Drakon 3 - Queen of Dragons by Abe Shana

Author:Abe, Shana
Language: eng
Format: epub

Drakon 3 - Queen of Dragons

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

At the wise and seasoned age of thirteen, Rhys had fallen in love for the first time.

Her name was Zoe. She was the daughter of the village seam-​stress. She had exotic black eyes and hair of the smoothest, purest ivory, and even though he’d known her since they were infants—since they’d been wet-​nursed and day-​schooled together—he realized one spring day that he was truly, utterly in love.

She wanted nothing to do with him.

Rhys fancied himself not ill-​favored. Even then, he was beginning to show signs of the man he would grow into, and finding maidens of the shire to adore him had never proved a challenge before, except, perhaps, when he was compared to his brother. But Zoe Lane was resistant to his every wile. If he brought her roses, she said she preferred wildflowers. If he brought her wildflowers, she said she preferred them left to grow in the downs.

If he brought her sugar, she wanted salt. If he offered to read her poetry—poetry!—she claimed she’d rather go swimming in the lake.

With the other boys.

He’d fretted and stewed all summer, boiling in a sweat of unfulfilled adolescent desires. He’d tried everything he could think of, being kind, being mean, leaving her be, following her about, and one late night he was seated outside her bedroom window, eating blackberries and sucking the juice from his fingers while he tried to figure his next move, when her face appeared by the curtains, a pale oval framed with even paler hair.

They stared at each other; she was still the most beautiful girl he’d ever known. His stomach got upset just looking at her.

“You’re really not going to quit, are you?” She kept her voice low, because, he knew, her mother slept quite near.

“No,” Rhys said.

She nodded, vanished, then came back. She beckoned to him and he’d trotted up to the sill just like an eager puppy.

“Stick this needle through your earlobe,” she said coolly, holding it up between her thumb and forefinger. “All the way through. Then I’ll believe you love me.”

The consequences had been instant, and rather immense. He was already supposed to be confined to quarters from eight at night till eight in the morning; Zoe’s mother had complained more than once about his behavior around her daughter, and he’d been forbidden by the marquess even to speak with her for a full month. But there was no hiding all that blood. It had flooded his clothing and risen up around him in waves, spreading its scent like the worst sort of alarm, and Rhys never knew if it had been luck or planning that his elder brother reached him in the grand hall of Chasen Manor just before his father did.

He remembered Kimber’s face, how his eyes widened as he stepped around the stairway and caught sight of Rhys trying to slip in unnoticed. How he stopped at once, and then turned as Rhys did to see Christoff emerge from his study.

A line of little red dots followed him like a trail along the floor.

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