Page 31 of Wings of Ashes
Ryker was a dragon.
Nix fell back on her stool, feeling it tip beneath her. She knew her ass would collide with the hard tile floor, but she had no way of stopping it. “Oof!” She landed and stared up at Ryker with a stunned expression.
“You’ve never seen a dragon shifter blow some fire before, Swan Lake?” Bael asked disdainfully.
Dragon.
Nix’s parents were killed by dragon shifters.
Though she did not remember much about the situation surrounding her parents, she remembered the flames. The red and orange flames that covered her mother and father’s skin.
Nix remembered her parents screaming for her to run. And she did run.
She ran until she stumbled across the cygni community, and Elle’s family took her in. The Oadess family raised her for the rest of her childhood and young adulthood. In the swan shifter community, Nix was told plenty of tales about roaming dragon shifters who enjoyed going out for “a bite to eat.”
Nix knew better than anyone how dragon shifters only cared about themselves. They swooped down, took what they wanted, and flew away without any concern for who they had hurt.
Big. Strong. Powerful. Those were the ingredients for malicious villains.
An alpha dragon shifter burned communities to the ground and roasted bystanders for a laugh or a meal.
Dragons were also rare.What if Ryker is related to the dragons who killed my—
Nix rubbed a hand over her face. “I feel sick.”
“Hey, Ugly Fuckling,” a male voice called from the lab table closest to them.
Seated on the floor, Nix looked over her shoulder to see the idiotic Mr. Graeves, who accused her of being a slut on her first day in class.
“We prefer cygnus shifters on their knees, not their ass,” Graeves said as he gripped his crotch to make it obvious what he implied.
This school is full of men who think women can’t get what they want without seducing or manipulating them. So, Nix was either a femme fatale whore or a puppet master bitch?
Nix’s face heated as fast as the vial Ryker had breathed fire onto. “What did you just say to me?” she asked in a tone she found hard to recognize.
Her voice thrashed out like a whip. Nix was not the kind of person to sound so…threatening. So strong.
Graeves blinked at her dark tone but repeated at full volume, “I said that you will find it easier to find a husband if you’re on your knees—”
A familiar switchblade flew through the air and pierced through Graeves’s hand. The hand that gripped the front of his crotch.
13
CHAPTER
Amale scream echoed around the classroom as Graeves jerked his hand off his dick and flailed his stabbed hand in the air. “What the fuck?”
“Only I get to ridicule the swan,” Bael replied.
“You could’ve pierced my dick!”
“It would have healed.”
Nix stood from the floor, brushed off the back of her pleated uniform skirt, and righted her stool. She did not like how much she enjoyed the pain Bael caused Graeves.
Bael was not defending you, she told herself.He literally just said he prefers to be the one torturing you. Her skipped heartbeat needed to calm the hell down.
To make matters worse, Bael was friends with adragonshifter. Obviously, Bael and Ryker were not good guys. Nix knew fellow outcasts when she saw them.
