regret losing that precious blessing.
Nynn had only just discovered her potential, and even she felt its loss. As soon as she followed him out of the Cage, her new potential flipped off like a light switch. The tease was nearly as cruel as the promised rewards. Deep beneath his misplaced loyalty, Leto must hate it, too.
Shadow claimed most of his body. Only a glimmer of golden skin shone where his breastplate left room for muscles to maneuver freely. Bare. Smooth. Flexing with each movement. She remembered her vision of him as a work of art. Charcoal and warm, fluid pastels. She wondered briefly how she would draw him while he fought. Blurs of color. Smudges of steel gray and swirls of his mace.
Shutting her eyes blocked those visual distractions, but the details of his body followed her into the dark. She was free to imagine Leto posing for an artists’ class on the male anatomy. An exemplary specimen, with every muscle and ligament ripe for study.
Nude and
With a frustrated noise, she ground her knuckles against her eyes. She was behaving like some desperate victim succumbing to Stockholm syndrome. Sympathizing with his cause. Changing her beliefs to suit his. Accepting his praise like a cracked desert floor drank the rain. Her fears were coming true, that she would wind up just as brainwashed.
Jack was her lifeline, as was her vow that the Asters would burn for their crimes.
Ten minutes later, Leto and a pair of guards walked her back to her training cell. He left without a word or a backward glance.
Alone, Audrey opened the butcher block paper. Inside were peppermints—the round kind that only old people ate, or what children left for last after Halloween. Didn’t matter. She grabbed one of the candies. The mentholated sweetness was a shock. Work and work and more terrifying work. Now she rolled candy across her tongue.
The contrast was nearly as shocking as how tenderly Leto had kissed her.
She glanced down the corridor toward the gate. There stood the sleepy, ridiculously overdressed guards. What was the purpose of their SWAT-style armor if they traded for peppermints and
Only the locks held her prisoner. Not those fools. They were as useless as the rest of the humans in that complex.
Audrey froze. She spit the peppermint onto the ground.
She’d been trained since birth to believe the old, pompous prejudice that Dragon Kings were better than humans. Millennia of examples proved it. Only, Audrey had fallen in love with Caleb—with his caprice and warmth and lack of centuries-old ego. Here, she was sinking into the morass of ancient bigotry against the resourceful, thoughtful, amusing people she’d spent years among.
No matter how much she disliked that thought, Audrey recognized the pragmatic truth. Her heritage was impossible to deny. She was a Dragon King, and she would need to embrace that old, powerful arrogance to save her son.
TEN
The next afternoon, Leto and Nynn squared off against two other warriors within the octagonal framework of the practice Cage. A dozen others had gathered to watch, taunt, cheer.
Leto had expected Nynn to see sense, break down, and beg for an Indranan to help unlock the gift she couldn’t control. He’d been a fool to expect her to be that rational.
In two more days, they’d fight in a real match.
Too much of her old self remained. Why did she let resentment and a stubborn, impossible grasp on her human life keep her from embracing her fate? Now it was worse. She knew of her gift’s existence and chose to ignore it. She was a fighter who refused to use the weapons at her disposal, choosing a rock instead of a broadsword.
“Get up!”
“Fuck off!” she spat from all fours.
She could conjure a nasty temper. Nothing wrong with that if she aimed it at the right opponent. Instead, she was going to ruin his chances at keeping Pell safe. He would be humiliated in front of the Old Man and his guests.
“Don’t make me fight you, too.” His shout echoed off the domed ceiling above the practice Cage. “Get back in this! Now!”
She jumped to her feet and readjusted a practiced grip on her dagger. Had her glare been a gift from the Dragon, she could’ve leveled continents.
Leto knew their opponents well. The first was a bulky middle-aged Southern Indranan named Fam. If the man had ever been muscular, his brawn had since turned to fat. Fam had sold himself into service after gunning down three people in a failed robbery. The Asters could protect such criminals from the human justice system. Lately, Leto was surrounded with more thugs and delinquents than true warriors.
Fam was sorely lacking in martial skills. His clan’s unique telepathy, however, made him formidable when the collars were randomly deactivated. Always birthed in sets of two, the Indranan were born with what amounted to half of the Dragon’s gift. Some decided that wasn’t enough. Fam, for example, had killed his twin. Decapitated her. In doing so he stole her abilities to make his gift whole.
The Indranan were known as the Heartless for that reason.
The other opponent was a female Sath known only as Silence. Five years hadn’t been enough time for Leto to determine her real name or her reasons for fighting for the Asters. Only her lover, another Sath named Hark, might know those secrets. He’d descended to the Cages six months earlier, when Silence had returned from a mission to Hong Kong on behalf of the Old Man.
She was called Silence because she never spoke. Fit and slender, her ghostly blond hair and fathomless eyes added to an unnerving aura. The Sath had the ability to mimic the powers of another Dragon King within a certain range, which varied widely. A Sath’s real skill was in picking which foe to mimic.
The collars deactivated.
Dragon-given powers surged back to life. Leto breathed. He gathered the rush of being the warrior he was meant to be.
For but a moment.
He was bombarded by the combined attack of Fam’s mind-scrambling telepathy and the lightning-quick reflexes Silence stole from Leto. She swept around, sliced her shield behind his knees, and used his shoulders as a launching point to jump away.
The small assembly of spectators cheered their approval.
“Thief bitch,” he growled.
Those born to Clan Sath were known as the Thieves. Leto had been raised to believe them parasites, but he couldn’t deny that Silence’s long years of surviving physically stronger opponents had served her well. She never used a traditional weapon, instead using a shield as confidently as Leto wielded his mace.
Although he needed but a moment to recover from Silence’s attack Leto couldn’t see past the white-hot glare Fam painted across his vision. If Nynn’s gasped outrage was any indication, Fam had her in his grips, too. The Sath were limited to one theft at a time, but the limits of an Indranan’s mental meddling were untold and unpredictable. Some were weaklings in mind as well as body. Some were as powerful as devils, digging into the psyche, exploiting unacknowledged weaknesses.
Some were the witches who had locked Nynn’s gift in a mental box.
He didn’t need to see. Although Silence could mimic Leto’s reflexes and speed, she hadn’t refined those gifts for a lifetime as he had. He located both opponents by minuscule clues—the vibrations of footsteps, the warmth of skin heated by exertion, the scent of sweat, leather, and metal. Fam had never been able to obscure all of Leto’s senses at once.
