The shouting. That’s how we knew something was wrong. My parents were always so careful to be quiet after they sent us to bed, so they didn’t wake my little sister, Alathea. She was a terrible sleeper. The shouting grew louder, and I threw the blankets back and pulled Alathea out of her bed, shouting at my younger brother, Xander, to follow me. Alathea was crying, her little arms wrapped tight around my neck, trembling. There was chaos in the entryway. Mother snatched Alathea out of my arms. My fathers were yelling. Fighting. There was laughter. It wasn’t a joyous sound. It was terrifying.
“Go, Shira,” Mother hissed. “To the tunnel. You need to get the trapdoor open. We’re right behind you. Xander, stay with me.”
I darted into the kitchen and crawled into the storage nook where the entrance to the emergency tunnel was, keeping my eyes trained ahead. I never looked back, never checked they were behind me like they were supposed to be. The tunnel. The trapdoor. That was my job.
Each latch felt like it took hours to open, my fingers moving clumsily and my muscles trembling with fear. There were screams, thuds against flesh, a splash of liquid hitting the stone floor that made my stomach heave. I forced my nails into the gap between the trapdoor and the stone floor, prying it up as my heart thundered in my throat. Blood coated my fingertips as splinters dug into my skin. My knees were bleeding. Dust and debris coated my night dress.
There was a loud creak as I lifted the trapdoor, and in that moment I realized how silent the den had become.
When had the shouting stopped?
A hand wrapped around my ankle, ripping me back from the trapdoor along the stone floor, grazing my hands and cheek. Screaming, screaming, screaming. This time the screams were mine.
I bit down hard on my tongue, the metallic tang of blood pulling me back to the present. It was the same every night. I wanted to cry, yet I never allowed my memories to take me to the most harrowing part of that night. The part that would almost certainly make the tears fall.
The moments after the silence.
I opened my dry eyes, staring up at the almost black cave around me. The memories danced around in my head as clear as they ever had been. I could see the horror, remember the agony, and I felt nothing but a shallow sense of sadness and loneliness. I’d never cried over what had happened to my family, and I hated myself for it. I remembered how sweet my mother was, how fun and full of life my fathers were. Xander and I were two peas in a pod, forever getting into mischief, while Alathea trailed around after us, six years younger than I was and obsessed with her big sister. It felt disrespectful to them that I’d become this mixture of bitterness, icy rage, and crushing guilt. In the depths of my memory, I knew that once upon a time, I’d felt more than that.
If I couldn’t feel, was I any better than the monsters who had taken me? Laughed as they’d killed my family and kept me as their pet? They felt nothing either — nothing except greed.
Dragons were shaped by greed and forged in violence.
I let my eyes drift shut, waiting for sleep to take me away from my prison for a little while, but the dreaded heavy pull in my limbs pulled me away from the promised land. I groaned, the sound echoing off the cave walls. Every part of my body urged me to get up and move, to leave my prison cell and let my feet carry me to safety.
The safe arms of dragon mates. Specifically, my dragon mates, who were apparently lounging around outside again, close enough for me to feel the draw to them.
I didn't know much about mates. I was eight when my parents died and no one who had forced me into their lives since then was particularly interested in explaining them to me, but I remembered my mother's bedtime stories. She'd tell me and my younger brother and sister about how when she came of age, she felt the shift come over her and emerged as a gold dragon as all females did. Within a few days, all five of her mates — my five fathers — had felt called to her presence, and they'd bonded almost straight away.
I couldn’t shift with the shackles on my ankles, but I knew my dragon was right there under the surface in a way she’d never been before. From the moment I’d felt her presence more strongly, the draw to my mates had appeared with it.
There was nothing that could keep a male dragon away from his mate. The female was the heart of each flight of dragons. She was what brought them together. They were here because of me.
I stretched on the lumpy bed, tossing and turning, and rubbing my stupid arms as if I could force the odd tingling sensation out of them. I knew I couldn’t. The males — my mates — were here most of the time, though they’d been visiting less recently.
Either they were giving up on me, or more likely, they were planning something. Dragons were hoarders. No dragon I’d ever met would be content to give up something they coveted — especially to a fae. Without having ever met them, I was confident they coveted me. Mates were gifts from the gods themselves, as my mother used to tell me, but the gods were cruel to give the males that waited outside my prison walls a mate who could never truly be theirs.
If I ever escaped the shackles around my ankles, I wasn’t about to willingly chain myself to anything — or anyone — else. For all of our sakes, I hoped their recent extended absences meant they were letting me go because I could never be with them.
I had a task to complete. For my fathers. For my mother. For my brother, Xander, and my sister, Alathea. I'd made them a promise, even though they hadn't been around to hear it. Mates or not, I had to get out of here one day. I had to avenge them.
Eventually, I got used to the strange tingling and heaviness in my limbs, and my exhaustion outweighed the physical need to get out of bed and beat at the boulder that blocked the cave entrance. As my eyes fell shut, the comforting and aggravating thought that they would still be there tomorrow lulled me to sleep.
Chapter 2
I paced in front of the fireplace in the front parlor, tossing balls of flames into the empty grate and letting them fizzle out on each pass, waiting for the rest of my flight to assemble, always ready to leave first as a good Alpha should be.
It was against my nature to fidget. Fidgeting showed discomfort, impatience. It was a weakness that could be exploited. I twisted my hands through the air, creating sticks and tossing them in the grate until there was a good supply of kindling, before throwing a little more fire at them than necessary. The flames flared in the grate, licking up the chimney in seconds. I gently pushed some air at it, bolstering the flames.
It was good to have control of all four elements.
There. Now I wasn’t fidgeting. I was building a fire. It was a useful task.
I lived for being useful. I’d been all over my other Alpha responsibilities. I’d secured us a comfortable den on a desirable mountain, I got us a suitable position as Council Enforcers, and bonded the males of the flight together. Whatever needed to be done, whatever tasks had to be undertaken, I had done them. Without question.
Aside from Oren, my flight respected my leadership. But today was the first true test of my Alpha abilities. Today, we would retrieve our mate from the wealthy fae scum, Glendower Castell, who had imprisoned her for only the gods knew how long. Or why. The lack of information we had about her situation was infuriating. For six months, we had known her location. As soon as her dragon was ready to emerge, Oren, Levi, Hiram, Seff, and I knew where to find her, but hadn’t been able to get to her.