partnership. “I fear I have no further use for you, my dear.”
He let the whip fly again and again, chuckling as it cracked loudly across her shoulder. Disappointed that she didn’t beg for mercy, or so much as raise a hand in her own defense, he worked the deadly weapon until her ragged breaths were nothing more than a few mewling gasps.
Drenched in sweat and gasping for breath himself, Nathan let the whip fall from his hand and leaned over the dying woman now curled in a ball on the floor. She opened one swollen eye and whispered, “St. George will set you free.”
He growled at her and then shrieked, “You bitch!” before drawing what little life force she had left from her body.
With her last choked breath, she once again whispered, “St. George will set you free.”
Outskirts of Detroit—One year ago
“Man, now that is one fine-looking piece.”
“Yeah, how’d you like to have a taste of that?”
Inwardly seething, Sean Drake’s only physical display of disgust was a slight tightening of his grip around the beer bottle in his hand at the juvenile comments the thugs in the booth behind him were making about the woman who’d just taken a seat at the bar. Their antics and crude behavior were starting to chafe at his last nerve.
These men were petty thieves and thugs. One was a large, hard-drinking bully, and the other his smaller, junkie buddy. Both low-life slugs.
He’d run into them a few weeks ago when they were casing the neighborhood around his current apartment. They’d been looking for their next target, and he’d made certain to accidentally bump into them that night to thwart their plans.
He should have killed them instead.
Had he followed his gut instinct, they wouldn’t be here tonight, intent on harassing someone weaker and smaller than themselves. He wasn’t about to let that happen. He didn’t care what trouble they brought on themselves, but they wouldn’t be permitted to hurt anyone else.
Sean tossed back the bottle of beer he’d been nursing and realized with a start that it was time to go home. Not to his sparsely furnished, one-bedroom apartment at the edge of the city, but home to the forested mountains and Dragon’s Lair. He choked back a laugh at that thought. Barely eight months had passed since he’d left the Lair, but it felt like years. Actually, he hadn’t simply left. Confused, half-dead and afraid for his life, he’d run away in the middle of the night.
It had taken him most of this time alone to come to the conclusion that he’d deserved the beating the Dragon Lord had given him. After all, his unwillingness to control his new, and unwanted, powers had put not just himself at risk, but he’d also become a danger to his brothers and their families. As the Dragon Lord, Braeden had been forced to choose between knocking some sense into the new changeling, or killing him.
Thankfully, even though it would have been within his rights as the lord, his brother hadn’t chosen to take his life. Sean knew he should have been grateful, but at the time, the boulder-sized chip on his shoulder hadn’t allowed him to see reason. Instead, he’d convinced his sorry self that everyone hated him, that nobody understood him—basically, he’d reacted like a spoiled, self-centered child.
But he hadn’t been a child. He’d been a relatively normal twenty-six-year-old adult with a college degree, and more wealth and opportunities than most people would see in a lifetime. He had a good position in the family business and a family who’d cared about him.
Until just over a year ago, when he had been torn from a dark dream by the sounds of a striking whip and an evil cackle, followed by what sounded like a raggedly chanted curse. He hadn’t been able to make sense of the breathless words, just snippets of a woman’s pain-filled voice. A demonic urge to change into a dragon had filled him. With it came an unrelenting need to seek Drake blood. Since he wasn’t a changeling, he had chalked it up to being nothing more than remnants of a nightmare.
His shape-shifting into a dragon would have been fine as far as Braeden or Cameron were concerned. Since both of his older brothers were changeling wizards and possessed dragon blood from birth, they would have welcomed his newfound ability. But it wasn’t fine with him. He had always been the normal one, the human brother without any power to read minds, transfer thoughts, slide into dreams, shift into a dragon or materialize someplace on a whim.
For many long weeks after the nightmare, he’d been edgy, moody, confused and unreasonable. As the next month passed, instead of fading away, the troubling urges from that dark dream grew. At the time, he’d thought he was losing his mind. But then, when the dream turned real and he had shifted to dragon form, he’d felt invincible and driven with only one purpose in mind—to kill his brothers. Aunt Danielle had been convinced that he’d been cursed—and since he had heard bits of a chanted curse in his nightmare, he agreed with her assessment, but could do nothing to break whatever spell had been cast over him, except wonder who had cast the spell and why.
Cameron had spent the next two months trying to teach him how to use this new unearthly power and how to control his urges, but Sean had been reluctant to accept his brother’s training. One night, in a moment of what he could now only consider pure insanity, he’d shifted into dragon form and attacked Braeden.
While he’d known that as the Dragon Lord his brother was a powerful wizard, he hadn’t truly known just how powerful until Braeden’s beast gave him a beat down he’d survived only by some miracle.
Sean rubbed the side of his neck. Just remembering that night made his scars burn like fire. How would his brothers—and their beasts—react when he showed up at Dragon’s Lair? Would they let him come home? If so, what would it cost him to gain entry back into the family fold?
A sudden flash of sensual heat flowed through him, interrupting his musings and drawing his attention to his surroundings. The brilliant green eyes of his slumbering dragon flickered open. The black, elongated pupils narrowed and widened, dilating with curiosity and interest.
Sean tensed, focusing on the unexpected awakening of his inner beast. He controlled the urge to shift and then studied the other occupants of the bar. Who—or what—had roused the dragon from its slumber?
His gaze settled on the exceptionally attractive woman at the bar—the one the thugs were still drooling over as they kept up their running commentary of what they’d like to do to her.
Their shallow imaginations leaned more toward control and force than pleasure. The urge to show them exactly how control and force felt grew stronger by the minute.
Yeah, it was definitely time to go home before he did something that would terrify the humans of this world.
Curious about the woman, and his dragon’s rapt fascination with her, he rose from his seat at the booth and grabbed his empty beer bottle from the table. Seemed the perfect time to get another one.
Crossing the uneven floor of the seedy neighborhood bar, Sean knew he was ready to pay whatever price his brother demanded. In an effort not to draw unwanted attention from his family, he’d avoided touching his bank account. Now, he was tired of drifting, tired of picking up one meaningless job after another just to eat and beyond tired of trying to act normal among humans who would never understand or accept what he’d become.
Sean
