Page 38 of Her Dragon Daddy Disaster
“Look around you! Look at those watching us. Judging us, thinking themselves better than us. They’ve come to try to stop you from having an opinion!”
Heads twisted as the crowd members looked over their shoulders and saw the knots of loyalists at the various exits from the plaza. Spines straightened, and faces tightened.
That was it. The turning point. Our recruits would soar after the dustup that was to come. We would finally have a chance at properly taking on the sovereign and winning!
I smiled to myself. One day, I would tell Jakub about what happened and what it meant for him as a dragon. Hopefully, he would be proud of me for sticking up for what I believed in.
“They think to tell you what to do. Just like the sovereign! They want you to fall in line. To not question anything! Well, I say enough! I say that today we show them we’re not willing to be treated like drones anymore. We want a say!”
I slapped a hand against my side, which was our signal to those in the crowd to take up our shout. It crashed over me now.
“We want a say! We want a say! We want a say!”
I pumped my fist in the air in time with the shouts, adding my own voice to the crescendo.
Nobody ever knew how it happened. Who moved first or set it off. Yet it happened so fast it must have been multiple points. Multiple people. The crowd surged. Not for the exits, but for the men and women waiting for them there. Men and women whodidn’t believe like they did. Who wanted to stop us from having a say, from having a choice in how we were ruled.
And as they rushed together, a blood-curdling scream echoed over all of them.
It wasn’t the sound that ran steel nails down my spine. It was what they said.
“JAKUB!”
My head whipped around, searching for the source, fearing what I might see.
The blood in my veins turned to ice as I saw the small form in the crowd, sheer terror on her face as she reached out, wildly trying to grab a hold of an even tinier arm before it was sucked into the fast-moving crowd.
She was too slow. Our son was hauled away, disappearing into the raging mob. A child, caught up in a fury created by my hand.
There was only one choice open to me. Only one thing I could do.
A parental protection instinct I didn’t know I possessed kicked in, and I was moving before my brain even acknowledged the decision.
Chapter Sixteen
Sarah
Giant wings snapped wide, catching my attention as the brilliant red reflected the sunlight.
“Levi?” I mouthed in astonishment a moment before someone’s shoulder spun me around to the ground with violent force.
If I weren’t trained to take blows, I would have been done for. Instead, I rolled with the impact as best I could, but I still saw stars for a moment.
Shaking my head, I got to my feet, dodging more bodies as violence erupted throughout the plaza.
This is bad. Very bad. You are not on the same power level as these people. Not even close.
I kept that in mind as I struggled to go after Jakub. My son was out there somewhere. If I was in danger, his was even worse. Dragon child or not, the plaza was becoming a warzone.
The first fireball erupted off to one side as if to punctuate my point. I cringed—the heat palpable from even that far away—but I didn’t slow down.
From above, Levi abruptly plunged downward into the crowd. I shifted direction, now heading toward the center of the plaza, hoping he was going after Jakub and not just joining in the fight.
A statue loomed up ahead of me, providing a modicum of shelter for a moment.
“Eep!”
I dove to the side and rolled to my feet as a body sailed through the space I’d just occupied, smashing into the stone base of the statue. Sparing a glance at the man trying to extricate himself from the indent, blood pouring down from his skull, I shook my head.
