As he disappeared around the corner, Angelika gasped, the meaning of his words sinking in. Kasia had inherited their mother’s ability to see the future. And he’d called Kasia her sister.
He knows who I am.
That realization triggered a landslide of another one. One that might let her contribute to this war.
If there was anyone who wanted Pytheios dead as much as she did—but was semi-powerless to do anything about that—it was Airk. Maybe combining forces was an idea worth looking at closer. Her sisters had mated for political leverage or protection. Why couldn’t she?
Together, a phoenix and the rightful heir to the throne of the White Clan could be very…strategic.
The fact she’d recently been thinking about him in a very nonstrategic manner wasn’t important.
She almost ran after Airk to toss the offer around but forced herself to wait. Better to think this through and work the pros and cons before she pitched it. Mating wasn’t something to go into lightly. And who even knew if it’d work with a dormant phoenix and a dragon shifter who might go feral at any second?
“Where have you been?”
Jedd’s rasping, rumbling voice made her jump. She spun around to find him standing in the doorway of the room next to hers.
“Nowhere.”
The wolf shifter glowered. “No more going nowhere without me.”
Angelika offered him a conciliatory smile but made no promises…not when she couldn’t keep them. She hated that she couldn’t give him that. “Night, Jedd.”
As she closed the door of her room behind her, she couldn’t resist one last peek down the hall.
Airk was long gone.
Would he even want to mate her?
Chapter One
Present day…
Motherfucking dragon shifters.
Hampered by the limp body slung over one shoulder like a bag of bones, and dripping into one of his eyes, Airk slipped and slid his way down the ice and rock of a Siberian mountain peak. He picked his way between abandoned “buildings” that made up this particular dragon-shifter colony. Inside him, his dragon was going berserk, a constant roar in his head, clawing to be released so it could fight off their attackers.
Nothing new.
The animal side of him was always an unceasing barrage of violence within, trying to get out. But Airk would never release that side of himself. He shut it down. Ignored it, dead focused on getting himself out of this situation.
Keep moving.
If he could get to the next entrance and find a mirror, he’d get himself and his passenger both out of here.
His boot-clad feet skidded on loose shale, but he recovered quickly. Instead of burrowing deep into this peak, the dragon shifters who made a home here had gone shallow, using naturally occurring caverns as individual homes, like a village dotting the mountainside. After a week of sneaking around like a damned demented ghost and observing this smaller community, he’d finally shown his face to a woman he’d recognized from childhood. One who he’d remembered was a friend of his mother’s.
Colossal mistake.
She’d run away screaming and brought the whole damn community down on top of him. Not the best result for what was supposed to be a diplomatic mission to convince his fellow White Clan dragon shifters to switch sides in the Kings’ War. How the blue and black kings had convinced him he could be successful at anything that required persuading others to follow him was a fucking mystery. Being around anyone—especially other dragon shifters—only set off the beast inside him more.
Especially when they went for his throat before he’d gotten five words out.
The unmistakable bellow of an enraged dragon above him set small rocks tumbling down the side of the mountain. His own dragon blasted an answering challenge in his head, one so loud pain echoed off the inside of his skull. Airk only held on harder to that empty, emotionless place he’d learned to go to inside him. Emotions were messy and forced mistakes.
Better to shut them off.
He ran faster, gaze darting here and there. One of these homes had to have a mirror. The one he’d planned to use to leave had been shattered before he got to it.
The limp body he carried suddenly twitched, his passenger waking up, then kicked out and upset his balance. Airk’s boot lodged between two rocks as he tipped sideways and came down hard. Pain tore through his calf.
What in the seven hells? Had he landed on a dragon’s tooth? Meanwhile, the woman over his shoulder shoved at his back. “What—”
His dragon snapped his teeth that another dared touch them. In the same instant, a shadow passed overhead, and the woman Airk was attempting to rescue gasped in terror.
The other dragon was too high up to get to them fast. Its first mistake. “If you want to get out of here, stay still,” Airk snarled.
She immediately went motionless against him, and he shot to his feet and took off, now trying to hide a limp and ignore the burn ripping through his flesh with each movement.
“Airk.”
The sound of his name was barely a whisper on the wind. His enhanced hearing picked it up, and everything inside him went stock-still with recognition even as he kept moving.
He was immediately slammed with a memory. Angelika Amon standing before him, gorgeous in a figure-hugging gown for her sister Meira’s mating ceremony celebrations. Her frosty white-blue eyes had searched his as she’d asked him a question. “Have you decided what’s next yet?”
That’s how she’d started it.
Then she’d gone on about how she wanted to help him reach out to the White Clan and maybe turn them away from Pytheios, make them allies of her sisters’ clans. How his people needed a new king to lead them to the other side of the war.
He’d been stupid enough to ask how, and then she’d said the words. Words that pierced the usual numb he kept wrapped around himself.
“If we were to mate…”
Hells. Airk had done the only thing he could. It had taken everything in him to do it, but he’d said no, unequivocally, and then he’d walked away.
He’d been avoiding her ever since.
What the fuck was Angelika doing here? And where was she?
He searched the mountainside for a glimpse of her. Was he hearing things now?
At a tiny movement, he jerked his gaze to the right, and he damn near tumbled ass over head at the sight of her—long, white-blond hair tossed in the winds whipping at the mountain, framing her perfectly heart-shaped face.
She stood hunkered down in a doorway, beckoning him like the siren she was with a tiny wave of her hands, no doubt trying to not also attract the attention of the dragon overhead.