The Warrior King (Inferno Rising) by Owen, Abigail (online e book reading txt) 📗

those hard-won havens unguarded and at risk of attack. They and their allies couldn’t afford to lose even one of their strongholds.

I could jump through one of those mirrors and disappear.

After all, she was the one controlling the magic.

She could simply change the location in the nearest one and be gone before anyone could stop her.

The gargoyles would take me back.

Maybe. Notoriously closed off from the world, the protectors her dying mother had sent her to tended to not like visitors coming and going.

Not that she was seriously considering returning to them. She’d made a promise.

With a will she didn’t know she possessed until this moment, Meira pulled her shoulders back and forced her feet to move, taking one step, then another. Away from the man at her back and toward the king at the end of the aisle who was meant to be her future.

Standing at the back of the dais, Maul, their massive hellhound, watched the room, eyes glowing red, ever their protector since they’d found him as a puppy. As Brand and Ladon stepped forward to lead her sisters to their places at either side of the steps to the dais on which the throne sat, they cleared the way to Meira’s own future mate.

Strong and tall, with wisdom in his eyes, Gorgon bore himself with a regal authority that, after ages on the throne, was probably as natural as blinking. He didn’t need to be dressed in the formal onyx suit—detailed with intricate embroidery in shimmering threads, again of all the colors of the dragon clans, matching the design of the jewels in her gown—to project an air of utter control and power.

Despite the fact that he should scare the hell out of her, over the last few months, he’d been nothing but kind. She’d come to genuinely like this man—a fact that she saw as a good start.

If Meira was honest with herself, Samael intimidated her more. Something about the way he held himself—leashed violence. Leashed emotions, more like. Then there was the way he looked at her. Only twice since she’d been here had she caught that particular look, gaze full of an emotion she couldn’t pin down—or maybe didn’t want to identify, because she suspected it too closely mirrored ones of her own that she’d cut off and buried deep. Even so, those emotions in his gaze had reached out and twisted around her. Binding. Compelling.

Stop it.

Gorgon must’ve seen her expression through her sheer veil, lips pinched with nerves and gaze perhaps a bit twitchy, because his eyes crinkled at the corners in a smile meant for her alone. He smiled easily. She’d come to like that about him. However, he held his ground, a strong dragon shifter king who waited for his prize to come to him.

Maul cocked his head, giving a doggie whine she took to mean a sort of support for her. However, he didn’t show her any images with his telepathic means of communication, merely stood quietly.

As she took those final steps to Gorgon’s side, he took her by the hands. Quickly she remembered to douse the fire on her skin there. Kasia had said Brand could touch her fire before they’d mated, but, then again, they’d mated successfully. Better not to risk it in front of all these people.

Gorgon rarely exhibited any emotion around her, not that Meira could sense, anyway, almost as though his emotions didn’t run deep enough, or were held so tightly in check none leaked out. Different from the wall his captain put up, though.

Even now, she could only make out the faint traces of power that lingered around him. And something else. An astute kind of judgment, maybe? Patience? She still wasn’t sure. All she knew was—regardless of today’s bout of nerves—around Gorgon, she personally felt calm. As though she could lay her troubles at his feet.

“You wore my color,” he murmured.

Meira managed to smile and nod. No sacrificial, virginal lamb all in white. “My color now.”

A blip of satisfaction reached her as he squeezed her hands in appreciation. “Are you still sure?” A question he’d asked her several times over these months of preparation.

Meira shored up her own mental blocks against the emotions swirling throughout the room, including her own, and smiled back, trying her best to make it appear confident. He would care for her, be gentle with her—that at least she knew. “I’m sure.”

He searched her gaze, she wasn’t sure for what, then with a nod, turned them both to face the sacra, the obsidian urn that featured in the start of an hour of various rituals, rites, and oaths.

After presenting her mate the chest of gifts, which he would open later, she and Gorgon each burned sacrifices of their old lives to the gods—a lock of hair, vials of blood, old letters from loved ones. Meira said a symbolic good-bye to her family, making eye contact with Angelika at the back of the room with the wolf shifters even as she kissed the foreheads of the two sisters allowed to stand up with her. Ladon and Brand led their mates away, no longer part of the ceremony as Meira joined her new family.

Finally, after other traditions were observed, Gorgon gently lifted the veil over her head and kissed her. Again, she doused her flames over that swath of skin. A pleasant kiss, tender, if not exciting.

At her back, a blast of darkness, like a bomb had been set off in the room and the shock waves struck only her, made Meira gasp.

As though a wall had collapsed under the onslaught, Samael’s emotions pummeled her like a hurricane that had beaten down on a tiny island where her family had lived for a short time when she was a child, whipping at her, threatening to peel away every layer of protection to expose her, raw and vulnerable, to the elements.

Confusion, rejection, need, desperation, despair, possessiveness…but also determination and resignation.

A combination that didn’t make a lick of sense.

She dared to flick