane and Calvin had been injured.
“They mutilated and killed shifters in that place.”
“Experimentation will sometimes lead to failures. It’s science, Danika. Not magic.”
“They cut out Calvin’s kidney! And they did something terrible to Zane’s grizzly!” My dragon rumbled in my chest and I let her rise a little closer to the surface.
“Is Zane the one in the trailer?”
I didn’t respond and instead let my reptilian eyes glower in his direction.
He snorted and shook his head like I was barely worth his time. “Our family comes first. Dragons are the original shifters and all others are simply a means to an end. Look at Boris and Alexei, they wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for other shifters helping the scientists understand the genetics behind what we are.”
I looked at the two men in the front of the car. “What are you talking about?”
“You must breed, Danika. You need to produce dragon offspring or our family dies with you.”
“And how am I supposed to do that? There are no other dragons.”
My father’s eyes slid toward Boris and Alexei again. “No, but we are getting close.”
“Close?” I thought back to their strength, their unusual eyes, and the way they smelled like a dragon. “You’ve turned them?” There was no hiding the disgust in my voice.
“No, that’s impossible,” my father scoffed. “But we have spliced some of their DNA with ours. They can’t shift and they won’t live longer than a regular human life, but they may be the key we need to produce viable offspring.”
The tears streamed down my cheeks, the lump in my throat catching on the reality of his words. “Artificial insemination?”
My father smiled, a cruel smirk that reminded me of all the reasons why I’d let my dragon have control three weeks ago so that I could maybe live my life the way I really wanted. “That’s the hope. If we can get male dragon DNA not from our family line, then we can make a dragon baby.”
“You’re sick,” I said.
My father grabbed onto my arm and squeezed hard enough that my bone almost snapped. “I am doing what any good father would do. You used to understand the way of our world. But ever since you started working for the ISC, your dragon has become weak. You are weak!”
“Let go of me,” I growled.
He squeezed harder for just a moment before letting go. Then, flicking his gloves in his lap again and staring out the window, he added, “You will be spending a night in jail.”
“What?”
“It’s part of the agreement I made with the ISC. There must be consequences for your behavior.”
“And a county jail in Homer, Alaska is your choice?” I snapped.
With a huff, he said, “No. Not at all. But this is what the local shifters fought for and what they ultimately convinced the ISC to do. There will be a press conference in five days where you will announce your resignation and you will return with me to Russia.”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not doing that.”
Anton sighed again, but it was more like a sound he needed to make to push his dragon back down. He didn’t say anything else to me. “Here, Boris.”
We pulled into the parking lot of the local jail that also housed the county clerk and the library. I already felt trapped, and the thought of being closed into a tiny jail cell, had my heart racing. But when I looked out the window and saw a familiar face, a little part of me calmed.
“You have some interesting friends,” my father said when he saw me looking at Major.
“I do.”
This may not be my choice, but with Major, the grizzlies, and
the wolves on my side, I had hope that I could figure this out. I would not go back to Russia to be a science experiment. I agreed that I needed to atone for my crimes, but I would do what the ISC asked, not what my father wanted.
As we pulled to a stop and Boris opened my door, I sucked in a deep breath. Maybe I should change right now and fly away. I could grab Zane and we could escape together. But just as those thoughts raced through my mind, I caught Major looking at me. He shook his head, warning me not to act impulsively. And if he was here, acting calm, he might have a plan that would help.
With one foot in front of the other, I walked toward the jail. Major said nothing as we passed and I hoped, more than anything, that I could get a message to him as soon as my father left. In the mean time, I needed to act professional despite the fact that I was half naked. So I strode forward, accepting my fate.
For now.
“Zane? Zane!” The muffled voice pulled me from the darkness. “Zane! Derrick help me!”
“Julia?” I whispered. Pain shot through my skull, pulsing like an electric current. The room around me faded in and out of a fog, and I blinked several times trying to focus on the person kneeling beside me.
“Zane? Are you okay?” Julia’s voice was thick with fear, and something about that set my nerves on edge. She was a grizzly. She had very few things to fear in her life.
“Come on, buddy,” Derrick said. They both grabbed my arms and lifted me off the ground.
My head spun and my knees wobbled, but my friends held me up. “Where is she?” I mumbled. Then, licking my lips and clearing my throat, I tried again. “Where is Danika?”
“Danika?” Julia asked. “She was here?”
I saw the couple share a look, and when Derrick jerked his chin toward the bedroom and wrinkled his nose, I knew they could tell what had happened between the two of us. Julia started to pull me over to the couch. “Zane, tell us what happened.”
