Page 32 of Queens Ride Horny Dragons
"Why?"
To embarrass me at the coronation? My harem were the ones who were supposed to hand me my crown, who were to stand behind me when I faced the shifters as their queen. They would be my moral support and help straighten my backbone when I told everyone we were already at war with the fae. Without them, it would just be me. Alone.
Was this some kind of stunt to get me to cancel the ceremony?
"Asa," I said, my mind already spinning, "can you copy that to something so I can show it to some people? And could we go through and search for more things to copy?"
"Yeah, it's not that hard," he said, like I should know better.
After we went through the camera feeds and I showed him what else to copy, I leaned down to kiss the back of his head. "I'll be right back, okay?"
He nodded and set some headphones on his ears.
Fiery rage bit at my heels as I hurried from the room. I wanted to hunt down my harem, steal them back, and pop the heads off of Petra and Rio. But I couldn't. Not yet anyway. I needed to cross into fae lands and kidnap back Léas so she could restore dragon shifters' power so we could fight this war. And I needed to do this quickly so we had a fighting chance.
We. Humans. Dragon shifters. Everyone but the fae.
Why I was helping the stovetops when honestly they deserved to die off was a mystery to me, but I wasn't doing this for them. This was for humans. This was for my harem. They'd helped me, saved Asa, saved me, and I would never be done repaying them for it. And if I didn't succeed, they could die at the hands of the fae.
Well, not while I was queen.
Back in my bedroom, I tore the dress from my closet door and threw it on my bed so I could change. Would Petra and Rio be there at the coronation? Would they be brazen enough to show their faces? Probably. Anything to watch me squirm.
I stepped into the dress, unable to keep from touching the beaded details as I fastened it and adjusted the sleeves. Gorgeous. I hated it. Without bothering with hair or makeup, I declared myself ready since I only have about ten minutes left. If the shifters were offended by my bedhead and sleep lines likely still on my face, they could suck my balls.
The first step toward my bedroom door dropped me to my knees. A terrible pain erupted in my gut, like acid and lava and the surface of the sun boiling up inside of me. I cried out, a breathless scream. What was happening? The burning simmered outward along the surface of my skin. It felt like I was being burned alive, torched like a witch tied to a stake. I retched, clawing uselessly at my body. My eyes flooded with tears, and I was thankful because I was sure that if I looked down at myself, I would be nothing but charred skin and blisters and bone. The pain in my gut intensified, and I curled in on myself with a loud moan.
The pain. The pain had started in my gut…like poison.
Writhing on the floor, I curled my fingers and tried to shred the dress off of me. Thirty seconds, Tavis had said. Thirty seconds of misery while my dragon fire destroyed the poison. But that was for poison I put inside of me. Not poison I wore.
I couldn't get the dress off. I hurt too much, burned too much. I ripped and tore and flung myself about like a woman possessed. I screamed. Oh, how I screamed, but no one who cared could hear me. Not my harem. Not Asa who'd put on his earphones before I'd left.
Finally, finally, I ripped the last of the dress loose. I lay there naked, panting, in the middle of my bedroom floor, still not daring to look down at myself to see the damage. The dress sat in a tattered pile next to my head, and I wondered if we had a camera shot of who had brought it to my room. Not the fae. They wanted me alive to continue this distracting Civil War while they waged the real one. Petra? Rio? They had their hands full with my harem, but that didn't mean they weren't behind it.
It was fury alone that brought me to my feet. Somewhere behind it, my body still hurt, the dragon fire inside me taking a lot longer than thirty seconds to attack something on the outside of skin. But it didn't matter. I was still alive.
I marched to my closet and found the same dress I'd worn to the full-moon ritual—the sleeveless royal blue one. Carefully, I put it on, not trusting it, but also hating the feel of the silky fabric sliding over my burning flesh. I had to look down at my skin in order to put the dress on, and it was an ugly, mottled red. If it hadn't been for the dragon fire battling it, I hated to think what might have happened. Death, certainly. And maybe nothing more of my body than a skeleton wearing a poisoned dress.
So far so good with the full-moon ritual dress, even though the feel of it ravaged my sore skin, so I hurried back to the art room and Asa.
Standing behind him, I took the headphones off his head. "Can you find me another camera shot?"
He turned suddenly at the raspiness of my voice from all my screaming, then gasped at the sight of my arms and neck. "Yara?"
"Nothing for you to worry about."
"I don't believe you. You look like you're hurting." His eyes flooded with tears as if the very idea of me hurting rebounded back into him, and I hated it. Hated the fact that he was seeing me like this when I was supposed to be the one who had my shit together for the both of us. Far from it.
I shook my head, willing the seams on my emotions to stay strong just a little bit longer. "I'll be fine. Listen, Asa. I need your help. With two things, actually. One is I need to find a camera shot of someone carrying a fancy dress up to my room."
He scanned my arms and neckline, likely visualizing said dress from the burns on my skin and snapping the details together. He was too bright for his own good sometimes.
Turning back to the screen, he fiercely rubbed at the tears on his cheeks. "The person with the dress hurt you."
"Yes."
"Why?" He started clicking around the screen, his movements angry.
