Chapter Five Zara

Chapter Five Zar a

As a column of crimson flame engulfs the swimming pool and ignites the empty stage, my mating bond blazes to life.

Finally .

And that psychic wallop definitely packs a punch.

After the muddy sense of psychic deprivation I've been slogging through on this boat, the bracing crackle of Ronin's telepath-potent aggression hits me in the face like a dash of cold water. Vasili's down below, wreaking some kinda havoc in the living quarters. Now my bond with him crackles to life too, ebbing and swelling like staticky radio on a mountain road, lurky with malice and homicidal intent.

Lucius? He's a gaping hole in the tapestry of our group bond. The familiar comfort of his steady alpha strength is, like, nowhere to be found.

Which is freaking me the fuck out.

For real.

But all that's nothing compared to the tsunami of murderous rage that's howling through every pore of my body from my third alpha. The one who just got here. The one who's already circling for another lethal pass.

"Maxim!" I scream.

Barefoot, I scramble up on the bar and wave my arms madly for the dragon's attention.

Who threatens my mate! His voice roars through our mating bond, echoed by a dragonish bellow that nearly ruptures my eardrums.

Ronin grimaces and claps his hands over his ears. He too is scrambling, mentally, to throw up some psychic armor against the broadside of Max's fury .

"That's a little loud, love," Ronin groans through the bond we all share. "We're literally right here."

Gladly will I kill for my sovereign and for you! Maxim roars like blazes and rakes the sleek glassy prow of the megayacht with a curling firehose of flame.

My dragon shifter's lining up so he can strafe the main deck with his flamethrower breath, while traumatized passengers flee screaming in all directions. Honestly, it's like King's Landing in the series finale of Game of Thrones down there.

"No killing, big guy!" Shifty senses are super acute. Still, I reinforce the shouted command with all the psychic voltage I've got. "I mean it. We got civvies down here. Ronin's a little bloody, but we're both basically okay. Lucius and V are, uh, MIA."

Hearing my warning, Max swerves and veers away with a deafening roar of concern.

I know he admires Lucius, in this cute hero worship student-teacher kinda way. Those two aren't together in our polycule (yet). But I'm starting to suspect Max is kinda crushing on Lucius, even though it's taking him forever to act on it.

Anyway. Our dragon's extra protective of Vasili these days. Like he's trying to be V's alpha too. Even though that's an instinct that never fails to make my Goblin King vicious. When those two alphas of mine interact—the snake and the dragon—they're like sparks to tinder.

Right now it's an instinct that works for me, because right away, Max stops flaming the civvies on board. Instead, he redirects his torrent of angry fire to warn off a circling news chopper that's ventured too close.

"Cheese on toast," I yell. "I mean it. No sautéeing the civvies. You got that?"

If they threaten my mates, I will kill them all. He broods and wings over the spreading flames. But at least he lets the chopper clatter off unmolested.

Well, that's lucky.

Just in case you haven't figured this out by now, Max is kinda, like, a hothead.

Seriously.

He's way worse than Ronin, who used to be the psycho in this harem .

As flames race across the deck, the whoop of the megayacht's fire alarm adds its voice to the fray, followed by the hiss and sputter of the suppression system. Acrid smoke burns my lungs and makes me cough. I twist my blowing hair into a hasty knot on my head, duck to avoid a gust of flaming cinders, and try to strategize about how to get us all out of this shitshow.

Without, like, killing anyone.

Meanwhile, those hovering choppers and WNN speedboats are still recording the whole clusterfuck. Betcha this night's gonna break the witching world ratings record.

Lucius is in the blooming drink, Ronin sends through our bond to Max. My Brit's pacing the poop deck, bloody and disheveled, glaring balefully at the singed and savaged AIB guys as they scurry for the stairs and make for the lifeboats.

Have a lookabout for our wolf, Max, he urges. There's a love.

I will find him and I will save him! Max bellows and swoops to circle the boat. He's flying low above the water, all broody and ominous with intent, which wreaks all kinds of havoc with the speedboats that are trying to mount a rescue operation. His low pass overturns a lifeboat some panicky crew from this party boat are trying to winch over the water. That mishap plunges the anxious passengers, all crowding to scramble aboard, into screaming hysterics.

Sweet Jesus, this ambush is turning into an actual emergency.

The Aquarius Queen is definitely burning, with fingers of fire racing across the varnished and (apparently) highly flammable deck in multiple places. We might even be looking at a Titanic -type situation, like a sinking (minus Leo DiCaprio and the iceberg).

At least we're close to shore, and the water's not freezing. So there's that.

But I'm no Kate Winslet.

I don't need saving.

The person that does the saving around here is me.

I make up my mind and will myself airborne. I'm still new at this flying shit and I don't have Vasili's style and panache in the air (at least in human form). But I've got enough basic levitation to propel myself over the debris-littered scrum of the swimming pool and the smoke-wreathed chaos of the main deck, swoop in to grab the diva's abandoned mic from the fiery stage, and land (coughing) on the raised quarterdeck above the living quarters.

The air's clearer up here. Plus there's a bright red fire alarm console mounted on the wall right there. I swipe a hand across my stinging eyes to dry my smoky tears, then hit the switch to kill the sound.

With a last whoop, the alarm falls silent.

Thank fuck. My poor ears. They might never stop ringing.

"Listen up, people," I announce into the mic, my amplified voice seeping thin and tinny through the shrill buzz of my battered eardrums. "There's more lifeboats port and starboard, and those paparazzi speedboats are starting to queue up at the back. Everyone needs to form lines and start offloading."

Terrified faces divide their attention between me, the steadily advancing flames, and Max's lurky flight.

"That dragon's mine," I say firmly. Because he is. "As long as everyone behaves, he's gonna hold his fire."

That might be, like, aspirational thinking on my part. But I reinforce that shit though our mating bond and instruct my broody, threatening alpha dragon to play nice.

Max grumbles, but he does begrudgingly widen the circumference of his circle. That gives those rescue boats some space.

A few passengers, all sooty and disheveled and definitely the worse for wear, start shuffling into queues near the lifeboats or migrating aft for offloading.

"Good. That's real good," I encourage everyone. "We're like two kilometers max from the island. That's an easy paddle. We'll all regroup there."

You might be wondering who died and made me queen.

But the actual queen—that duplicitous bitch Messalina—is nowhere to be found.

Yeah, she'd better fucking hide if she knows what's good for her. We'll all be lucky if no one winds up dead due to this stunt she pulled tonight. For fuck's sake, the four witching races are already practically extinct. We need every functioning dick and uterus we've got to sustain the population.

Maybe even… mine?

That furtive question sneaks through my brain, buried deep behind my barriers so I don't set off my shifter guys, a couple of whom are rocking this major breeding kink. Suddenly, those BC shots I've been taking with evangelical fervor don't feel as much like a no-brainer as they used to.

I mean, if I'm gonna be queen… maybe I'd better start queening it.

Like I'm trying to do right here.

I cough again to clear my throat and refocus on the crowd. Ronin's directing traffic down there, looking surly and unsafe and therefore not much comfort to the terrorized passengers. But they need the direction. Those flames are spreading fast, the smoke's making it hard to breathe.

Long story short? This whole boat's teetering right on the edge of panic. Wouldn't take much to nudge the whole shebang into hysteria.

A scuffling fistfight erupts in the milling crowd near the lifeboats, punctuated with a flurry of thrown punches and shoving.

"Whoa, easy there. No pushing," I say into the mic. "There's gonna be plenty of room for everyone on those lifeboats. We'll make extra trips if we have to. People who can walk okay, you help the folks who need it."

A tall slim streak of violet swoops up from the main cabin to alight at my side.

With a blend of relief and unease, I give the side-eye to my dominant alpha.

Somehow Vasili still looks like he'd be right at home walking a Fashion Week runway in Paris in that violet tux, even with his gilded shag of rock-star hair all windblown, a streak of soot striping his sharp features, and a dark spatter of blood (hopefully not his) staining his crisp cuffs and his narrow ringed hands.

He looks like an escapee from a Marilyn Manson MTV video. Honestly, he's so flamboyant he steals my thunder without even trying.

But I'm so relieved to see him I totally don't mind.

"Shit, Goblin King, where the hell have you been?" I grumble. "We have a situation here."

"I'll say," he purrs, eyeing the scrum around the lifeboats under his smoky lids. "Who knew that Aquarius bitch has a teleporter at her beck and call? That naughty fellow whisked little Lina off the boat—along with himself—before I could slit her throat in the powder room."

You never know how literally to take him when he says shit like that. But I eye his bloodstained hands and cuffs and feel kinda queasy .

This bad boy always carries a cache of hidden knives. When he uses them, he's fucking lethal.

"Regicide is a felony," I say primly (like he needs reminding). "Uh, not to mention, murder's a violation of the Academy Codex."

"Well, she was whisked off before she could bleed out," he says peevishly. "So no harm done. More's the pity. Fortunately, little queen…" He gives me a sly smirk and slips a hand inside his tuxedo jacket to produce a glittery object. "In her rush to flee the scene, she left a little something behind."

I stare down at the delicate tiara in his hand. Up close, that slender circlet sports actual diamonds, the icy blue-white glitter interspersed with purple amethyst. The thing's real familiar, because Messalina wears it for all her public appearances. It's like a royal heirloom that goes back centuries.

In fact, she was literally just wearing it.

Suddenly I'm feeling kinda dizzy. "Is that…?"

"What it is, little queen, is yours ." My warlock hums with wicked satisfaction and offers me the ancient artifact with a showy flourish. "You'll want to replace the Aquarius amethysts with Gemini emeralds, of course. Ideally before the formal coronation, whenever that may be. I can assist with that. I have a personal jeweler at Tiffany's."

"Why does that not surprise me." I'm still staring at the thing in this nauseated fascination.

Seriously? This whole moment is pretty otherworldly. My snake's attracting plenty of attention, the way he always does (even in mid-evac), perched elegantly above the fray in his bloodstained violet tux, casually offering me the witching world crown.

The action slows and the seconds stretch.

I feel the weight of this moment, the pressure of all those watching eyes, like a physical presence pressing down on me. A swarm of choppers circles overhead, bristling with those omnipresent cameras.

Then I suck in a breath and lift my chin. My eyes lock with V's.

"Go ahead and put it on me, bad boy," I tell him softly. "You're the Scorpio scion. Plus you're gonna be one of my kings, aren't you? I intend to crown you and all the guys right along with me at the formal ceremony."

Something fractures in his face .

His icy gaze glitters with suppressed longing.

My heart clenches and aches in my chest. I know shit about him that only the guys in our polycule know. Behind his horrible bully warlock facade, I know my terrible alpha will always be the lonely queer boy his father rejected and shipped off to hide behind magical wards at the Academy, just for the so-called sin of being gay. Though he'll deny it with cutting scorn that's sharp enough to draw blood, Vasili's always secretly been afraid we'll reject him too.

I want him to know that's never gonna happen. Not on my watch.

We're all crazy in love with our snake.

Even if, deep down inside, he's still afraid to believe it.

In an eyeblink, his smoky lashes sweep down and his perfect face shutters. Now he's all sneering arrogance, same as usual, as he saunters up close and places the crown delicately on my head.

That artifact throbs with ancient power.

Yowsa.

The thing's so unexpectedly heavy I can barely hold my head up.

And the whole world is suddenly so still and silent, under the crackle and pop of burning wood and the chukka-chukka of the choppers, that I can hear my own heartbeat thudding in my ears. It's like the night is holding its breath.

Every eye in the witching world is watching.

I swallow hard and raise the mic to my lips. Even while my gaze clings to V's for reassurance.

"Okay, listen up," I tell the whole witching world. "The Senate voted on the next queen months ago. We don't need a do-over. I'm the next queen. So I'm keeping this." I stick out my chin and glare straight at the cameras. "Anybody wants to take it from me? I got finals this week. Right here at Icarus. Just so you all know where to find me."

Vasili acknowledges my declaration of intent with the Romanov eyebrow. Then he inclines his chin, just a fraction of an inch, in subtle approval. He pivots to stand with me, shoulder to shoulder. His dangerous stare slices through the spellbound crowd in silent challenge.

A streak of chestnut lopes up the gangway and drops at my feet, shaggy fur dripping with seawater.

A ragged gasp spills from my lungs. My legs almost buckle with relief .

My mating bond with Lucius is different when he's all wolfed out—he's, like, not verbal in that form—but it's definitely him. I can barely restrain the impulse to collapse on the deck beside him and smother my headmaster in a desperate hug.

Instead I just drop a hand to my side, so he can nuzzle my fingers with his cold wet nose.

I'll do a lot more than that once we're private.

Though I do definitely wonder what happened to Xiao.

Ronin stalks up the stairs, plants himself squarely at my side with booted legs spread and belligerent arms folded, and smolders at our viewing audience like he's ready to hurl fire at any provocation.

Still circling overhead, Maxim bellows in triumph.

This moment's pretty fraught. So I'm hyper-alert and tingling with nerves. A subtle flicker of movement from the flybridge across the way snags my immediate attention.

That's the highest part of the boat, higher than where I'm standing with the guys, it's mostly used for navigation. I'm a certified diver and I'm comfy on boats. That's how I know the flybridge is usually secured. There shouldn't be civvies up there.

And, actually, that's no civvie.

It's Cleo.

She's standing alone at the helm, straight and regal as a queen. (If I'm being honest.) With her royal indigo gown sheathing her stately supermodel physique and the wind teasing her silky merlot mane. Somehow, even in the middle of this flaming shitshow, with multiple fires raging, she's managed to stay impeccable.

She definitely looks more like a queen than I do, standing barefoot with my motley crew of disreputables, my teal curls twisted in a hasty knot, stray ringlets spilling down my neck, and one strap of my spangly cocktail gown broken.

God even knows where I've left my purse.

In that tense stretch of silence, Cleo meets my gaze across the width of the boat that divides us. Across the literal gulf of fire that lies between us. I lift my chin and lock onto her level stare.

She even acts more like a queen than I do. She always has. She's literally a famous celebrity in the mortal world. She's a supermodel who's lived her whole life in the spotlight .

But fuck that shit.

I'm not stepping down.

Not for her.

The witching world needs me. Far as I can tell, she's left the arcane races twisting in the wind.

Is this the one! Max's psychic bellow just about makes me jump out of my skin.

In fact, his telepathic broadside makes all my mates twitch. Lucius' wolf emits a growl of warning as our massive black dragon swoops toward the boat with golden eyes flaming, taloned legs outstretched, and smoke leaking through his serrated jaws.

"Yeah, that's her." I sigh. "No flaming."

Sure, I hate what she's done. But I used to love her. Like, I really fucking thought I was in love with her. That's the whole reason her betrayal back in Singapore—not to mention this new one tonight—hurt me so bad.

Clearly, she needs to be dealt with. But I don't need to see her flambéed right in front of me.

Max snarls and sails toward her, low and lethal.

Shit. I'm not even sure he's listening.

Calmly Cleo slips the straps of her evening gown from her slim shoulders. The garment slithers down her long pale body to pool at her feet. Underneath she's wearing a wisp of black lace that cups her perfect tits, a tiny triangle of matching lace over her crotch, and a garter that straps a baby handgun to her sleek thigh. She poses on the deck like a lingerie model, just long enough for the paparazzi cameras to flash.

"What the fuck," Ronin grouses.

Thank God he sounds totally unimpressed.

Sure, we all share in this harem, that's how it works when you're poly. But I'm not about to share my warlocks with her .

While Max closes in with jaws gaping wide like he's gonna swallow her whole, Cleo toes deftly out of her sparkly stilettos. Her graceful arms sweep over her head like an Olympic diver. Then she executes a perfect swan dive from the flybridge.

A blinding white flash obliterates her falling form.

I suck in my breath on a spurt of shock.

When my vision clears, a sleek coil of garnet scales is pouring through the air. That endless spiral, divided by a spine of razor-sharp spikes glittering merlot and ruby in the firelight, slips into the inky sea with barely a splash. Just before the whole apparition that used to be my supposedly mortal, unshifty girlfriend is engulfed in the depths, her forked tail flicks in a flirty wave.

"Sweet Jesus!" I yelp. "What the hell was that?"

But I know.

We all know.

Even though no one's ever seen one in the flesh—I've only seen illustrations in the antique books of witching world lore in Lucius' library—what we've all just seen is literally supposed to have been extinct for centuries.

My backstabbing ex-BFF is… a fucking sea dragon.

Max hammers past in a powerful gust of wind and roars in frustrated rage. Next to me, Ronin's swearing like a sailor. Vasili doesn't even twitch and he doesn't utter a sound (he's actually suspiciously silent). But his eyes are narrowed in snaky calculation and his face is hard and dangerous. Lucius' wolf tilts back his muzzle in a long mournful howl.

Which pretty much voices my own turbulent feelings to a T.

Cleo might've just escaped my dragon's vengeance. But I know she won't be going far. I've got something that belongs to her.

The way she sees it, I'm wearing her crown.

And she's gonna want it back.