Page 5 of The Ice Prince's Fated Mate
As my dragon continued to try to free itself from my mental grasp, I loaded up on memories ofwhyI didn’t let myself feel such pleasure anymore.
The overload of trauma and agony that flooded me was too much for my dragon. It couldn’t handle the knowledge of what had been stolen from me, let alonehow. It trumpeted and roared in anger and fear and pain, and I didn’t stop it.
Maybe I should have let it out, like Anna clearly had done with hers. But I couldn’t. I wasn’t like her. I had memories of a dark room, and the smell of stale beer and straps that cut so deep into my wrists they bled, or …
I surged upward as the dragon retreated inside of me, the moment of clarity enough to lunge for the door and fling it open.
A surprised face appeared, narrowly missing getting hit. I recoiled from the olive-skinned stranger. Sulfur and ash filled my nose.
Fire dragon.
I inhaled to scream instinctively for Dirk as the Red reached for me, his claws extending from one hand. A wicked grin split his face.
Three
Dirk
The nearest Redwasn’t prepared for what hit him. I was an avalanche of alpha power simply looking for a conduit. He was the outlet. Fire blazing from his fists and smoke curling from his nose, he charged, opening wide to exhale and bathe me in flames.
I launched myself at him, closing instead of evading, and shoved my fist into his mouth. The blade on the end of my forearm snapped as it punched out the back of his neck. Then I unleashed a wave of cold that turned his insides to ice and killed the nascent flames before he could use them. The Red went stiff as a board, his eyes bulging as he tried to draw air with lungs that were frozen solid.
The hammer blow to his sternum was the true killer, crunching through bone to shatter the organs into tiny pieces. Leaving his brain to catch up and realize he was dead, I resumed my headlong charge for the chalet and what mattered most. My mate.
“Die, ice-scum!” A Red snarled, flinging a skin-burning ball of flame that I had to duck under or be charred, the heat melting away my ice-armor.
“Show me the way,” I grunted, reaching him and lowering my shoulder to hit him square in the stomach with every ounce of force my headlong charge had behind it.
With an explosiveoof,the fire dragon shifter hurtled backward, smashing into the side of the chalet. Glass shattered and wood splintered from the impact.
I leapt through the air at the fallen attacker, clenching my fists together. Frost engulfed both my hands, and as I descended, a spike of blue-white ice formed around them. I landed, driving the makeshift stake through the Red’s neck and snapping it off.
There was no time to pause. Bulldozing my way through the broken wall, I beelined for the kitchen.
“Ella!” I roared, wanting her to know that help was nearly there. That the Reds who had attacked her were about to meet their reckoning for daring to lay a hand on my mate.
My dragon was in the driver’s seat as we skidded to a halt in the kitchen, looking around for her. She was gone. No screaming, no signs of struggle other than the spilled frying pan. No blood.
I forced myself to take a long, deep breath in, using my dragon’s senses to help sort through the various scents in the air and figure out how many Reds had taken her and which way.
A burst of rich jasmine followed by a wave of bold amber rushed through my system like I’d just been hit by a blast of lightning. Every muscle fiber twitched and my eyes shot open. It was perfection. Utterly addictive. I wanted to drink deep of it a second time.
In that moment I knew that for all the remaining centuries of my life, I would never smell something so deliciously wonderful ever again. Compared to the vibrancy of Ella’s mate scent, the world was a dull lump of coal. Without it, I was nothing.
My fangs were down, stabbing my lower lip. The dragon inside me demanded we find her and claim her. She had to be ours.
Through the haze of mate need and rigid lust that had me stiff as a brellwood board, a section of my brain noted no other dragon scents in the air. No Reds, no sulfur or ash in the air. Just Ella.
So where had she gone?
Alarm for our mate’s whereabouts overpowered the thrill of discovering her mate scent, propelling us in the direction of the back of the chalet, where the missing rear door was a dead giveaway.
I burst through the empty frame, hot on the trail, only to come to a standstill as a Red came to his feet, blood gushing from his nose.
Drawing back a fist, I was too slow and moving the wrong direction to end the fight with one blow. The Red was strong and fast, inside my swinging arc. We went to the ground in a tangle of limbs. The air around us grew superheated as he unleashed flames, but I countered that with a ball of frost that stunned him.
I slammed my head into his nose with a satisfyingcrunch, breaking it further. He swiped at my face with a bloodied hand. But it wasn’t his blood. My dragon lost its mind as we realized who it belonged to—Ella.
A wave of darkness that I’d long kept buried broke free of my self-imposed restraints. I hauled the Red to his feet and slapped his face back and forth twice in rapid succession to stun him further. My other hand clenched tightly around a foot-long length of ice that formed under my mental command.
