by Abigail Owen
The mark of a phoenix.
“Damn, that’s beautiful.” His gaze traveled over her with awe bordering on worship, even as he waited to die in her flames.
That look and his fire only added to the heat consuming her body as Ladon filled her with glorious pressure at each thrust. He paused, rearing back as the combined flames poured over him, and they both held their breath.
Would this work? Suddenly she wanted this to work. Wanted him to live through it.
Heart pounding and chest heaving she waited, watching his face for any indication. If he had mated a human woman, they’d be worried about his fire. But with a phoenix, hers was deadly if they’d chosen wrong.
Suddenly, Ladon grinned. “I guess we’re meant to be,” he said, then dipped his head and claimed her lips. At the same time, he resumed what he’d been doing, pumping into her slowly at first, then faster.
Relief stirred through her. He wasn’t burning to death. This was going to work.
The feverish need inside her reached a screaming pitch. Ladon pushing her back on the bed to join her there, never stopping his hammering into her for a second as he did. He adjusted their positions so that he lay over her, taking his weight on his elbows.
Then he sucked in, a sound like a bellows surrounding her as he built his own flames inside his body. He leaned over her and took her lips in a hungry kiss. Warmth filled her from the inside as he pushed his fire into her.
The mating kiss of a dragon shifter.
A flurry of thoughts pinged against the sexual haze she found herself in. Wait. What if his fire killed her instead? What if the legends were wrong and she was about to burn?
Too late now.
The fire inside her spread out, flowing through her blood and over her nerves to increase the heat and tension already built to the tipping point.
Skylar flung her head back. “I’m going to…”
A second fire pushed inside her from the juncture at her thighs and Skylar arched her back, clawing at Ladon as she screamed through an orgasm that ripped through her body, slamming into her and through her and out of her.
Ladon tipped his head back and roared his own release, a feral sound that took hold of her soul, echoing her own screams, his face harsh and beautiful above her. He didn’t stop his pumping hips until the waves of ecstasy ebbed.
Finally, he slowed, then stilled, though he remained seated deep inside her. Chest heaving, he dropped his head so that his forehead rested against hers, eyes closed as he caught his breath.
For her part, Skylar sank into the afterglow of that incredible orgasm. She’d never experienced pleasure like that before, and damn if her body wasn’t completely sated. Part of her wanted to stretch beneath him, reveling in the lovely sensations filling her. Skylar tried to listen to that part of herself, because the other part—the real world, logical part—niggled at the back of her mind.
Unfortunately, despite her resistance, logic won. “Holy shit,” she gasped as realization crashed through her. “That worked.”
They were…mated? Was it truly that easy? Because she’d sort of, deep down inside, expected him to die in the process. Regardless of her sudden, intense desire for him not to.
Ladon grunted. Amusement, or concern, or agreement—she wasn’t sure which. Then he lifted his head to gaze down at her, his eyes no longer lit with an inner fire, serious as hell. “Yes, it did.”
What the hell am I supposed to do now?
Immediately her own snarky inner voice answered her. Keep fucking him until this is over and you walk away, because damn that was good.
The more reasonable voice in her head latched on to her half-baked plan—help take down the old regime of kings, then go on her merry way a free woman.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Maybe we did it wrong?”
Wicked amusement gleamed back at her. “I don’t think it gets much more right than what we just did.”
She grinned and traced the cleft of his chin. “Arrogant ass.” But the words held no conviction because she couldn’t deny the power of what he’d made her body feel.
“Is your brand on my neck?” She reached back to feel, but only smooth skin met her touch.
Ladon leaned over to peer at the spot. “I don’t see one, but that can take months to form. Something to do with the connection, the bond solidifying, and we only just met.”
Said the man still buried inside her, half erect.
He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, his eyes darkening. “Did I hurt you? I know I was rough. Maybe too rough—”
She held a finger to his lips, shushing him. “Don’t go getting all gooey on me, Blood King. You didn’t hurt me. I…” Dammit. Voicing feelings again. “I liked it.”
A flash of an emotion she couldn’t quite identify, relief maybe, sparked in those blue eyes. “Good.”
…
Shit. He’d never come so hard in his life, and he’d damn sure never bitten a woman, let alone during sex, though, to be fair, she started that business. He finished it. And he liked the look of his mark on her skin. He suspected seeing his family crest, combined with the Amon insignia, on her neck would hit him even harder.
Part of him expected her to start flinging names like Neanderthal at him, but strangely, she seemed contented to remain lying beneath him.
My mate.
A strange sort of satisfaction welled up inside him at the thought. Not satisfaction that he’d claimed a phoenix, though a certain relief floated around in the emotions he sifted through. This was more a satisfaction that she was his. He’d survived, and now Skylar Amon was his.
Mine.
The intensity of his emotions in this moment sent shock slicing though him. His dragon loosed a rumble of pure possessiveness, and Skylar’s eyebrows shot up.
Ladon didn’t bother apologizing. The animal was part of him, was him, and she’d have to get used to that side of his nature.
She was his. That was all that mattered. He stuffed the roiling emotions in a dark hole and focused on the practical. One massive step closer to winning this war he’d started the day he’d killed Thanatos and claimed the crown.
“So, what happens next?” she asked. “Because I’ll be honest, I sort of thought I’d be informing your people that a funeral needed to be happening for your pile of ash.”
“That’s definitely honest.” He lifted one eyebrow. “And descriptive.”
She shrugged. “I’m not the sentimental type.”
“Or the squeamish type, apparently.”
“Nope.”
Neither was he. Maybe the fates knew what they were doing after all. “Hmm. Next, we inform the rest of the clan that I have a mate and that there are two phoenixes in existence?”
“Not four?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Not until we have your other sisters safe.” This was a weird conversation to be having in this position, but he was oddly reluctant to move, and she’d made no indication she wanted him to. “Then I get down to the business of getting Brand on his throne. I need all the allies I can get.”
Skylar tilted her head, eyes narrowed. “You mean we, right?”
He didn’t follow. “Me and Brand?”
“No, stupid.” She smacked him on the arm. “We. You and I. Your mate.”
Mated less than ten minutes and already he’d been called stupid and been hit, two things that hadn’t happened to him in centuries. Not since he honed his fighting skills with deadly intent, and his clanmates decided fucking with him was a bad idea. “Maybe we should work on your self-preservation instincts.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t avoid the topic. I am not going to be a puppet. I have skills and a brain—”
“And opinions,” he said.
“You’d better believe it.”
Ladon blew out a heavy breath. “I get it
. Kasia asked for pretty much the same thing.”
That pulled a scowl from the woman in his arms. “You mean when you intended to mate her.”
Damn. Bringing that up right at this second hadn’t been the best idea. The strategic move would be to avoid answering and redirect. “How do you want to contribute?”
“Do you really want to know?” Skylar shifted under him, not to move away, but to get more comfortable.
Only her wriggling served to remind his still semi-hard cock that they were naked, and he was inside her.
Her eyes widened as he thickened. Fuck, she was going to think he had zero control, like a callow youth, all ready to go again so soon.
“Yes. I want to know,” he managed to grit as he fought for command over himself.
Rather than telling him, Skylar tipped her head, then wriggled some more, and Ladon grunted as his body responded.
She looped her arms around his neck. “We can talk after.”
Shock reverberated through him. “Are you sure?”
She lifted her legs to wrap them around his waist and he slid deeper, pulling a low groan from him.
“I’m sure,” she murmured.
CHAPTER NINE
The glass moonhole and walls that made up the dungeon chamber in which Airk Azdaja had spent most of his life usually showed a sky he could never get to, but not tonight. Tonight, a snowstorm raged outside, obscuring his view of the Himalayas.
A blast of sound seemed to rock the very mountain beneath his feet as the blizzard hammered them, producing a lightning strike they called thundersnow. Only, underlying the rolling tumble of sound, Airk swore he caught a sound not of nature.
Dragon.
“That was a bad one,” Nathair commented, glancing nervously overhead, not that he could see anything through the whiteout blasting outside.
“Do we need to be concerned?” a raspy male voice, almost more of a hiss, questioned from the cell directly across the way.
Airk ignored the man—a blue dragon shifter who’d identified himself as Chante. Posh accent, clear assumption that he should not be here, and lots of whining. Probably one of Pytheios’s lackeys or spies who hadn’t done his job right. The only reason he would end up in the dungeons with Airk. That type came and went with monotonous regularity, and all met the same end.
Airk nodded at Nathair and reached through the bars of his cell to move a chess piece.
He had not been surprised when Pytheios’s younger brother appeared this morning. Even as a child, Nathair had never liked the storms that could slam into Everest with no warning. He had taken to coming up here to watch, his thought being that if the hollowed-out mountain home of the Red Clan collapsed, he would rather be on the top of the rubble, not underneath it.
The chessboard sat on the floor between them, only those damn bars an indication that, of the two of them, Airk was the prisoner.
As a child, before Pytheios, Airk and his parents used to visit this mountain. Airk would come up here, to the top of the world, just to marvel at how big the sky was.
A sky he would never touch.
That had been before. Before the phoenix had foreseen that any man who dared to kill Airk would die not long after.
Now he sat imprisoned in the most fortified dragon stronghold in existence in a room with walls turned to glass and then magically warded to act like a one-way mirror, allowing those inside an unimpeded view, even through the ice and snow coating the rock, and preventing those outside from perceiving that anything but rock and ice and snow lay there in the first place.
He studied the chessboard.
Airk knew why his ancestors had put the dungeons at the top—to torture the captives with what they could never have. Dragons needed to fly, their souls craving the sky like the body needed the blood in its veins.
Nathair’s dark hair flopped over one eye as he stared up at the fury of the storm overhead. The man rarely sat. After years of these visits, Airk figured Nathair’s mind, which never stopped calculating, on a constant churn, would not allow him to be still.
Airk made his move. “Your turn.”
Nathair turned and barely glanced at the board, making his move with quick confidence.
Airk held in a sigh of frustration, taking his time to consider his next. He never beat Nathair, but these visits were one of the few breaks in the monotony of his life. He didn’t count Chante or the others like him who’d come to stay as “guests” before.
Nathair was the only reason Airk knew what had developed in the outside world, telling him stories, and eventually bringing books and pictures of technology and cities and wars, marvels and discoveries. Even with that information, Airk still couldn’t wrap his head around what awaited him if he ever escaped this hell.
Another blast of thundersnow, carrying with it another sound. Airk was sure now. A dragon fought the storm outside. A dragon in a rage, unless he missed his guess. A roar Airk was painfully familiar with. “The lord and master is not happy this night.”
Nathair flinched and turned away from the view. “No.”
“Bad news?”
Nathair said nothing. He never did when it came to Pytheios. His loyalty to his older brother had never broken in all these centuries, but that did not mean Airk wouldn’t keep nudging.
“Not there,” Nathair said, referring to where Airk was hovering his piece over the board.
“I need to liberate my queen, or you have me in two.”
“Yes, but—”
Airk cocked his head as Nathair stuttered to a halt and stared at the board while his mind seemed a million leagues away. “Liberate the queen,” he murmured to himself.
“What?” Airk asked.
“I have to go.” It spoke to the red dragon shifter’s distraction that he failed to collect his board as he all but ran from the chamber.
…
For once, the freezing temperatures of the air at this altitude did nothing to assuage Pytheios’s roiling fury. Instead, a storm raged around the mountain, bringing with it a barrage of ice and snow, obscuring his vision.
But he didn’t need to see to know where he was. He’d grown up on this mountain. Everest was his mountain. And right now, he needed to fly, to bleed off his rage out of the view of others, even if his body’s haggard state meant he shouldn’t.
If he didn’t, he’d lose control and unleash this frenzy on his people, something he couldn’t afford. Not now.
He prided himself, above all, on his self-control. Control was what had kept him on his throne all these centuries. Control, and no fucking phoenix to get in his way. Now he had four to contend with, if all of Serefina’s spawn inherited her abilities. If the reports were to be believed, the new one recently found had already mated the traitor king.
“My love, come down.”
The soft call of his witch barely reached him over the howl of the storm. He caught it only because he’d passed close to the entrance. She must be inside, because no way could she handle Everest on a good day, let alone in this blizzard.
He didn’t bother to soften the volume of his mental words, knowing they would pierce Rhiamon’s fragile human mind and cause her pain. “Have you found either of the two missing phoenixes?”
“No.” Even from this distance, her frustration with that fact screamed through that single word.
Pytheios didn’t give a shit. She should be frustrated. Rhiamon had found Serefina for him.She could damn well find her daughters. These phoenix women were young, only five centuries old, and only having just come into their powers upon their mother’s death. They should be easy to find and capture.
“We have nothing to talk about,” he barked and hoped Rhiamon lay on the ground writhing in pain with the volume of his words.
Yes, she’d located the phoenix in South America. However, her information came too late for him to
do anything about it. By the time they discovered her location, Skylar Amon had already made her way to the Blue Clan. To Ladon Ormarr.
He’d lost two phoenixes to that fucker. All Pytheios’s power, his network of spies, the other clans, even his witch, had done nothing to stop it.
Pytheios snarled as he bobbed in the air. The holes in the membranes of his wings, now more like tattered rags than flesh, made flying more difficult. Already the task was draining his reserves of power. Impotent fury poured out of him, and Pytheios loosed a torrent of red fire from his maw as he roared his wrath.
Rhiamon’s voice whispered on the winds. “I know this appears to be a setback, but we can turn the situation to our advantage.”
“My king, the witch is right.” The Stoat’s nasal intonation found him now. Like Rhiamon, not as a dragon, but in human form, trusting Pytheios’s sense of hearing would catch the words. “We have several plans in place we can use to find the others, now that we know of them, and possibly take out the two already in play. Your brother has also made a suggestion.”
Nathair had an idea? His brother’s brilliance couldn’t be relied on regularly, working only if left to his own devices. If Nathair had an idea, it would be worth listening to.
Pytheios tipped his wings, shooting back to the mountain, battling the elements and his own feebleness. He flared his wings only at the last second, as he began his shift, human feet touching the ground. He completed the transition as he stalked toward the entrance, where he knew his people would be waiting. Despite his usual finesse, red flames surrounded his body as he moved.
He didn’t bother to suck them back inside. Let his people see how angry he was. Maybe fear would spur their actions to get this fixed. Immediately.
Pytheios passed through the security measures allowing him entrance to the mountain. Rhiamon flinched at the sight of him. In this state, she couldn’t go near him, or she’d risk burning to death. Fire and witches did not mix, regardless of his control over the flames. She lowered her gaze and backed away from him.
