Page 10 of Gemini Hunted
With my flashlight angled considerately away from her eyes, Cleo’s pupils dilate. But her optical membrane stays down—for protection. A trickle of tiny bubbles leaks through herrazor teeth. Suddenly the water flowing past my icy limbs heats like an eddy of shower spray.
All dragons have breath weapons. Mine is lightning. Max’s is flame. Zephyr’s green dragon (who doesn’t shift) breathes acid.
And Cleo, very clearly, breathes a scalding steam.
My ex-bestie is capable of melting the flesh from my bones like soup stock with a single pissed-off breath.
My dragon thrashes against the bars of her mortal cage, both frantic and enraged. My human vitals are going haywire, pulse rabbiting, skin prickling, the pit of my belly shrinking to an ice cube of elemental terror.
Yet I’m also… powerfully… intrigued.
Cleo + Zara.
Once upon a time, my ex-BFF tattooed our names in tiny letters on her inner forearm—right down the vein—in Sanskrit.
We were lovers and roomies and partners in crime for over a year. What kind of strength and guile and sheer stubborn grit did it demand from her to hide this monumental secret?
Slowly, so slowly, my free hand drifts out and up. Cleo’s sea dragon pupils squeeze to slits. A warning trickle of superheated bubbles squirts between her scimitar teeth.
Barely even breathing, I hold her gaze with mine.
I’m too terrified to blink.
Yet, somehow, I muster the resolve to graze the very tips of my fingers along Cleo’s muzzle, just above those ferocious teeth. Under my careful fingertips, her wine-colored scales are sleek as suede. She’s not cold like a fish. Like the hide of an air-breathing dragon, she’s banked heat.
Her yellow irises pulse and shimmer like a furnace.
But she doesn’t bite my hand off.
Not even when my open palm settles gently against her cheek.
A slow shuddery exhale hisses through my respirator. The fist of terror clenching my guts, very slightly, eases its grip.
I don’t know if she’s a telepath—because, clearly, nothing I thought I knew about her was true. But I’m a telepath myself, a good one, and Ronin has been honing my skills.
I gaze into the glowing lanterns of her eyes and breatheCiao, bella.
A resonant rumble rises from the vast coil of her body. To mortal ears, that rumble sounds like a menacing growl.
But I’m no mere mortal. I know dragons.
This one… Cleo…
She’s…
Purring.
A lightning bolt of new ideas dances through my cerebral cortex and lights up neural pathways that have been clotted with betrayal and grief for months over her bitter treachery. What was it she said to me, the night of my birthday bash, when we met and clashed on the royal yacht?
You do not wish to be queen, no?Cleo’s perfect teeth sank into the violet matte of her lower lip.But I—don’t you see—I was given no choice.
I can hardly wrap my head around the fucked-up electric insight that’s sparking and crackling through my stunned brain. Obviously, I wasn’t given much choice myself. Lucius and Ronin kidnapped my ass in mid-heist from a Singapore penthouse and dragged me through the wards to the Icarus Academy by force.
It took me months, but I finally accepted this whole ball-and-chain queen gig.
I had to.
Had to accept.
