Chapter Sixteen

Fuck.

The king was alive. His king, his friend…was alive. The man who was under the belief that Meira’s vows held her to him until he could claim her body…was alive.

And Samael was being torn apart from the inside.

His dragon blasted a roar in his head so loud he shook with it. The sound reverberated with challenge against anyone trying to claim her, but also with terror they’d lose their mate. Especially given where Samael’s immediate thoughts were already going. Beneath those first two instinctual, bone-deep emotions lay grief, for the man he’d have to fight was not only his king, whom he’d been loyal to for centuries, but his friend. One of his few true friends.

How could I do this to him? To the clan? How could I have put Meira in this position?

Because his actions would be setting her against her sisters and everything they were trying to achieve, but also against his king and clan—no way would his people ever accept them after this. Not as their king and queen. Not as members of the clan at all.

Not as anything.

Hell wasn’t a deep enough pit to hurl him into. As her mate, his job was to protect her, make her happy. Fucking impossible now.

He forced himself to look at the woman staring at him with wide eyes, her face so pale she might as well be translucent. He’d made vows, but so had she. Sacred vows in front of the Blue, Gold, and Black Clans. Witnessed. Technically, she belonged to Gorgon.

I have to fix this.

Only one way to do that.

“Stay here,” he ordered.

“What?” She started toward him as he unlocked the door and slid it back. “No.”

“I’m not asking, Meira. I’m telling you.”

She’d lifted an imploring hand toward him as she walked. Now she dropped it to her side, eyes narrowing. “An order?” she asked. “Talk to me, Sam.”

“Can’t you see my emotions right now?” He snapped the words, feeling like a bigger asshole for turning this on her, but not willing to take it back.

Meira winced. “No. That wall of yours is up.”

Good. He didn’t want her feeling this. “Stay here. It’s for your safety.”

“I can use the mirrors to search for him—”

“I know where he is if he’s here.”

“So I go with you.”

“No.” His hands curled into fists at his sides. “It’s not safe for either of us out there.” Not if Gorgon was alive.

“All the more reason to do this together.”

“Dammit, Meira.” The words came out more dragon than human, the growl snarling out of him. “I can’t…”

Fuck. He’d been about to say he couldn’t lose her, but if Gorgon was alive, he’d already lost her. She’d never been his.

The mating shouldn’t have worked if that was true. He should be a pile of ash.

Except for a phoenix, mating isn’t about fate, it’s about choice, a voice whispered in his head. Not his dragon, but a voice of doubt. The same voice told him he’d never been worthy. That reaching for her had turned him into Icarus, flying too close to the sun.

A soft hand landed on his arm, yanking him out of his thoughts. Shock zapped up his spine to find she’d crossed the room to his side without his being aware. “Okay,” she said softly. “I’ll wait here, but I’ll be watching when I can.”

A grunt of pain ripped from his throat, and he leaned forward, placing his lips over hers, claiming her, tasting her. The sweetness of jasmine and smoke, and something a little bit him—earthier, like sun-warmed sand—wrapped around him. Not enough for others to notice. Yet. The longer they were mated, the more that would become obvious. Samael pulled her closer with one arm around her waist, lashing her body to his, trying to absorb her softness, her delicate beauty.

Not even Kasia’s visions could predict how this was going to end.

He released her abruptly and simply stared. Taking in the sight of her lips, swollen and pink from his kisses, her vibrant curls, the small dip where dimples would show when she smiled.

Meira.

“Sam…” She searched his gaze. “You’re starting to scare me.”

Again, his dragon unleashed hell inside him, thrashing and demanding release, his roar threatening to blow out Samael’s eardrums. Meira’s eyes widened slightly. “What was that?” she barely got out through lips gone chalky.

She’d heard? Fuck. This couldn’t be happening.

Bottom line. He was scaring the shit out of the woman he loved enough to give his life for, and that went against everything a dragon shifter was wired to do for his mate. “I’m scared.”

Panicked. Terrified. Ready to do violence.

Because he knew, without a doubt because they were the same this way, he was going to have to make the hard decisions here. Otherwise, his tenderhearted mate would be torn apart trying to do what was right for everyone. Including him.

“Me too,” she whispered.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen next.” He cradled her cheek in one hand, absorbing her warmth, her softness. “But I need you to trust me to do what’s right. What’s…best for you. Okay?”

Despite the way the spot between her brows gathered in a small frown, Meira leaned into his touch. “I trust you.”

“Good.” His dragon settled, but only slightly. At least she wasn’t watching them as though Samael was a grenade with the pin pulled and tossed away.

That was precisely what he was, but she didn’t need to know that. “Give me time, then search for me. Don’t come out unless I tell you to.”

She nodded, but he didn’t believe her eyes, which had turned navy in her distress.

“Promise me, Mir.”

Her lips pinched, and she shook her head. “I can’t promise that, but I’ll try.”

The best he was going to get, and he knew it. “Try really, really hard.”

That earned him a small smile. Gods, had he lost the right to her smiles?

Samael turned his back on her and forced himself to walk away, every step heavier, harder. He made his way out onto the ledge protruding over a drop that had never scared him, not even when he’d been a boy and couldn’t yet access his dragon. His parents would find him out here sitting with his legs dangling over the side and just watching.

But something about staring into a void of blackness—lights glittering from occupied homes around the conical circumference of the hollowed-out atrium, and more lights below, the only indication of a full city at the bottom, swallowed by the size of the cavern, carved out from the center of the mountain ages before—struck him as wrong.

I see my own death in that darkness.

He shook off the thought. He needed to find out if the message traveling through his clan like wildfire was true. Was Gorgon alive? Was the man he’d sworn his life to alive?

Was Meira’s true king here?

He hardly had to touch the thought to release his dragon, and the creature was bursting from his skin, faster than might be safe. In shimmering waves of light, he shifted, his new form absorbing everything human about him and swallowing him whole to become the beast, though still entirely Samael. They were one and the same, not separate.

Still…a dangerous move to shift when his animal side was this wild, ready to rip into anything that came between him and his mate. Samael shook with the effort of controlling himself, of keeping from the edge of the abyss where the animal took control and the man vanished, no longer part of the whole. His dragon fought back, desperate to take his mate and fly away from here. Hide out the rest of this war with the gargoyles and guarantee her safety.

Guarantee that he got to keep her.

Samael’s control slipped, just a tad, and the dragon slid closer to the doorway, zeroing in on Meira, who stood back, obscured by the curtains, her jasmine and smoke scent drifting out the door he’d left open behind him.

Did she sense his animal’s fear?

Fear. They hadn’t succumbed to it in centuries. Not since the day he’d forced his way into the still-burning shell of a home to find his sister’s form charred in her bed. Not since. Until now.

Fear. The acrid, metallic taste of it filled his mouth.

“It’s going to be okay,” his mate murmured from inside the room.

His dragon must’ve believed her, because he breathed, the tension trembling his muscles easing as the animal ceded control to the human side. Except the human side was painfully aware that Meira couldn’t know that. Not for certain.

Too many variables were in play.

Including a biological, bond-driven need to make sure Meira was safe and happy. No matter the cost to himself. She may have chosen him when she thought Gorgon dead, but if the king wasn’t, she would be pulled in a million directions—Samael, Gorgon, her sisters, the clans that depended on the phoenixes to break Pytheios’s hold, the debt he knew she felt she owed her mother, revenge for her father…

As for him, his people were depending on both of them making the right choices. Even if that meant—

Stop. Find out the truth before you make decisions.

Samael jerked his wings out and performed a flipping maneuver off the back of the perch that shot him between two other dragons descending in wide circles, arrowing him straight down.

Ahead of his trajectory, he sent out thoughts to the men he trusted most among the guard. “Where is he?”

“Captain?” Bero’s voice burst into his mind.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Guafi’s response layered over the other. “You show your face here? Now?”

Another three similar responses turned into a shocked jumble of words and sounds in his head.

“Where. Is. He?” Samael cut through the noise to demand. An order. His men would know that.

Silence—way too long given the order—and finally Amun, his lieutenant, responded with the answer Samael was in search of. “His chambers.”

Samael slammed his trajectory to a halt, flaring his wings in such a way that he changed direction in a sharp arc that bent his back, shooting upward. Toward the perch at the king’s residence.

“On my way. If you’re not already there, get there.” Another order.

He prayed to every god he could think of, even the ones he didn’t trust, that his men obeyed. That he still stood as captain in their eyes.

In seconds, Samael reached the outcropping and landed with the silence of his kind. He stalked toward the door, changing back to human as he did. Finding the door locked, he rapped his knuckles—still covered in black scales as he completed his shift—against glass tempered to block out even dragon fire. A new feature installed in the last few decades.

The curtain drew back to show the pale-skinned face of one of the newer guards among his men. Shock and fear lit the fire in the man’s eyes, a pale gray that glittered almost like silver.

“Let me in,” Samael commanded, using both his voice and the telepathic link he had access to even as the scales faded from his skin.

“Sir. I don’t know—”

The sound of a barked order came from inside the chamber. The guard’s face disappeared, only to be replaced by the harsh visage of Amun.

Only he didn’t unlock the door. “Where the hell have you been?”

Samael scowled. “You know where. Keeping our queen safe until we could find the king. We knew the man she killed was not him, as we said when she spoke to the clan days ago.”

Through the glass, Amun searched his face, no give in the man. The lack of trust in those eyes struck deep. Samael had fought beside these men for ages. Watched them become who they were. Hell, he’d helped most of them become who they were, training them himself.

And now they didn’t trust him? He’d expect that from the king’s council and the people, but from his own men? Fuck them, then.

Amun gave a sharp nod, and the click of the lock sliding back sounded a heartbeat before the door opened.

“Where is he?” Samael demanded as he stepped inside and strode past.

Silence greeted the question, and he swung around to find Amun staring at him with narrowed eyes. “Why are you missing your king’s mark, Captain?”

Fuck. The brand on his hand was still gone.

“Yours isn’t? Mine disappeared when I was told the king was dead.” He glanced at Amun’s hand. Sure enough, the symbol of Gorgon’s house stood out in stark prominence.

“Ours returned when he showed back up.”

Enhanced senses combined with years of honing his skills as a fighter gave Samael a split-second warning before two bodies flew at him from either side. Twisting down and under, Samael took a punch to the kidney as he spun, but his movement sent one of his attackers flying by. Hands up, feet spread and moving, he made sure to keep Amun’s body between him and Bero and the newer guard, so he only fought one man at a time.

At the same time, he kept his senses tuned around him. More than these two had to be on the way.

“You don’t want to do this,” he warned them. “I am not your enemy.”

“Come to the dungeons peacefully,” Amun answered. “And we’ll sort this out properly.”

No. This could be a trap.

Every protective mating instinct inside him went into hyperalert. What if Amun and his men had somehow known he and Meira had arrived, and they had been the ones to send up a false report of Gorgon’s return to lure him out? Separate him from her.

Meira.

I never should have left her alone.

…

Horror gripped her in icy claws as Meira watched from the mirror in Sam’s bathroom. No way was she leaving him out there on his own without backup.

Why were his men attacking him? With Gorgon home, wasn’t that proof that she hadn’t been lying? That the man she’d killed had been a plant?

“No way. Trust has to go both ways, Amun,” Sam snarled.

Those words acted like fire in an oilfield, and all three men moved at once. In a frenzy of punches, kicks, and grappling, at speeds she could hardly comprehend, the men went at each other. As best she could tell, Sam was holding his own. The shorter one with the man-bun, not the one Sam had called Amun, went flying backward thanks to a kick to his chest, knocking into the third younger guy, allowing her mate to face off against Amun, taller than him but lankier. In a swift maneuver that involved a grunt of what sounded like pain, Sam had him in a headlock.

Man-Bun and Youngster jumped back up, rushing them, but Sam swung Amun around, using his body as a blockade even as he rammed his knee into Amun’s face over and over. He appeared to be gaining the upper hand, except two things happened at once.

Amun broke his grip, and a shadow from outside her field of view rushed him.

“No!” Meira yelled. Only she wasn’t affecting the mirror in a way that he’d hear her warning.

Sam managed to jump back just in time, and the fight continued.

Needing to be closer, she scrambled up on the countertop to put her hands to the mirror and pressed her face in to watch the action, with her heart trying to fly out of her throat and jump into the fray.

Trust me, he’d said.

To what? Get himself killed? She knew why he hadn’t gone with his men to the dungeons to sort things out. She’d seen the dawning suspicion in his eyes. That Gorgon’s supposed return might be a trap to lure them out of hiding.

If that was the case, it had worked.

Samael’s face, covered in blood from his nose, which she hoped wasn’t broken, gave him a gruesome appearance. But he kept swinging, his back to the glass door leading outside as he fended off the three men, moving and maneuvering so that he only took on one at a time as much as possible.

If she hadn’t been so damn terrified, Meira might’ve appreciated the skill her mate displayed. No wonder they’d made him captain. She’d heard of his skill in the air as a dragon, but he was damn impressive in human form, too.

Another two shadows flickered at the edge of her view, and two more men joined the fray. No way could he stand up against five. In less than a minute, he went down as the three men coordinated their attack like hyenas taking down a lion so they could steal the kill.

Fear pumped adrenaline through her like a giant needle had been plunged into her heart. Only one thought got through the noise. She had to help him. Desperate, Meira let the image go for a second and shifted it to Kasia’s mountain, searching as fast as she could.

“Come on,” she gritted through clenched teeth. “Where are you?”

The one creature whom she’d trust to send into that room had to be with Kasia. He hardly left her sister’s side. Flying through image after image, room after room, getting dizzy with the speed of the blurring outlook before her, Meira didn’t stop searching until she found him.

There. A flash of black with glowing red eyes. The image stopped and held.

“Maul,” she yelled. “I need you.”

The hellhound, who’d been lying in a boulder-size lump at Kasia’s feet in a conference room, didn’t hesitate, jumping to his feet and bolting for what she guessed on his side of the connection had to be a monitor used for teleconferencing.

“What the hell—” Brand and her sister jumped up.

Meira ignored them. Maul disappeared and then reappeared in the room beside her on a wave of smoke and stench. Immediately, she cut the connection, blanking out her sister’s concerned face.

There was not enough room, and the dog was scrunched like packing peanuts into the bathroom that was not designed to hold a hellhound. His thoughts pierced her mind through that physical contact. Images of Meira hurt or bleeding.

“I’m okay. I’m fine. It’s Sam. He’s in trouble.”

Slapping the mirror with her palm, she showed him the room.

Sam had managed to get to his feet, only now he was moving funny. Like one side of his body wasn’t working properly. One eye was shut entirely by swelling, and he was clearly protecting his right side.

He backed away from the men, a few of whom had clearly come off worse in the encounter. Slowly, he moved closer to the glass door again.

“Don’t let him get into the atrium and shift,” one of the men, Amun maybe, said. “We’ll never pin him down if he goes dragon.”

Sam’s lips tipped in a smile that was full-on arrogance, made more sinister by the black flames consuming his one open eye.

“Help him,” she begged Maul.

The hellhound, using his own form of teleportation again, disappeared in silence and appeared in the room with Sam a heartbeat later with a snarl that poured shivers down even her spine, and she’d been expecting it.

All five men spun to face the new threat, several backing up rapidly. In the same instant, using their distraction to his advantage, Sam lunged for the window, in what appeared to Meira to be an attempt to jump over the edge and plummet to his death rather than be taken. Four of the men remained facing Maul, but one went after Sam. Amun.

Meira went to change the image and try to catch him through a window as he fell, but she paused when all motion in the room jammed to a stop. Amun’s legs braced against the glass door while the top half of him was blocked from view.

“Got you, you son of a bitch,” Amun shouted.

Then Sam’s obviously limp body was hurled with superhuman strength back into the room. He hit the wall with a crack, then dropped to the floor in a heap. From where she stood, Meira could only see his legs, but he wasn’t getting up.

Maul jumped in front of him, and all five men froze, their faces a comical mix of horror and awe. Mostly horror.

She knew it well. The hellhound, with his massive size, glowing red eyes, and putrid scent of death had struck her dumb with fear regularly when they’d first found him, and he’d been nothing but gentle with her and her sisters. Kasia in particular, but Skylar, too, had played with him, while Meira tended to keep her distance. Angelika had been a bit of a mix.

Now Meira was grateful for him as he held the men off.

“He’ll take the captain away. We can’t let him,” Amun said and took a step forward.

Maul pulled his lips back, baring his teeth, and none of them dared come any closer. Not even their leader.

Amun’s frustration showed in the way he twitched his shoulders. “If we rush him—”

“Stop!” Meira commanded and stepped through the mirror herself. She didn’t shake or hesitate or even think of herself at all, because Samael’s life depended on her.

“Fuck me,” one of the men muttered under his breath.

“We should have known by the hellhound that you were close by,” Amun spat.

She ignored the venom in his voice, because she could feel them. These men were confused, and deep down they were scared, looking for someone to blame. That made them lash out, because apparently dragon shifters could be emotionally stunted. She couldn’t read minds, too, but Meira was fairly certain these men didn’t truly want to hurt their captain. They were doing their job to protect the king.

Which would mean Samael’s suspicions were baseless. She had two options. If one didn’t work, she’d try the other and have Maul get them out of here.

“We are not your enemies,” she said softly, calmly. The way she’d speak to a cornered or abused animal.

She placed her hand on Maul’s side, his fur prickling against her palm. With a confused whine, he sat, tongue lolling out of his mouth. Which would be adorable if he wasn’t so freaking scary.

The emotions swirling around them only eased a fraction.

“If we surrender, will you promise that no harm will come to us?” she asked.

The men in front of her glanced at one another, confusion almost a color around them, anger still ebbing and flowing.

Sam was going to kill her for this when he woke up. Especially if she was wrong to put her trust in these people. But she had no choice. These men were their clan. Like with Rune and his men, like with Gorgon allying with Brand and Ladon, like she and her sisters were putting their lives in the hands of the creatures they’d run from, trust needed to start somewhere.

Amun eased his stance, and the others followed suit. “We have to put you in the dungeon.”

Maul snorted, a sound that came across like a sarcastic laugh, and Amun eyed him warily.

“Is Gorgon truly alive?” she asked.

If not, she’d have Maul teleport the three of them away from here now.

Amun’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t even need her abilities to read the suspicion. “Yes. He showed up in the hangar, severely beaten but alive. The timing of your arrival can’t be a coincidence.”

“And yet it is.” Crappy timing had become the theme of her life these days. “We’ll come with you peacefully. Samael told you…we are not the enemy here.”

“That remains to be seen.” Amun nodded at his men, two of whom, with visible reluctance, skirted her and Maul to haul Sam up by the arms. His head drooped forward as he dangled between them, dead weight.

“Does he need medical attention?” she asked, trying hard not to show how desperately she wanted to run to him and try phoenix tears to heal him right then and there.

“He’ll be fine, but we’ll call the healer to the cell we put him in.” Amun stepped past her to move to a door leading out into the human-size hallways beyond. “Follow me.”