Chapter 1
I scrubbed my lips raw with a wet towel, but the blood wouldn’t stop. The metallic taste filled my mouth, rolled down my throat in a hot stream, flooding everything inside me with the bitterness of married life. For the tenth time I spat the red liquid into the basin and tried to steady my heartbeat.
I turned on the tap and shoved my trembling fingers under the icy water. I had a reprieve. Not a long one, but thank the Goddess even for that. While my dear husband tumbled around with his fated one, he wouldn’t be tormenting me. Isn’t that happiness for a girl who has no one in the world but a dragon husband?
To the whole world, I belong to him, and anything a dragon does to his fated mate cannot, by definition, be wrong. Only I’m not his fated one. And that’s where all my troubles come from.
I shook my head, driving off the unwanted self-pity, and shut off the water only when I’d stopped feeling my fingers. It didn’t make anything easier. Reluctantly I lifted my head and looked at my reflection.
“Well now… A real beauty queen, Yasya, no denying it. This is what living with a dragon does to you. A few more nights like this and I can head off to meet my ancestors. Nobody’s going to cry about it anyway.” I smirked at my reflection, and the pain in my split lip and nose made me wince.
However much I tried to put on a brave face, the fear kept rolling in. It cramped my whole body. I turned into a vegetable, incapable of thought or movement, able only to wait for him to come back and hurt me again. Which is what he’d been doing for a whole year now. Most often my husband called this torment “making love.” Though I always believed he was punishing me for what I’m not. For his own inability to justify his obsession. Because I never once cried or screamed, no matter how much pain he caused me.
Or because I still hadn’t given up, and was trying with everything I had to scrub off this cursed mark of fate.
Today, for instance, that was exactly what I’d been punished for. Sitting in a room at the inn, I’d come up with a new way to be rid of the cursed pattern on my forearm. Burn it out and be done with it, and stop obeying a sadist.
But Loran Sin-Meres sensed it all and burst into my room before I could do anything. A dragon with water magic, and in practice a Bel-Warden. Put simply: an officer of the administration who oversaw the crossings on the desert canals. He was beside himself with rage when he saw what I meant to do.
He stunned me with a slap. And then explained, in terms I couldn’t miss, that I am his property and he is my master.
I hate him! I hate dragons and their obsession with fated mates! He destroyed me from the first second he laid eyes on me! Wiped out my family, ruined the estate, burned through the entire inheritance. Shut me away in a monastery for four years, and then took me and left me to die slowly on a stone floor.
I hate him!
Rage got the better of reason. I lost control of my emotions, and for a second my secret slipped loose. Below the fourth-floor window came a snarl, then a cry. It hit me like lightning. I imagined the fury that poor traveler must have felt, and was ashamed of my own weakness. I put the flimsy mental shield back up and massaged the bridge of my nose.
“Hold on, Yasya! That’s all you need, for Loran to find out about your gift. Then he really will take you apart piece by piece and hide you in his cellars.” I quickly smeared salve on the fresh bruises, the way I always did, and froze halfway to the bedroom when voices came through the wall.
The creaking of the bed and the dragoness’s straining moans had finally stopped, which didn’t cheer me much either. Or rather, it dropped me into animal terror. But I didn’t move, listening impatiently to her conversation with my beloved husband:
“Loran, I’m tired of pretending to be your secretary! When are we finally telling everyone I’m your fated mate? Me! We’ve been rattling along the road for a week now like some family of hermits. Me, you, and her, the fake fated one you keep dragging everywhere for some reason, humiliating me! I’m your fated one, not her! And enough of this performance about how that simpleton’s father left you to look after her! I need respect from my future husband, not a love triangle!”
Oh really? I snorted inwardly. Then take him! And leave me in peace at last! I mentally seconded the capricious little voice of my husband’s mistress.
