Page 74 of Into Ember

We weren’t meant to find our mate.

It’s the one thing they didn’t see coming. And now they’re trying to get between us and her.

It won’t work.

Elara is ours. Queen or not.

That woman… she’s everything.

And they want to put her on a pedestal and play pretend.

I look around the room at the males, and I make myself look away, because things are going to get very bad for everyone if I don’t. No one here is innocent. No one in this room knows what she is to us. All they know is that she’s the only female dragon they’ve ever seen.

A growl rumbles up. I shove it down.

Now is not the time to lose it. Not when getting her out of this depends on all five of us staying exactly this calm.

The lock doesn’t open from the inside, and it doesn’t open with fire, not with her about to walk through the middle of a thousand people. It opens with Sam. A voice. A face. A location.

And the plan I gave at dawn is already dead. Erik can’t stay closest to a woman crossing a hundred feet of open floor alone. Five lines of sight don’t close a gap that starts at the top of a staircase.

So I adjust. That’s the job.

Let her cross. Let the realm look. Let Morty have his perfect entrance. Every route in this room ends at this dais, and they put the five of us exactly where she’s going.

That’s the whole plan now. She gets to us. The ring closes around her and it does not open again tonight. We keep our eyes and our ears open, and whatever happens in this gold room, whatever they think they’ve arranged — we are standing there when it happens.

None of us leaves her alone again. Not tonight. Not ever.

The orders go out in signs small enough to pass for a stretched shoulder, a checked cuff. Erik’s hand answers. Understood. Brock’s chin drops a fraction. Gunnar grins at the room like he’d happily burn down. Rayner watches everything else.

My dragon is closer to the surface than he’s been in a century. I hold him.

The music dies mid-phrase.

At the top of the grand stair, the doors swing open, and a herald’s voice fills the whole gold length of the trap.

“The queen.”

Chapter 28

Rayner

She’s so goddamn beautiful.

Even in that awful dress.

Chapter 29

Elara

“The queen.”

The man whose entire job is apparently announcing people has a voice like a cathedral bell, and it rolls out over a thousand upturned faces, and every single one of them is pointed at me.

I stand at the top of the staircase — the one you could drive a truck up — in a dress I hate, with hair I didn’t ask for, in a room that has clearly never heard the word restraint in its life, and I think, very clearly, what the fuck is this.

Gold. Gold everywhere. Gold columns, gold ceiling, gold dripping off the chandeliers, gold on the sconces and the railings and the little cherub situation happening above the windows, more gold than I have seen in my entire life combined, more gold than should structurally exist in one room.