Luck of the Dragon

with a thud that sounded deafening to Lucy’s horrified ears.

Lucy gasped and looked at Alec’s face. The blood drained from her head to her feet, weighting them like lodestones.

Alec stared at the stone and then at her. His eyes seemed to glow red, and he bared his teeth, before clamping his mouth shut. A muscle worked in and out at the side of his jaw.

Joey released her and picked up the orange stone. “Doesn’t look like a million-dollar stone to me.” He tossed it in the air, from hand to hand.

“Give it to me.” Lucy grabbed the Padma stone out of the air. The heat of the stone burned her fingers like hot sand. She gasped in surprise and handed it to Alec, dropping her gaze so she didn’t have to see his condemning face.

“Let me guess.” Alec took the stone without touching her hand. “Gino made you steal my sapphire, too?”

“No,” Lucy whispered, unable to form a word to acquit herself. She was guilty. Guilty of betraying him. Guilty as charged. The former gavel bang in her head now felt like a noose tightening at her throat.

“I would have given it to you if you had asked.” Alec rolled the rock between his fingers.

“I’m so sorry.” Shame worse than any she had ever known pulled her toward the ground. “I am so, so sorry.”

“You’re right.” Alec put the stone in his pocket. “You are sorry. A sorry, lying, thieving piece of human trash.” Alec turned on his heel and stomped into the hall.

Lucy followed behind.

“Put her brother in a cage and have someone get her ready for the ceremony tonight,” he said to the waiting guards in the hallway.

“Yes, Jer’ol,” Lil said.

“A cage?” Lucy reached for Alec’s arm, but he was too far away.

Alec glanced back at her. “You’ll attend the ceremony. If you behave, I’ll release you and your brother when the night is over. You have made your choice clear.”

Chapter Seventeen

Alec screamed in primal pain and ran and jumped from his balcony. How could the Fates have been so wrong about Lucy? How could he have been so wrong about Lucy?

He let himself fall in his human form, slowly, then faster and faster. Panic engulfed his human mind, but he did not flail or turn to his dragon form. The wind shrieked in his ears, but he kept his arms and legs rigid against the restless whip of gravity.

Alec! Leo yelled to him across their mental connection. Alec, change to your dragon!

Why should he? He was not immortal. It was possible to die. Maybe he would just keep falling. He would rather die than touch Lucy’s deceitful, lying human face again. Rage shot through his limbs. No, he would not give her the satisfaction of dying.

Halfway to the ground, he pushed his dragon wings to the surface of his skin and let his bestial nature flare. His black dragon swooped out of the free fall, racing to the heavens, away from the casino.

Alec, slow down, Leo called. Bloody talk to me.

You are my successor. See to things.

She is just a bloody woman. There will be another.

But they both knew it wasn’t true, not in time for him. Lucy had been his last chance to complete his bond and save his dragon.

Alec tucked his wings and surged upward. The air was less buoyant above the wispy clouds. His dragon beat his wings harder and heaved gusts of air into his lungs. The late afternoon sun warmed his back, a contrast to the chill and absolute silence of the heavens.

On the curved horizon, the moon waited for her chance to shine over the mating festivities, shimmery and pale.

Lonely and all alone.

You are behaving like a reckless bastard. Leo’s voice was loud and taunting in his mind.

In his black dragon form, Alec glanced over his right wing and roared a stream of fire. In the distance, Leo’s dragon trailed after him, a spot of orange and yellow against the twilight. Alec’s blood surged over spiky rocks of adrenaline. Leo wanted to stop him, to try to reason with him, but he would have to catch him first.

A blood challenge to you, fire dragon. Alec’s words sounded maniacal to his human mind, but he didn’t care. He swooped toward the earth, and the desert floor raced by, brown and flat and dead.

…

Lucy sat on the corner of her bed chewing her lip and twisting her hands. Alec’s “You have made your choice” boomed in her head with painful aftershocks. He had been so angry and so hurt. She hadn’t believed him when he had said he wanted her forever. But when he’d caught her with the sapphire, he had acted like a man who had been hurt by the woman he loved.

The woman he meant to spend his life with. Forever.

Just like he had said.

The tension in her head built and she jerked to her feet and paced, back and forth, back and forth across the room. She pivoted by the curtains. “Plague, phantasm.” Her reflection in the mirror as she passed it was distraught, her eyes flighty and scared, her hair tangled in a mess of crystal extensions.

“Peace, perception, patrol.” Her brain registered the ridiculous litany. “Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.” She threw her hands out, not at all calmed. Her stomach twisted, and she recognized the ache.

Regret.

Lucy forced her body to stand still and she examined her conscience like a juvie judge, frowning over the file, looking for discrepancies. The painkillers had made her bold—truth—they had made her think she could do it, but the actual decision to act, to take the sapphire, that had been all her.

But it wasn’t like she’d done it for the money. She had been trying to save Joey, true.

Didn’t that make her somehow innocent, by way of noble intent?

No, it didn’t.

Lucy sat down on the hotel room bed hard, hating the gnawing pit of wrongness in her belly. Bad behavior was Joey’s purview. She was the good one, the one who always did the right thing, no matter what. Just not this time.

When it really mattered.

Alec had been serious about wanting a life with her. The knowledge was astounding.

Before Lil had locked her in the room, she had told her that Alec would only tolerate her presence for the ceremony, for the sake of the other dragons. Her mind flooded with images of Alec’s face when he had realized she had taken his sapphire, and the hurt she had seen there doubled inside her chest.

“How am I going to fix this?” Lucy mumbled, knowing that there was nothing she could do.

Alec would never forgive her. She wasn’t sure she could forgive herself.

It was the hardest truth of all.

Panic squeezed her chest from her head to her knees, tightening her vision with the kind of vessel narrowing that preceded a full-on anxiety attack. Pain exploded in her head, pushing the crevices of her brain to the edge of her skull.

One thing at a time.

Lucy forced a breath in and out. She would try to explain to Alec. She would get through the dragon ceremony. She would make sure Joey stayed out of trouble.

NO.