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She swung at me.
I’d heard rumors, whisperings that the princess was a skilled fencer. I hadn’t seen it, as she’d kept herself all but hidden since I’d arrived in Thalassar. Fighting with a katana was not like fighting with a sword as thin as a needle. But even as she charged at me, there was no trace of her rumored skill. The ability to be grand was there, surely. In her stride, determination, and stubbornness.
She swung the katana with such a force that would have made any normal mer tremble. But I was no ordinary mer.
Just before the blade came swinging down, I whirled so she struck empty water. She cried out, turned again to me, a vicious whirl of pink and purple.
“Skill and cunning, Princess,” I teased, then I held my sword up. “Where should I slice next?” The tip of my blade touched her shoulder. She stilled as it slid down the top of her bodice. “Here?”
She sucked in a breath and pushed the tip of my blade away with her own before stroking back.
“Maybe you’d like to be sliced yourself?” she threatened.
There went that wicked mouth of hers. I was so busy staring at it that I didn’t predict her next move. She sliced forward, aiming for my chest. I barely had time to jump back before the blade sliced across the front of my bei zi. It was a garment I used for training. Long colorful robes that depicted the images of dragons with snarling teeth and vicious claws.
The material tore.
“Huh...” I observed the slit. “Impressive.”
Odele smirked, obviously pleased with the compliment. The dragon in me roared, bashing itself against the surface of my consciousness. Ready to claim its mate. The legends surrounding my family were unclear in the line of truth and myth. One thing in the legend was clear enough. As a lineage who bred dragons, it was no surprise when an ancestor consorted with one.
And so every single one of his descendants had the blood of dragons. Inside us, there was a beast buried beneath our surface.
It was my nature to be wicked. To breathe ice. To win battles. To collect treasures. To claim my mate.
Only a slip of the dragon came out now. It was him who fueled me. Adrenaline and carelessness pushed my actions. I supposed... the dragon and I were one and the same, I’d just pushed that nature away so often, that the primitive part of me had become something separate in my mind.
It was slowly unleashing now as we parried. I struck, and she responded. There was no real skill to her, but she was a quick learner. Slash. Swish. The blades of our swords struck, the force vibrating my arm with pleasant familiarity. We twirled and hit, the tip of my blade ripping another seam on her dress. This time at her hip. The material parted to reveal the scales on her waist.
The dragon in me roared a second time.
A taste. A taste. A taste.
Her cheeks heated with a blush, and then she was advancing. I blocked, but she was relentless. Her sword came at me from every possible angle. But the sword wasn’t her only weapon. She struck with fists and tail. Her outburst of strength was so surprising, I staggered back and she advanced.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The sword fell from my hands when she whacked my fingers holding the hilt. It clattered to the floor between us, and unarmed, she still came after me, punching the small of her fist into my chest.
I took it for all of two seconds before I smacked her wrist. The katana clattered to the floor next to mine. She gasped, from surprise or pain, I couldn’t be sure, but I pushed her back by the shoulders.
The princess lost her balance and started to fall backwards, but not before she gripped the lapels of my clothing and I fell to the floor with her.
I wrapped my arm around her head to cushion her fall; that didn’t stop the breath from whooshing from the both of us.
A sharp silence descended, cut through only with the sound of our mingled breathing. Our chests pressed together, they moved where it was near impossible to discern where one ended and the other began. Her heartbeat was captured by my own.
Then, the princess chuckled. “Now I know,” she panted, “why they call you the Dragon Prince.”
The world had fallen away around us. There were no advisors to lecture me on propriety. There was no carefulness between us any longer. There was nothing but warmth, and dare I hope it? Love.
I touched the tip of my nose to hers, and you’d have thought it had been a kiss from the way her cheeks warmed.
My tresses of hair fanned out, a few strands having fallen from my tie, and curtained the sides of our faces. There was tenderness in her gaze as she pushed a strand behind my ear.
“Prince Kai?”
“Yes, Princess Odele?”
“We should get up now.”
I didn’t want to. Everyone else could damn themselves into the abyss for all I cared. All I wanted was this.
“Of course, Princess.” I got up, pulling her up with me. Floating before each other, I pulled the torn strips of her dress together, my fingers confident near her hips. “Sorry.” I smirked. “But I really don’t like this dress.” I pulled my hands away.
She looked at the flaps hopelessly and shrugged. “It’s just a dress.”
Before, she had yelled at a merservant for knocking food onto her clothes. That had been the princess of the past.
Instinct, and desire, had me grasping for her hand. I brought it to my lips, pressing the softest of kisses against her knuckles. My eyes went down to her skin, at the red welts there.
Noticing my attentions, she pried her fingers away, almost self-consciously.
My blood boiled.
“Princess!” a snake-like voice hissed. An oily looking merman, with long, disdainful features, string-like strands of hair slicked onto his shiny scalp, came over beside Odele.
Knobby fingers wrapped around Odele’s upper arm. She winced. The action was slight, and she tried to hide the gesture by schooling her features into a mask of impassiveness.
I turned my glare to him, unleashing my consciousness into my other self. Into that part I desperately tried to push down. My veins filled with ice.
“You...”
His eyes left the princess to look at me. Yes. There’d been just enough cold packed in my voice that he froze.
“Unhand the princess,” I ordered. “Now.”
He sputtered. “I beg your pardon, Your Majesty, but I am the queen’s advisor.” He still did not release her. As if he had the right to put his filthy hands on her.
“And I am Prince Kai Li of Draconi, heir to the throne of Draconi, son of the war general and Emperor Jiang Li. I am the Dragon Prince of my kingdom and that mer is my betrothed, so I will tell you only once more, unhand her.”
Only fools disobeyed my orders once.
No one dared do it twice, unless they wished to be corpses, rotting in the silt.
And this mer obviously wanted to be. His hand still rested there.
“Your Majesty,” he snapped with a flourish. “As advisor to the queen, it is also my duty to advise the future queen, and this repulsive display was inappropriate and barbaric.”
My own advisors huffed in breaths of indignation. Though they would have disapproved of the display as well, they’d not tolerate the likes of him insulting us in such a way.
I’d long since mastered the art of calm fury. “Then I suppose sparring is as barbaric as flaying the princess?”
I did not want to announce such a thing in front of everyone. I’d wanted to spare the princess this embarrassment. But I was cruel. It was inside me. And it was time he see it unleashed.
I grabbed his collar, hand shoving out in the midst of his sputtering. In the shock of the action, he released Odele and clawed at my hand instead. I brought him close to me, the tips of our noses touching.
“You think I didn’t recognize what those welts on her hands were? You think I don’t know what you did?” I was well versed in royal lashings. And to see the evidence marked so prominently on the skin of my princess?
If I still held my katana, I’d run it through his flesh.
“It is necessary to—”
I cut the rest of that filthy sentence off by shoving my thumb into his throat. He gurgled. “The only thing necessary is that you stop talking and listen. Do you understand?”
I eased my grip and he immediately opened his mouth. “You—argh!”
I dug my thumb in deeper, and when his gurgling ceased, he nodded.
“Good.” My smile was a blood-curdling, cruel thing, and there was a glare emanating from him somewhere beneath the droop of his saggy eyes. “Because I want you to know that if you ever, ever touch my future queen again...” I choked him for emphasis. “I will kill you.”
Silence ensued. And only when I thought he’d absorbed my threat completely did I let him go.
He scrambled backwards, gasping for breath like he’d been drowning on air.
I turned to the princess, who was staring at me with such wide eyes. The tame part of me would have apologized for such a display. Right now, I was not tame. Either she’d accept me in all my savage, raving, murderous glory or not at all.
“I believe, my gem, you had a schedule to keep?” I only said it to gauge a reaction. All she did was stare. With disgust? Or was that a gleam of delight in her eyes, a precious obsidian glow that drew me in as all treasures did to dragons?
She opened her mouth to reply, and I ached to hear those next words. But the voice that spoke wasn’t her own.
“The princess, in fact, does have a schedule to keep.”
I turned slowly, but not before noting Odele’s sudden pale pallor. The appearance of Captain Tiberius Saber had nearly every single one of Odele’s guards scrambling over each other to float in a single line. He ignored them to swim by Odele’s side. He gripped her upper arm, much more gently, but her own face could not mask the venomous reaction to his touch.
“Captain Saber.” My way of greeting. “Pray, tell, where have you been?”
His posture was stiff. Saber was a big merman, wide and muscular, as opposed to my lither body and thin frame. Yet, I had no doubt that I could crush him if I really wanted to.
Ice was trapped in the depths of his eyes, encasing around his entire body and demeanor. Cold. Emotionless, even when he wore the depths of his heart in his eyes.
“Forgive me for the bluntness, Majesty, but I do not answer to you. Where I was is none of your concern.”
I really wanted to stab her guard.
“It becomes my concern when you are absent from doing your duty to my betrothed. Perhaps, had you been present, such violent liberties against her would not have been taken.”
“You know what?” The princess huffed out a laugh that was all too fake. “I do have a schedule to keep. Since it’s too late for tea, I think... I think I’ll go change for riding.” She discreetly pulled her arm from the captain to rush closer to me. She was such a sight to behold, in a dress that was mere tatters now. Stretching out on her fins, she pressed a kiss to my cheek, where her warm lips lingered. Heat stirred inside me, and I kept very, very still as her lips traveled to the lobe of my ear.
“Thank you, my prince.” Another kiss, and then she pulled away. Her absence made me shiver.
“Until next time, my gem.”
She smiled at my parting words and swam past Captain Saber, acting as if he wasn’t there in the first place.
He didn’t follow her immediately. His eyes were like chips of glaciers threatening to crash into me and plummet me to an icy death.
Little did he know that I was forged in ice and jewels. And if anyone was to bring about the ruin of a merman, it would be me, and Captain Saber wouldn’t live to see tomorrow.