Page 37 of Devoted to the Dragon

I slip back into the shadows and move through the Council’s headquarters. It doesn’t take me long to find the dragoness. I follow the scent of smoke mixed with her bodyguard’s sage.

When I get to her, the bodyguard is missing, but another wolf has taken his place. The couple is standing close, so much tension radiating from them that it makes the neck of my shirt feel like a tightening collar. The wolf looks as pissed as she is, his voice a growl so low I almost need to step from the shadows to hear them.

“I’m trying to keep you alive!” he whispers.“They pushed me out. They suspect that I’m loyal to you. This is enemy territory. Everything I learned today was secondhand, and none was useful. They’re plotting something, but even Jesup has found reasons to delay meeting. And unless you want to start a war, insulting the king upon arrival wasn’t the best first move.”

“He should be insulted. I knew it was bad. I’ve heard about the Outskirts and the lost wolves, but Fennik?—”

“I know, little dove, but you can’t take them all home.” The older wolf softens, reaching for her.

She backs away, grinding her jaw. “Silence isn’t the answer.”

The wolf’s face falls, and a stern wall comes back into place. “Neither is dying for a good cause.”

The dragon opens her mouth to argue, and the wolf leaps for her. It’s a punishing kiss, so hot that I feel it in my gut. There are teeth and nips, moans and tongue. It’s a battle between them that he eventually wins by pushing her against the wall.

The sexual tension is so thick in the air that my shadows can’t help but taste it. She is spicy as fuck, just as I imagined. Her energy is hot and red, full of sweet arousal laced with tangy anger, followed by a burning wrath that heats my insides and makes my dick hard.

His hands cage her head on either side, and he speaks softly. “You can be mad. We can disagree. But you won’t pull away again.”

Her energy pulses from red to blue, a love and loyalty so bright that it is its own kind of fire. The dragon huffs, but all her anger has been snuffed out. I’m fascinated by her essence and the way it pulls between her and the wolf.

I wonder if she’s even aware of how her energy reaches out to his, desperate for an anchor. Before I can puzzle her out, the door next to them opens and the hot bodyguard pokes his head out.

Without looking at the man, the older wolf calls, “Coming, pup.”

He steals another kiss from the dragon and leads her into the room with a hand to the small of her back.

I thought both couples were hot. Imagining them as a threesome is going to become my latest obsession. I try tofollow, needing to see behind that door, but I come up against a barrier that tastes of magic. She’s put up wards—a clever, hot, fascinating, and off-limits dragon.

The off-limits bit might as well be a blinking arrow to my fuck-it attitude, and I linger at her door, knowing I shouldn’t. My shadows are impatient and unruly. They want an up-close taste of the dragon and to know how she fits with the older wolf and the hot Viking.Picturing what’s going on behind that door isn’t helping matters. My cock is hard and my serpent hungry.

Not for the first time, I wonder why my mother has bothered with the wolves. I understand the politics of it. She wants us to be the first family to make an alliance with other shifters. Serpents are somewhat obsessed with our outsider status. It pisses us off that we aren’t welcome in the wolves’ territory, the only shifter safe haven, no matter the money or status we have in the human world. Securing an alliance would launch Sloan’s rule and solidify our family as one to envy, even if the wolves are dying. But if I’m choosing, my pick is the dragon.

Eventually, I return, defeated, to find my sister exactly as I left her.

“You’re back early.”

“The dragon has wards,” I grumble, still pissed I didn’t get to see what happened next.

I bet it was hot as fuck.

My sister nods absently, engrossed in her email. “The king says she works with a powerful witch. I’m not surprised. Did you get anything before you hit the wards?”

For some inexplicable reason, I don’t want to tell her what I saw. It feels too intimate to share.

“Just wards,” I say, shrugging. I take the weird fur chair beside her and let my shadows expand. They’re restless, dancing around me. My serpent wants me to return to the dragon andstand guard at her door. “Remind me again why she isn’t the one we’re wooing?”

Sloan’s laser focus darts to me. “Why?”

“Curiosity.”

“It wasn’t on the table.”

“But if?—”

Sloan narrows her eyes. “It’s not. Whatever scheme you’ve got in your head, forget it.”

I blink at her innocently. “There is no scheme.”

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