Page 8 of The Forbidden Dragon King
The moon’s light should have pulled me into shifting, but once again, I’ve failed.
I square my shoulders.
One thing that I’ve learned is always have a backup plan. Possibly because my first reckless plans normally blow up in my face.
“Okay,” I whisper, steeling myself, “if I can’t be accepted here, then it’s time to see if the fae want an Omega who can scrub floors, peel potatoes, and steal shit. Some skills, huh? A rose scented bargain.”
I lick my lips nervously, as another howl rings out.
They’re getting closer.
If I don’t find the rune book, then I won’t escape.
I’ll die tonight.
Adrenaline spikes through me. I’m trembling with fear. Only the runes can protect me by hiding my scent. Bard doesn’t know how obsessively I watch him, along with the forbidden rune magic that he practices. I know that he has this spell. Only the elites have access to the truly illegal stuff.
It’s ironic that those who break the laws the most are those who set them.
I scan Bard’s luxurious bedroom, increasingly desperate.
Moonlight streams through the small, tinted glass window over Bard’s room. It illuminates the grand painting of him, which hangs on the wall above his four-poster bed, as if the royal family don’t dominate the court enough.
I can’t help the way that my heart leaps painfully in my chest, however, when I study the painting.
By the moon, I hate the yearning that draws me to the frustratingly handsome prince with his thick brunet hair and forest green eyes.
I wish that I could carve the feeling out of my chest.
How many Omegas already throng around the prince? He rejects them all but he could have his pick.
Bard has never even spoken to me. Yet he loves fae magic like I do. He breaks the rules more than anyone in the Moon Court, including me, even if he’s smarter about hiding it. And just sometimes, when I get mouthy, I see the way that his lips twitch, before he can stop himself.
Why does my inner Omega wish that Bard would trigger my first heat and mate me in the hunt?
Sometimes, all it takes is smelling his scent as he walks past me to make me purr. His lips twitch at that as well.
Does he feel something for me?
I can’t help the draw to his woodsy scent of pine and fir, as if he’s my Alpha. Yet the hierarchy divides us: Bard is at the top, a royal, and I’m at the bottom, an orphan non-shifter.
Is it wrong that sometimes I yearn to be bonded? To finally have a pack?
A proper home?
I saw Bard last week exploring the ancient, forbidden Winter Caves. The caves are a honeycomb of tunnels, which lead to the borders of the frozen, northern Unseelie Kingdom. He didn’t notice me following him downwind to make sure that he didn’t catch my scent.
I’m stealthy.
Lucky for Bard that I wasn’t an assassin.
If either of us had been caught, we’d have been cast out of the pack and exiled.
I watch Bard each week, while I’m on my knees scrubbing the corridor floors, as he swaggers by me with his head in a book. He barely seems aware of his gang of friends around him.
No one else cares as much about magic as Bard and I do in the entire Moon Court. But we can’t even talk to each other about it.
Still, Bard has never stopped his elite friends from bullying me, even if his gaze will linger on me a momenttoo long, when he does manage to raise his lazy gaze from his book.
