Page 1 of Gladiator's Bite

Chapter One

Sunny

Teddy’s side of the bed was cold.

I groaned and pulled the pillow over my face. This was going to be weird. He was going to make this weird. Hell! Fuck, italready felt weird. I glanced around the bedroom. For decades, we shared a small bedroom on the Medwin 2 and nothing ever happened between us. We were best friends and were once teammates on a rugby team. Why now? I knew the answer. We were too far from home for too long. There was too much missing here.

“Don’t make it weird,”my dragon yawned into my thoughts.“A romp is a romp.”

Was it just a romp? Teddy got in his emotions about plenty of stuff. Why not sex? Why not us?

There wasn’t an ‘us’. Not that way at least. He was still my best friend. We still had each other’s backs. Surely, he wouldn’t tell anyone we romped. Did the others hear us? Did they pick it up on their freaky-deaky flight link mind reading bullshit thingy? I hoped not.

“Eh, the Starscales won’t care even if they did.”

I sniffed the air. Someone was cooking breakfast, but I wasn’t ready to face Teddy. Whether he was in his emotions about it, regretting it, or wanting to talk it out. I wasn’t ready for any of that bullshit. Instead, I grabbed my phone and checked on my Moonscale Media account from back home. My newest hatched sibling, Acadian, looked so much like both of my parents. I missed them with an ache that I didn’t know was possible.

The first year or so of my life was marked by my flight going to war with a hate group called Mundanes Before Magic. Our house was attacked and after the war was official, I lived with my eldest brother and his mate for nearly a year. Even after the war ended, I spent plenty of time back in Heartville with them. It was how I ended up being friends with Teddy in the first place. His eldest brother lived there with his mate and kids.

I rubbed the heels of my hands against my forehead and switched over to my Starscale Flight Account. Starscale 2 wasaccepting walk-in gladiators today. I grinned, imagining myself tearing into another dragon for fun. Everyone back home called rugby violent, but I was sure these matches would make rugby look tame. My stomach growled, forcing me to roll out of bed and head into the kitchen. I paused in the corridor, silently pleading with him not to make this messier than it had to be.

Sure.

We hooked up.

We’d hooked up with other people before.

This didn’t have to be a big deal.

Taking a deep breath, I swung open the door to the kitchen to find it empty. A plate of food sat on the stove warmer waiting for me, but Teddy wasn’t anywhere in sight. He hadn’t been in a while by the smell of the kitchen. I stood at the stove eating the ‘pig patties’ aka what we called sausage patties back home.

Yep. This was gonna be weird. I scrolled through my Starscale account, but everything was the same ole same ole. That was the biggest issue about living on a world that had few problems. I hatched during an age of chaos and sometimes my cells craved it. At least, it felt that way. Castor brought me along to play diplomat for our home flight but Hush and the other leaders didn’t see much use for me. They already had a treaty with our flight and unless someone went bat shit and broke it from our side, they weren’t worried about what we did or didn’t do.

I scrolled back to the top ready to close the app when I saw the gladiator invitation again. We’d been allowed to participate in every other part of flight life. Would they turn me away at the door of this one? There was only one way to find out. One way to have a good reason not to be here when Teddy came back. Some time apart would make everything less weird.

A flash of tactile memory played over my skin. His chest pressed against my back. His arms wrapped around me and hismouth dragging over the back of my neck. I shook my head. Good sex was always good. It didn’t change how I felt about him and I hoped it hadn’t changed much on his side either. I didn’t want to lose my oldest friend. Last night had been so fucking stupid. So fucking immature. So bloody—not lonely. What was the word for that?

“Filled up,”my dragon teased.

I huffed and a ring of smoke escaped my nose. Alphas didn’t get ‘filled up.’ Only, that wasn’t true. I wasn’t sure what sex lives were like back home. I never thought to ask anyone. It seemed rude. Hell, in Moonscale London it probably would’ve gotten me in a fight. Here, I’d been to the purple district often enough to know that here, alphas did what they wanted as long as they had the consent of everyone involved.

“Is that the question now? Do we want to be a Moonscale or a Starscale?”my dragon mused.

The answer was we were both. Moonscale by birth and Starscale by the bright orange star on my chest. I got lucky there. The newly grown scale was almost the exact shade of orange as the rest of my dragon. It showed up not long after the Medwin 2 touched down on Starscale 1. It meant my mate was somewhere on one of the three Starscale worlds.

“And we’re here because Teddy wanted to come to outer space,”my dragon reminded me.

I grabbed the memo pad from the counter and scribbled down a quick note to let him know that I was off to 2. We hadn’t ventured off 1 yet but it was time to pop that travel cherry.

“Running away again,”my dragon said.

“I haven’t ran away before. It’s like you said we came here because Teddy wanted to go to space.”

“If you say so,”my dragon said.

“Are you a dragon or a sphinx? Because I am not vibing with this riddle.”

He huffed and another ring of smoke escaped my nose.