Page 110 of Her Psycho Beasts

She turns tear-filled, pleading eyes towards me. “Just speak with him, Xander. Please. Just… Just hear what he has to say.”

“Are you kidding me?” I hiss. “What could he possibly want to say to me that doesn’t involve wishing my slow and painful death?”

“Please,” she pleads again, collecting the tomes together and throwing a dusty cloth over them. She stands and grips my arm, a light in her dark eyes blazing. “Xander. Do not make me beg.”

Her words hit home. I made a promise to her that she would never beg at the hands of a male. Ever.

I despise that she’s using this against me now, but I gave her my word and I live by that. Every muscle in my body commands me to move, to get the fuck out of this godforsaken place and fly through the night back to my brothers. Instead, I will myself into stone.

The footsteps get closer. That heartbeat and breath are steady, and it reminds me to calm my own. I cannot look weak here. I cannot look anything other than arrogant, confident, and predatory.

His power pulses in a contained wave of heat around him, the picture of courtly draconic etiquette. Etiquette I’ve had drummed into me since I was a child. I school my own power, as having been the only dragon at Animus for the past half a year, I haven’t needed to check myself.

Turning, I rise, spreading my bare feet apart to meet the man who took everything from me. And as it stands, I’m trespassing on his estate, a heinous crime for our kind.

Drakos males have always been rexes, a male centre of a pack. It’s our role to propagate the line, and we can do that by having multiple females. By planting our seed in multiple women. By having a regina, by sharing a central female mate—a non-dragon, at that—I’m not only dishonouring my bloodline, I’m ending it.

There is no offence worse than that.

My father steps into the room, dwarfing the wide doorway. His shoulders are broad, his frame holding enough muscle to be imposing to any other male. Long black hair is loose, separated to drape on either side of his shoulders, telling me he was about to go to bed. He wears the elegant long black robe of our forefathers. The emerald green silk trim is studded with diamonds and emeralds. When he’d banished me, I’d had to look up at him, but now we stand eye to eye.

I watch him note that change. Along with every other detail of my person.

His tone is flat, but it still manages to strike me in the gut. “You are trespassing.”

“I have permission,” I say curtly, glancing to my side to indicate my sister.

He huffs dismissively through his nose. The misogynistic prick doesn’t think she counts. My father regards me, his jaw set, jet-black eyes glittering.

“Well? What does the noble Lord Drakos have to say?”

He steps forward. “You can have what you want, Xander,” he says, surprisingly gently. “You can have the privilege of returning to this family. Of bearing the sigil of our house, of being heir to the Drakos seat. Of freely seeing your sister andniece and nephew. Of being welcomed into a loving home. Of security and love.”

With each passing sentence, my heart thuds like a stampeding dragon and we all hear it.

“And what,” I grind out, “do I have to do in return for all of this?”

He tilts his chin upward and narrows his eyes. “You know exactly what you have to do.”

Chapter 56

Aurelia

We arrive back at the school two days later, driving in under the cover of darkness. We stay in different hotels to our previous trip back from The Jewel of the Jungle and talk very little, my mates letting me process everything that’s happened. At least twice I’d run into the bathroom and locked myself in, sitting on the toilet and crying into my palms. I’d been crying in bathrooms by myself for so long that it came most naturally and was important for me to do in between the crying and snotting all over Savage and Lyle.

My lion and wolf cradle me every night as I lie awake and see my mother’s face on a loop. I usually end up falling asleep somewhere near dawn and then sleep in the car with my head on Savage’s shoulder, sometimes with Eugene on my lap when I needed his familiar, feathery warmth. I feel Scythe’s eyes on me the entire time. Feel the gears turning in his mind as he wonders about my surge of power that night.

I can’t even find the mental energy to care about that. Discovering new powers isn’t exactly a new thing for me and even if it were exciting that I could throw fire now, it won’t bring my mother back. It won’t giveherback the decade and a half that had been stolen. It doesn’t change the atrocity of the situationand the way it makes nausea roll in my stomach as if I’m stuck out on a violent sea in nothing but a tiny dinghy.

Savage and Lyle are with me in the dinghy, but even when they try to feed me spoonfuls of food or the big blocks of chocolate Savage purchases, I can’t find the appetite. Scythe is like the monster in the ocean, nothing but his eyes and fin letting us know he’s always watching, always waiting. As if I’m a live grenade ready to explode at any moment.

And in truth, I feel like it.

I feel like one wrong move, one wrong trigger, and I will blow myself apart. I know that what I’d done at Naga mansion and then again at my mother’s funeral was unexpected. I know that level of power has never come to me before. It feels like, if I so wished it, I could send all of us spinning into a waterspout out into the sea and never come back.

Sometimes in and out of dozing, I swear I hear a ticking clock. Other times it’s the death rattle of tired lungs. And once, I felt the brush of furious, venomous fangs shrouded in dark power.

I wonder if this will make my father hate me more. I hope it does. Because it’llnevermatch the hatred I feel for him.

---