Page 106 of Gemini Wicked

Takes me a tick to find her, already halfway across the piazza and making excellent time, pelting with her light-footed Fae grace for the harbor and the turquoise dazzle of the sea like she’s Usain Bolt nailing the forty-yard dash.

Vasili’s dragon hisses in fury and arrows in her wake, eating up the distance between them. The tinny scent of snow floods the air—that’s him revving up another round of his Asian dragon cloud breath. A direct hit of that shit will encase her in ice and freeze her right to the cobblestones.

Which I don’t think she’ll survive.

My pulse roars in my ears. My heart shoves up against my throat.

I don’t normally get airsick, like, at all. Still, I feel like I’m gonna hurl.

Get your shit together, showgirl. I give my skittish conscience a bracing pep talk. She just punched you in the throat and pushed you off a roof, remember?

Yeah, my conscience whispers back. But she didn’t really wanna kill you. She knows you can fly.

Xhevith roars like a tyrannosaur in Jurassic Park and labors to close the distance between him and Vasili. With a powerful beat of his scaly wings, we pull up alongside my snake. The big green rumbles under my legs as flesh-eating acid fills his gullet. His massive ribs expand like a bellows.

Of course, that dragon’s linked telepathically with his rider.

And I know the Dark Fae King really wants to be the one who brings me Cleo’s head.

“Don’t kill her,” I scream at everyone, shoving the command through my mating bond with my snake for good measure. “Just grab her.”

If we’ve got Cleo, Nikolai having my crown won’t be such a show-stopper. Because there won’t be a rival claimant who can wear it. If we’re lucky, he and Messalina might even be willing to trade that crown for Cleo’s royal half-Unseelie ass.

Of course, neither one of my guys likes this command. V’s dragon, who doesn’t have limbs to do the requisite grabbing (because snake), swings his long toothy muzzle toward me and screams in protest. Zephyr’s arm clenches hard around my waist.

“Don’t be a softhearted fool, my bride,” the Dark Fae hisses in my ear. “The girl is your enemy. She deserves to die.”

“For fuck’s sake, Zephyr. She’s your long-lost cousin, right? Just grab her.” I crouch in the saddle so I don’t slide off and catapult that order at both my guys, both out loud and through my bond with V. “I mean it.”

My snake lets loose with a teakettle scream of frustration and fury.

Xhev roars like blazes in response. But he angles his wings and dives, soaring low behind Cleo’s sprinting form with forelegs extended.

I’m not bonded to this dragon, so obvi his rider’s told him to do what I want.

For once.

Yeah. Zephyr and me, we’ve got some shit to discuss once we handle this immediate sitch.

And it’s a nick of time kinda thing, for real, because Cleo’s almost reached the boat dock and the refuge of the open sea.

We’re soaring right behind her fleeing form, with her burgundy hair streaming in her wake (because I’ve pretty much destroyed her schoolgirl braid). We’re all ready to do the snatch-and-grab when my ex-bestie glances over her shoulder.

Her face fires with alarm. With a cry, her arm sweeps wide.

A curling wall of water rears up from the harbor like a tsunami. The tidal wave crashes over V and engulfs his thrashing form to drag him out of the sky.

Riveted to the saddle by shock and horror, I scream his name in the lightning voice. A deafening crash of thunder shakes the sky. Purple lightning forks and flashes.

Zephyr snarls and reins Xhevith violently away from the looming wave. From Cleo’s racing form on the dock below, a blinding blaze of light sears my retinas and practically fries my optic nerve.

When my dazzled vision clears, we’re winging over an empty dock.

Fuck my life.

I barely glimpse the coiling slap of a forked merlot tail as Cleo’s sea dragon dives into the drink and vanishes.

“Elemental Faerie magic,” Zephyr growls in my ear as we soar fruitlessly over the empty sea. “Clearly, your rival possesses it. My element is air, but hers is water.”

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