Page 122 of The Alien's Vicious Starflash Manor

Too late.

Far too late.

CHAPTER 32

LARA

My fingers tremble against the wrinkled silk of my court dress as I smooth the delicate material, trying to erase the evidence of what happened between us.

Everything has changed in the space of a breath—one moment lost in the dangerous passion of being pressed against the maze wall, the next watching Ivrael’s body contort and shatter into something I never could have imagined.

I can’t tear my eyes away as the ice dragon that was Ivrael launches himself into the night sky. The sound is like an avalanche compressed into a single thunderous beat of those massive wings. They catch the twin moons’ light and reflect it, sending it dancing across the maze walls as he soars over the towering ice walls, his long neck stretched forward as he pursues the hunters.

The elegant lines of his new form cut through the darkness. When he aims back into the maze, presumably at the hunters, what he breathes toward them isn’t fire—but it’s not ice, either. It’s like a flash of pure starlight, too bright to look into.

The display is breathtaking, beautiful in a way that makes my chest ache—and terrifying in its raw, untamed power.

My legs threaten to give out as the reality of what I’ve just witnessed sinks in. This is what he truly is—not just the cold, controlled duke I’ve known for the past year, but something enormous and elemental.

I wrap my arms around myself, but I can’t tell if I’m shaking from the bone-deep cold he left behind or from the overwhelming realization that everything I thought I knew about Ivrael, about this world, about my place in it, has just shattered like the ice still falling from where his wings first unfurled.

At my feet, the ribbons that until recently bound my wrists pulse with the blue light of their magic. Even released from them, I’m bound to forces I’m only beginning to understand.

Quickly, I kneel down and scoop up the ribbons, compelled to save them, though I don’t know why, and tuck them into my bodice.

Above me, his sinuous form wheels against the sky before sending out more starflashes, and my heart clenches with emotions I’m not sure I can even name. Fear mingling with wonder, for sure—but underneath it all, a dangerous thrill I can’t quite suppress.

Because despite everything—despite the terror and the cold and the knowledge that I should run as far as I can—part of me wants to see more, to understand what other impossible things exist in this world of ice and starlight.

In his world.

By all rights, I should be horrified. Everything I know about survival screams at me to run, to hide, to get as far away as possible from the creature of frost and fury that Ivrael has become.

I just watched the man I’ve spent a year caught between hating and wanting transform into something that shouldn’texist outside of fairy tales and fever dreams. My rational mind catalogs the impossibility of it—the way his elegant frame shattered and reformed, how his aristocratic features elongated into that deadly muzzle, the sound of bones breaking and reforming.

But horror isn’t what floods through me. Instead, there’s only a bone-deep certainty pulsing in time with my heartbeat.

He’ll protect me.

For all his cruel edges and cold calculation, for all the times he’s proven himself exactly the monster I accused him of being, he won’t let them hurt me. The realization should frighten me more than his transformation did.

What does it say about me that I implicitly trust the very person who bought and imprisoned me?

A crack like breaking glass echoes through the maze—sharp and sudden as a gunshot—followed by screaming that makes my skin crawl.

The sound cuts off abruptly as Ivrael’s roar shakes the very ground beneath my feet. It’s a sound of pure fury, of avalanches and arctic storms, of death by freezing. It should freeze my blood, should send me running in blind panic.

Instead, something deep inside me responds, resonating like a struck bell. The sensation ripples through my chest, down my spine, out to my fingertips. It feels like recognition.

Like awakening.

Like something ancient and powerful unfurling beneath my skin, answering his call.

The maze walls begin to shudder and crack as Ivrael tears through them, his massive form demolishing this careful construction. The sound of shattering ice fills the air as he hunts the hunters, and I can feel his rage in each impact, each explosion of crystals.

Shards of ice rain down around me in a deadly, beautiful cascade, catching moonlight and starshine, turning the air into a storm of diamond dust.

I hold up my hands instinctively, expecting pain—but that’s when I feel it.

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