Page 9 of The Dragon's Omega
We hit a stalemate for a minute or two, me scowling at that scale, him glowering at me, until finally, finally, Vidar angled his chest closer. It rose and fell in slow, stuttering breaths, the tip of the busted scale just close enough to grab.
“Uh, okay.” I blew on my chilly hands and rubbed them together. “I’m going to grab onto the scale that’s sticking out.” I pointed to it when I realized he had shifted somewhat so he could fully stare down at me from the beach. “And I think it’ll be best if you just, uh…” My vague circling fingers made him rumble. “Roll onto your back, maybe?”
He made his feelings clear with a huff that felt like the worst of Cali heat in the dead of summer. When our gazes clashed, his narrowed, and I threw my arms out.
“What? There’s no one here but us. No one’ll see your little tummy.”
His scent pressed me from all sides, a multi-pronged attack of bonfire smoke, cypress, and amber. Dominance. Alpha strength. The invisible hands were back, caressing my throat, the valley between my breasts, over my ticklish stomach and down to?—
“Stop being distracting,” I snapped, trying and failing to go for an alpha bark of my own. Whatever came out only seemed to make this dragon chuckle, but the pressure eased. “Look, if I hurt you, I don’t mean to. I just want to help. So, I’m sorry in advance?”
Unlike most of the eligible Cedar Cove alphas I met in the last six months, Vidar didn’t seem to mind a petulant omega who pushed back against his bullshit. Still, this was a dragon. There was alpha, and then, apparently, there was him.
I probably shouldn’t push my luck too hard, right?
Another long beat passed under his fiery scrutiny, until finally he eased forward so that I didn’t have to jump to grab the scale. No, I reached it on my tiptoes, salty ocean water lapping up my sides. As soon as I had both hands locked tight, Vidar rolled. Squealing, I clung on for dear life, lifted out of the water and flattened across his chest in no time. He moved carefully, slowly, but it still took a minute for me to find my shaky sea legs on a dragon’s chest.
Once I was up and more or less balanced, I pinched myself. Hard. Then I did it again, harder. The third time made me wince, but I was a stickler for checking my work in sets of three. It only felt right to test my reality with three pinches, just to confirm I wasn’t, in fact, dreaming—or, more horribly, passed out back at the warehouse in the wake of all that Synn attention.
Nope. Not dreaming. Not disassociated. Here.
This is real.
He was real, even if my heart struggled to accept what my body already knew.
Vidar was real—and he… was mine?
No, no, not the time. Focus on the task at hand.
Clearing my throat, I hiked up my dress and squatted, then elbowed the weird scale aside as far as it would go. Beneath, in the meat of his chest, I squinted when I spotted something like a blackhead, and my frown only deepened upon reaching in and discovering it was solid metal. Vidar growled the second I made contact, the vibration humming under my bare feet and reverberating up my shins.
“I see it,” I told him, half shouting so I didn’t take him by surprise. “I’m going to pull it…” I reached in again, ignoring the fact that my arm was bumping muscle all the way down. His body was an inferno, like diving into a hot oven. “On three!” I curled my fist around the blunt end of whatever was in there, surprised that I could almost touch fingers. It wasn’t big. More like a thorn in a lion’s paw, actually. “One, two?—”
I yanked on three, and Vidar bellowed. The force of his exhale, the violent shudder of his pain, sent me tumbling over his side, but he caught me in one massive claw before I hit the water back-first and lobbed me back up.
“I know, I know! I’m sorry!” I slid down his chest until I caught myself on two of his good scales, then clambered back into place like this was just another beginner rock wall at the gym. “I’m sorry it’s painful, Vidar. I’m trying to be careful, I promise.”
Sweat beaded my brow. Heat dribbled down my back and joined the slick on my thighs. My perfume pumped like a force field, but I stayed the course. When I tried again, he held still, but he could only swallow his agonized groans for so long. Every single one was a dagger to my heart, and I blinked back the sting of fresh tears as I worked. This stupid thing was coming out. I refused to make him suffer for nothing.
But whatever it was, was in there good, and by the time I had wrenched it up a foot or so, my back, shoulders, and arms ached. My core shivered from the exertion, and I glared inside for another look, determined to find a better way to?—
“Oh.” My eyes narrowed. “What the fuck?”
I wasn’t exactly a master on the subject, but I had added enough bows, arrows, and quivers to cover art and graphic design to recognize fletching feathers when I saw them. They stuck out from all sides, spiked and metal, angled for maximum pain if you pulled them against the grain.
Sadistic assholes.
People talked about omega wrath, that under the right circumstances, it was more lethal than alpha rage. I thought I’d felt it before, first when Mom died, then when Dad chose the bottle in his grief over me and Louis, and then after my younger brother’s accident, hit by a drunk driver on the way to fetch Dad from a bar he should not have been drinking at. Every time, every tragedy, I thought, this is it, this is the wrath we learned about at the academy, that was hotly debated between traditionalists and modernists on podcasts—that, at our core, we omegas could be furious harpies if pushed hard enough.
I had big feelings about the nightmares that obliterated our family these last eight years, and the emotion now didn’t take away from that.
But it hit different. The idea that a bunch of hunters attacked Vidar because they wanted his goddamn treasure, then stuck him in the heart with this awful arrow, designed to inflict max damage on the way out…
Well, I didn’t feel like the nurturer anymore.
No, as I pushed at the bloody insides of the wound, not caring how hot it got, how much it burned, I swore I tasted blood.
Alphas were supposed to be the violent ones, but suddenly I craved violence. As I wiggled and tugged, I yearned to inflict it.