Poor guy. He was overwhelmed with emotion. Gasping and choking in his cell.

She grabbed the bars, determined to be with him, only to suck in a breath as the metal singed the skin on her hands. She snatched her poor abused appendages back and glared at the offending bars.

Stupid dracinore. She’d learned about the metal at her mother’s knee. Xylia, the Silver Sept’s resident alchemist, possessed a tiny sample. Deka still remembered the burning lesson when she’d grabbed it from her mother’s worktable with her chubby fist and popped it into her mouth—she’d gone through a stage of swallowing anything that her mother told her not to touch. It led to a few visits to the ER and some X-rays that she’d framed on the walls of her hoard.

Mother had made her spit it out then gargle a saline solution to neutralize the effects. Deka remembered trying not to cry—because, according to cousin Gilly, only sissy babies cried.

Holding Deka on her lap and rocking her, Mother had proceeded to explain why it hurt so badly—worse even than the bleach she’d swallowed in an attempt to make her blood the same color as her hair.

“That chunk of metal is dracinore, baby girl. The most dangerous metal known to our kind.”

“It burns,” she lisped.

“It does. And it’s harder to recover from because it affects us on a cellular level, impeding our rapid healing ability. You can blame this metal for our downfall. Someone gave large amounts of dracinore to our enemies, and they made swords and arrows out of it. Not expecting it, we fell by the hundreds to their weapons.”

“Why do that?” she asked. ‘Why’ being her favorite word ever, along with, ‘Hey, Babette, wanna jump off this?’

“Why else but to kill the greatest species ever. The other races have always envied our kind. Humans, especially, feared us. Rather than serve us as the superior species, they chose to murder us into extinction. They almost succeeded. But despite our grievous losses, we rallied. We became wilier than the hunters. For decades we hid from the deadly weapons, made the humans think we were extinct. But meanwhile, we plotted. Our ancestors infiltrated the castles of those who attacked us. They collected all the dracinore weapons. Every last one of them.”

“Where are the swords now?” little Deka asked—because a mighty blade to smite anyone, especially that hateful cousin Peter with his braying laugh, sounded like just the thing.

“Gone. A person with magic opened a rift and tossed that nasty metal back into the dimension from whence it came. Except for this one piece.” Mother held it up with tongs.

Then slapped Deka’s hand when she grabbed for it.

The lesson from it all? Don’t eat rocks, and supposedly only teeny-tiny pieces of dracinore remained.

Until now. Cue the ominous music.

Apparently, someone had access to the dimension where it came from and had brought some back because the bars of her cell were covered in it.

The worst part? The stuff didn’t just burn. It had some strange magical attribute that made shifting into her dragon almost impossible and nullified a dragon’s strength. Even if she’d been able to bear the painful touch, she wouldn’t be able to bend the bars.

It meant that, for the moment, she was—gasp—no better than a human.

The shame. Speaking of shame…someone in the cell across from her didn’t have any.

“What happened to your clothes?” Not that she minded his nakedness. Despite his Grizzly Adams appearance, Samael had nothing to hide. His lean body—leaner than she liked to see—boasted nicely toned muscles, and he was rather… “Mind moving your hands? I’m trying to check you out.”

He cupped his groin and glared. “I didn’t give you permission to ogle.”

“Are you going to try and give me orders?” She clapped her hands and bounced. “How exciting. Mother and the aunties do that all the time, which means I’m predisposed to disobey. But with you, I don’t know if I should listen and please you.” Wink. “Or disobey and have you punish me.” Wink. Wink. The possibilities almost melted her girly bits.

“Do you ever shut up?”

“When my mouth is full. Why not move that hand so we can see if you have enough to accomplish that.”

The black look didn’t seem keen on cooperating.

How adorable. Much better than the woebegone heap she’d noted upon first entering the dungeon. A prison that came straight out of a B-movie, and her without the ability to take a picture for her memory album.

“So when do we get fed around here? I am starving. The bar I got drunk at didn’t even have peanuts. Talk about cheap.”

“We get one bowl of gruel a day.”

“Gruel, as in soupy kind of oatmeal stuff with chunks.” She shook her head. “That won’t do. I didn’t build this body on diet crap.” She gestured to her frame, pleased to note he admired her properly. “We’ll have to order in. Are you in the mood for pizza or Chinese?”

“You do realize this is a prison. We can’t call out for food. Nor make demands. This isn’t fucking Club Med.”

“As if Mother would let me stay there. Club Med is for humans.” Dragons stayed at special resorts, the kind that offered scale scrubbing and fang sharpening.

“I’m done dealing with you.” He turned to walk away, showing off those superb glutes of his. He acknowledged her admiring whistle with a finger. Probably the one he planned to pleasure her with when they escaped their dastardly cells.

How sweet of him to tease her.

Now as to their escape…

I might have bitten off more than I can chew.

Nothing wrong with a big mouthful, and the joke was on him. She’d already seen his equipment when he wasn’t paying attention. At repose, his dick was a thick slumbering beast. She wondered what it would take to get it to rouse and ravish.

Despite his dismissal—which, hello, she’d not condoned, so it didn’t count—she continued to speak.

“What do they offer for entertainment around here?”

Dead silence.

“Are there any other prisoners, or is it just you and me, stud?”

The man stubbornly kept quiet. Playing hard to get. Her crotch practically exploded with excitement.

“So you never said how they caught you.”

More silence.

It didn’t deter her. Just because he’d disappeared into his dark corner didn’t mean she’d let him mope. Let him bask in the ray of sunshine that was her personality. Now that she’d drawn him into her orbit—the one where everything revolved around her—he would soon snap out of his funk and return to his evil overlord self.

“Ooh, is this a guessing game? I’ll start. You got captured after a mighty battle fending off dozens of wyverns single-handedly until they overwhelmed you with sheer numbers.”

He didn’t reply.

“They sent a doppelganger, wearing my adorable face, meant to fool you into trusting her so that she could get close enough to drug you.”

A snort from the shadows. “I never said you were adorable.”

“You didn’t have to.” It went without saying. And lo and behold, he’d replied. “You must have marched valiantly into captivity in order to spare me from the wrath of this Suzie person.”

“You seem to have me mistaken for someone noble. In my world, it’s all about me.”

It used to be all about you. You’ll soon learn, stud, just whom you exist for.

“I’m running out of options. What does that leave? Ooh, I’ve got it. Your brother, Remiel, overcome with emotion at your reunification was also perturbed by your existence, and since he could not kill you, he handed you over to Suzie so he didn’t have to get his hands dirty.”

Another snort. “Remiel would have killed me himself given a chance. Alas for him, he never got one.”

“Aliens descended—”

He interrupted. “It was my own stupidity that led me here. I was angry and upset after Sue-Ellen—”

Cough. “Hussy.” Cough.

“—chose my brother.”

“No need for that pale imitation of a dragon. You’ve got the real thing here, stud muffin.” She skimmed her hands over her curves and, while she couldn’t see his face, imagined he avidly stared. She would if the roles were reversed.

“Do you want to hear what happened or not?”

“Carry on.” She gave an imperious wave.

He sighed. “As I said, I was pissed and wanted back what my brother stole from me—”

“Which, according to what I heard, you took from him.” Such a delightful man, taking from others to enrich himself. Deka lived by the same rule. And look at that. They were both so misunderstood because of it.

He growled, a low, rumbly sound that almost had her tearing off her clothes and shouting, “Take me.”

“Save the growling for later. I want to hear the rest.”

“The rest involves me getting a phone call saying I had allies in Europe and instructing me to meet some people at an airfield so they could smuggle me out of the country. Like an idiot, I believed them. I even got in the box on my own, inhaled the gas, figuring a nap would be nice. When I woke, I found myself here, a prisoner of my own stupidity.”

“It was a plausible story. There are factions within the Septs that would support your claim to the throne.”

“Is the Silver Sept one of them?”

She snickered. “Not the North American branch. As if Auntie Zahra would follow anything less than full-blooded Golden. Even if Remiel were to disappear, she’d support her daughter’s husband first.”

“You speak of Brandon, the swamp gator? He was created in a lab.” No mistaking the sneer in his tone.

“Yeah, but he’s family. You’re not.” Yet.

“You’re right. I have no family because I fucked it over. I gambled and lost.” Such a defeated reply. It belonged to anyone but her evil overlord.

“Why haven’t you escaped?”

“Why? Are you fucking kidding me?” That drew him from the shadows, an angry naked man stalking to the bars so that he might glare at her. “Do you think I haven’t tried? I burned my hands to the bone trying to yank these bars apart.” He held his palms up and showed her the traces of scars. “Every time that fat fucking jailer opened my cell, I tried to overpower him and escape.”

“Don’t tell me Jabba is stronger than a Golden dragon.”

“Of course, not,” he snorted with clear disdain. “But he has access to potions that knock me on my ass. Then he slaps on the cuffs, and I’m no better than a puny human.”

“I don’t know how they can live with themselves being so weak,” she said, nodding in agreement.

“The weakness makes it impossible to escape, and each attempt results in punishment.”

“Punishment is fleeting. Think of the agony you will deliver to your enemies when you escape.”

“The punishment fucking hurts, and thoughts of vengeance don’t do shit when your mind is being flayed from the inside.”

Despite his earlier reluctance to speak, he now proved a fount of information. “Who is holding us captive? Who dares to invoke the wrath of the Silver Sept? We shall strip the skin from his flesh. Eat his organs one by one as he silently screams.” Because a proper torture started with the tongue and ended with the eyes when there was nothing left to see.

“First off, it’s a she, not a he. The suzerain is a female, but I’m not sure of what race. She is powerful, though, more powerful than you can imagine.”

“Is she the same person who was screwing with the Crimson Sept?” The imposter had taken over the high priestess’s body and caused all kinds of havoc. The shame of it would keep the Crimsons at the lower echelons of power for decades to come.

“She has the ability to take on any appearance she wishes. Even the one she shows me is probably not her true visage.”

“Why does she want you?” She shook her head. “Never mind. Of course, she wants you. A virile Golden dragon in his prime and a contender for the throne.”

“Fuck the throne. The damned thing has brought me nothing but trouble.”

“Don’t be so hasty.” Because Deka really had her heart set on a crown. The heifers back home would be so jealous.

“I’m tired of all the politics and games. Ever since my birth, it’s been ‘Samael, do this.’ ‘Samael, say that.’ Between Anastasia leading me around by the dick, and Parker with his goddamned experiments, I’ve yet to live my own life. To make my own choices. I’m tired of being a puppet to others.”

“Then stop.”

His gaze narrowed. “You say that like it’s easy. As if I have a choice.”

“Because you do. You’re a dragon. And not just a dragon, a Golden one. No matter how you were born, or who the other half of you is, you belong to the most powerful line of dragons. You can literally do anything you want. And short of a full-scale war, there’s nothing your brother, or even the Septs, can do.”

“Maybe, once upon a time, I could have, but now…” His shoulders slumped. “I am nothing.”

Before she could slap that morose expression from his face with words, the ceiling overhead rumbled. She peered upward and managed to say, “What the hell?” before water gushed from the ceiling, tons of it pouring out of tiny holes perforated overhead. She sputtered under the torrential downpour, skin soaked, garments sodden, her hair, already suffering from a kidnapping and bar hopping, a soggy mess.

It lasted long enough to cleanse every pore she had, and a few she was sure just appeared for the rainfall.

When it was done, stopping as suddenly as it had started, she glared at the ceiling. “That was rude.”

“That was a sign.”

“You mean that’s happened before?” she asked, noting how nice his skin looked when slick.

“Not often, but when it does, it only means one thing.”

“And that thing would be that Suzie wants us to drown? Grow gills?”

A grim expression pulled his features taut. “It means the suzerain wants me clean.”

“Well, that’s nice of her to care for her prisoners like that, but couldn’t she install a shower? Maybe heat the water a little.”

“She doesn’t care about our comfort. She only bathes me because of what she wants.”

“And what does she want?” Deka asked.

He didn’t reply, and in the silence she heard their jailor approach, keys jingling at his waist, a slow, haunting whistle at his blubbery lips.

“Nothing.” Samael stared downward, shoulders hunched. A shadow of the brash man she once knew.

“Surely, it can’t be that bad.” He didn’t look too abused unless one counted the fact that he’d lost weight. He bore no fresh scars other than on his hands. Had all his limbs.

“There are things worse than death,” he claimed, holding out his hands to their jailor, sliding both of them through a single set of bars so that Jabba might lock the special wristbands around them.

“What does she want from you?” she asked again as Jabba entered the cell and unlatched the collar at his neck.

Not answering, Samael meekly exited his cell and began a slow, plodding walk in front of their jailor. She could almost feel the shame rolling off him in waves.

“Where are you taking him? What does Suzie want?”

Jabba had no compunction and told her. More like he hummed it, and it was only after they were gone, as Deka repeated the familiar refrain to herself that she grasped the title of the tune.

Why is he singing, Just a Gigolo?

Then the light bulb went off.

“That bitch!” Suzie was pimping out her man.