4. Lux

CHAPTER FOUR

LUX

I sat on the edge of a cot in a sterile white room, one of many littering the castle. Unused spaces where a king could easily hide a mistake. Said king loomed over me with a tablet in his hands. He hadn’t put me in the oubliette, which meant he still needed something from me.

I knew it had been a mistake to come home.

But with Jay hurt, I hadn’t known what else to do.

“Watch the video, son,” Leberecht said.

I pulled my gaze from the white walls, lit by a single hanging light bulb, to the tablet he held out to me. When I didn’t take it, he pressed play.

My bedroom bloomed to life. Jay lay naked, tied down to my bed. No sound accompanied the video, almost making it feel like a fabrication of reality. The shape of Og’s massive cock slid out of her throat just as Tyson literally dove between her legs. Jay arched, her perfect body as she climaxed. The fog of my rut rushed in, and my cock hardened. Pure violence pulsed in my veins. With a clawed hand, I swiped at Leberecht’s arm before kicking out, knocking him off his feet.

A guard yelled from the door before the two rushed me, driving me back. Pain bloomed along my back, where they pinned me to the edge of the cot. I snarled and cut through the one on the left’s scales with the sharp edges of my tail.

“Enough!” Leberecht’s full horns bloomed to life on his head. Brilliant white scales covered his body. He pushed the two guards holding me down away and hit my chest with a double punch. The cot groaned and broke as the air left my lungs. I landed hard on the ground. Metal stabbed painfully into my back. Agony shot through my rut, and my dragon roared. The smell of my blood filled the air as it dripped on the floor in loud drops.

“Look at you!” Leberecht continued. “Instead of following your instincts, living as I asked you to, you’ve suppressed even your dragon to the point of madness. You’re rutting like an animal! And over a woman who’s tricked you?”

My dragon’s anger billowed along with my own. She didn’t trick us. Our mate brought us together.

The two guards clasped metal chains around my upper arms, but I couldn’t look away from Leberecht, the man who gave me life only to hurl me into the hurricane of his own regret.

“You look so much like your mother,” he continued. “But every action you make shames her memory more. As if your very existence didn’t shame her enough.” His gaze bore into my cybernetic arm as it had over and over as if the only parts of me that existed were the parts I was missing.

But they weren’t.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I growled, hearing Jay’s voice in my memory and needing her to be right. “There is nothing wrong with me.”

My dad pushed off my chest and smiled. “If you need to tell yourself that, then you already know that there is.”

I let out a roar and leaped to my feet. A new wave of pain ripped into me as the metal stuck in my back ripped out. Before I stood straight, the chains stopped me in my tracks. Blood poured down my back, soaking into my waistband.

My dad laughed. “She’s fucking other dragons in your bed. You’re truly broken if you still want that.”

I gritted my teeth. Pain and anger focused my world to a fine point.

My dad tossed the tablet onto the broken cot, the paused video of Jay’s naked body still on the front. “If you can pull yourself out of your rut enough to read. Her entire history is on that tablet.” He pulled his horns back in, and his scales receded, leaving him looking calm and collected in his pristine suit. “Make the right choice. I can see past your deformities. You can come back to your old role. My docile, slow, runt.”

I tried to stand to fight, but between the blood pooling at my feet and the chains, I managed to get my good foot under me before wobbling precariously to the side. My dad shook his head, his face filled with pity I didn’t want, and locked the door behind him.

Anger turned the room red, and I looked down again. Despite the pain in my back, the rut kept me hard. Something needed to give. I gripped my dick, pumping it, using my blood as lubrication. With Jay’s image still on the tablet, I came hard and fast, and the fog of my rut thinned.

I managed to grow my scales. The blood flowing down my back eased, and I picked up the tablet. I was as likely to break the delicate technology as find Jay’s files in this state, but I had to understand.

I’ve gifted you these dragons… to fix a mistake.

I’d spent the last year as a Priestess of Air. Although I had my phone, I was still out of the loop. Since coming home, Leberecht hadn’t shared any information with me. I was a tool. He either wanted my disabilities on display to prove a point or to leverage something. It was this exact game I’d run from. Based on what I heard at the EM about the Ley Lines, whatever internal politics he planned were insignificant to the real problem.

I clenched my fist, and the screen cracked in my grip. My dick twitched, trying to harden. I released the scales on my back, letting blood flow out of me there to keep my dick flaccid and my mind rational. Bitterly, I wished Jay was here so I could kiss her and shock my rut back to submission.

Maybe I was mad.

Or maybe the world was mad.

I needed to understand what I’d walked into by marking Jay.