Under the Dragon's Protection

Heeled leather boots clicked on the pavement as the young woman in jeans with a leather jacket and ear pods in her ears, chewing gum walked down the alleyway like she could care less about this world. Only she knew of the storm her thoughts held that the mortal world could barely comprehend.

Three men sat in a Lamborghini Huracán on a food street somewhere in Western Europe, two of whom bickering constantly while the more intimidating third sat quietly staring at an alleyway.

A man approached the car with paper bags in both hands, broadly smiling at the company in the car, and handed out each bag of fast food to the two men and a drink to the third. While the first two grabbed the meal and started hyenacally eating the food with impatience and, 'What took so long?' and 'Let's get out of here now.' The third, on the other hand, silently nodded a 'thanks' and started browsing his phone as the newcomer took a seat behind the wheel and revved the engine.

They were about to leave when, all of a sudden, Alfonso Dominic McBlaze lifted his eyes off of his phone's screen and stared directly at the edge of the alleyway that was in his view and whispered, "Mate!"

This made the rest of the three stop and look wide-eyed, first at each other as if asking, 'Did I hear it right?' and 'Did you hear the same thing I did?' And second, at the man who had said the word and was now fixated at the entrance of the alleyway. His look with flaming golden eyes, contrary to Dominic's normal steel grey, added with a rise in body heat that could be felt all the way to the front seats of the car, made it crystal clear that they had heard it right.

What was expected was, the world's most powerful woman to come out of the alleyway. After all, the long-awaited mate of Dominic McBlaze couldn't just be anyone. He was, after all, the highest-ranking Alpha among the Dragon-shifter tribes. Given how heart-meltingly hot and mindbogglingly powerful he was, he, along with the rest, expected the most gorgeous spectacle of a woman coupled with either matching power or unpaired innocence to be his mate. Dom had waited more than a couple of centuries after the death of his first wife for the Şekileus, God of shape-shifters, to grant him a mate for life. Someone like Alfonso himself and not a mortal whom he had to marry because of obligation and not love. Love was a foreign concept to Dom, but he knew his mate could make him capable of it.

The two pairs of jaws dropped at the sight of Iris Maeve Hanson emerging flippantly out of the alleyway. They looked speechlessly as she made her way towards their car typing something on her mobile's screen and stopped a couple of feet beside the car, oblivious to the disbelieving eyes staring directly at her. Dominic couldn't believe his eyes or his luck. If this woman was his fated mate, where had he gone wrong in pleasing Şekileus, that he got such a wild-looking mate who seemed to care less about the world around her, let alone him?

He kept staring until it dawned on him, he couldn't sense her dragon. Mates are supposed to sense each other and their dragons, but this woman wasn't even showing any signs of mate detection like he was. Did that mean she wasn't a Dragon? Had been assigned a mortal mate? But why, he couldn't for the life of him understand. Why didn't he deserve the best?

But all these feelings of betrayal and confusion about the decision by Şekileus God were turned to one solid emotion of jealousy as he saw another man approach the woman for whom his body had crossed the boiling point and what worsened the feeling was her reaction to him. The sudden smirk that appeared on her face and that raise of an eyebrow and the way she claimed the right to be playful with him right in front of Dom and then walked back into the alleyway from where she had come.

This broke the trance they were all in.

Whoever and whatever she was, if she really was Alfonso's mate, they needed her. So the four jumped faster than sound out of the car, meals forgotten, and followed straight to the alleyway.

Dom didn't know what he was expecting from this woman going into an alley with another man, but it wasn't emptiness. The alleyway was empty, stark of any living soul except for maybe a rat or two around a dumpster at the far end of the alley.

But where did she go?

No matter how fast she was, if she wasn't a dragon she couldn't have disappeared like that. On both sides were buildings of several storeys and the alley was a dead end. So where did they both go? Was she a witch? That could be worse than getting a human for a mate. Witches and shape-shifters can never be anything but enemies, Şekileus God wasn't this vengeful even to sinners. So how did she manage to vanish without a trace?

Trace.

Everyone leaves it, even teleporting witches.

The trace of scent and the air was humid with the fresh scent of Dom's mate and that man. Strangely and slightly to Dom's relief, it didn't stop at a point as it did before a witch teleported, which meant his mate was something else.

But what?

Now he was curious and he needed to know how his mate's scent reached several levels high without being a shifter, since no shifter or even higher could jump that high. Now he needed to know who Şekileus God had chosen for The Alfonso Mcblaze.

He ordered two of his fellows to go do some homework on their alpha's mate.

Dominic needed to know whom he would reject for not being enough for a man like him, so Şekileus God would grant him someone he actually deserved, someone worthy of being the Alpha female of his tribe, Alpha female of all Alpha females.

And this wildling wasn't that.