Page 11 of Love Bites Extra Hard

Jail cells.

three

AVERY

I peekedthrough the windows every time we passed a cell. All of them were empty.

When we reached the very end of the hall, we found a man and a woman sitting in camping chairs just outside a cell. There were three set up, but only two were occupied. The man had a book in his hands, and the woman sat with her legs crossed, her expression dark as she watched us approach.

“Arthur, you can go,” Talon said.

The man nodded and vacated his chair, disappearing in the same direction we’d come from. I looked over my shoulder, watching him leave.

“So you’re the siren,” the woman in the chair said, studying me. Her skin was the same shade as Talon’s, her tight, natural curls tied up in two puffs on top of her head. They looked a hell of a lot more put-together than my bun did after our flight and my shower. I probably should’ve fixed it, but I didn’t.

Despite the way I was shivering, all she had on was a pair of athletic leggings and a tank top.

She was definitely a dragon.

“Stella, this is Avery,” Talon said, stepping up to the bars in the door Stella seemed to be guarding and peering through. “Avery, this is my little sister, Stella.”

“We’re less than two years apart, but he still insists on calling me little.” She rolled her eyes at me. If I hadn’t been so cold, and concerned about whatever was in the cell, I would’ve smiled.

“What’s in there?” I asked her.

“Not what. Who. Sylvester Aught.”

“Should I know that name?” I asked, stepping up next to Talon so I could peek into the cell with him. Leaning against the back wall, there was a man. A man covered entirely in dark blue scales, and chained to the wall in multiple places. I couldn’t see even a sliver of his skin.

He didn’t seem to be able to see us through the bars, either.

“No. He doesn’t exist anymore, according to the records in Mistwood,” Stella said.

“What did he do?”

“Raped and dismembered seventeen unmated female dragons.”

My gaze jerked toward her.

Her expression was dark. “It took us a decade to catch him. I ran the team that tried to find the killer, and he was a part of it. I lived with him. Slept with him. He?—”

“He’s a fucked up bastard who deserves to die slowly and brutally for what he did,” Talon growled. “But he shifted his skin to scale the moment he was caught, and scales are impenetrable.All of our best fighters have spent days grappling with him, trying to find an opening, but the fucker is too strong.”

“And you think I can do something to help?” I asked, my voice raising in surprise.

“Force doesn’t work on him. We’re hoping that if you use your magic to make him feel lust, you can make him shift back.”

“My magic doesn’t work that way,” I countered. “I can’t control minds or force someone to do something they don’t want to. I can only make them want me.”

“He can’t get himself off in this form,” Stella explained. “So theoretically, if you make him want you enough, he would have to shift back to deal with it.”

“That sounds like a pipe dream.” My voice was skeptical.

“It took us a decade to catch him, and we’ve spent the last ten years trying to break him,” Talon said in a low voice. “Torture doesn’t work, because we can’t get past his scales. Drugs don’t work, because we can’t get the needles through his skin and our fire can burn through anything in the air. He can’t drown, either. He doesn’t care when we try to use his family against him. He’s fucking untouchable. A pipe dream is our only shot at ending his life to make sure he can’t hurt anyone else ever again.”

I studied him through the cage. “I’m going to need time to come up with a plan,” I finally said. I already had an idea, but it would put my life at risk.

“We’ve got all the time in the world.” Stella patted the empty chair next to her. “Sit. We’ll brainstorm.”

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