Semua Bab The Dragon King's Human Mate: Bab 1 - Bab 10

Aria's POV Lyra came as the sun began to set. She did not knock. She never knocked — not in all the years we had been friends, not once. She simply pushed open the door and walked in and stopped when she saw me still sitting on the floor. "You have been sitting there all day, haven't you," she said. It was not a question. "Most of it," I admitted. She crossed the room, dropped down onto the floor beside me, and leaned her head on my shoulder. For a long moment neither of us spoke. Outside the window the sky was turning shades of amber and rose, the kind of sunset that belonged in a painting, the kind that felt almost cruel in its beauty on a day like today. "I went to the council," Lyra said finally. I turned to look at her. "Lyra—" "I told them it wasn't fair. That the bowl could have been tampered with. That there should be a redraw." Her jaw was tight, her dark eyes bright with something fierce and furious. "Elder Brom told me to go home and mind my place." "And what did yo

Aria's POV They came for me exactly at dawn. I heard them before I saw them — the heavy rhythm of hooves on the dirt road outside, steady and unhurried, the kind of pace that belonged to creatures who had never needed to rush for anything in their lives. I was already dressed and sitting on the edge of my bed, my small travel bag packed with the few things I had allowed myself to take. A change of clothes. The blanket my mother had sewn. A small pressed flower Lyra had slipped under my door sometime in the night with a note that said simply — I will find you. I folded the note and tucked it against my heart. Then I stood, picked up my bag, and walked out of my cottage without looking back. There were four of them waiting in the road. They were not dragons — not in their shifted form, at least. They appeared human enough at first glance, dressed in black armor etched with the dragon crest, sitting astride horses so dark they seemed to absorb the early morning light. But there was

Zaron's POV The messenger arrived on a Tuesday. I remember this not because Tuesdays hold any particular significance in the Dragon Realm — they do not — but because I had been in the middle of sentencing a border lord to death when the doors of the war chamber opened and the boy stumbled in, breathless and pale, clutching a scroll sealed with the mark of the eastern watchtowers. I did not look at him immediately. I finished what I was saying to the border lord first. I find it discourteous to leave a death sentence half delivered. The lord in question — a broad man with a red beard and the particular expression of someone who has only just understood that the stories they heard about the Dragon King were not exaggerated — had been skimming taxes from three border villages for the better part of a decade and redirecting the coin to his own coffers. He had done this under the assumption that I would not notice. I notice everything. "Your lands will be redistributed to the villages

Aria's POV The chambers they gave me were nothing like I had expected. I do not know exactly what I had expected. Something small, perhaps. Something cold and bare and deliberately uncomfortable, the kind of space that communicated without words that the person inside it was not a guest but a prisoner. A cell with a nicer name. That was what I had been bracing for during the long walk through the palace corridors behind Commander Drex, my arms wrapped around my small travel bag, my eyes tracking every turn and every guard and every possible exit with the quiet desperation of someone who understood that information was the only currency she currently possessed. What I got was not a cell. Drex stopped before a set of double doors at the end of a long corridor in the east wing — wider doors than the ones we had passed, carved with a pattern of interlocking scales that caught the torchlight and threw it back in long thin lines across the stone floor. He pushed them open without ceremon

Aria's POV Three days passed before I did anything foolish. I considered that a reasonable amount of restraint given the circumstances. In those three days I established what I privately thought of as a routine, though routine felt like too ordinary a word for the particular shape my days had taken inside a palace that was older than most civilizations and staffed by creatures who could reduce me to ash if the mood struck them. I woke before dawn. I wrote letters to Lyra that I could not send. I sat at the window and watched the sky change colors over the mountains until Senna arrived with breakfast and the particular quiet efficiency that I was learning was simply how she moved through the world — precise, contained, and more observant than she let on. After breakfast I walked. This had become the part of the day I looked forward to most. Drex had arranged the promised escort — a young dragon soldier named Caell who had approximately four facial expressions and used them sparingl