Chapter 1
Pendragon Castle,
North Wales
“Grigor, let me the fuck out of here, before I burn the whole bloody castle down!” Smoke was already starting to plume from Deryk’s flared nostrils.
“Stone doesn’t burn, Deryk,” his eldest brother reminded him mildly. “And until you calm down, you’re staying exactly where you are.”
Exactly where Deryk was happened to be a dungeon in the rock-hewn below-ground level of Pendragon Castle in North Wales, home to the eight dragon-shifter Pendragon brothers.
“I need to get out of here.” His eyes glowed golden as he glared at Grigor. “By the Goddess, I need to be free to find my mate and claim her!”
“And therein lies the problem with releasing you.” His brother made himself comfortable on a stool on the other side of the metal bars fronting the otherwise rock-sided dungeon Deryk was currently locked in. “I understand exactly what you want,” Grigor soothed. “But if you find your mate when you’re in this state, you’re going to either frighten the hell out of her. Or kill her.”
Her.
Deryk’s fated mate.
The woman he needed to give the mating bite while fucking her, if he wasn’t to one day shift into his dragon and remain that way.
Deryk’s talons scraped across metal as he gripped the bars fronting the dungeon. He wasn’t able to shift completely in the small cell, but he’d done a partial shift, and his hands were huge, tipped with lethal talons that ached to rip something apart.
Not his mate, of course. Deryk would never do anything to hurt her.
Biting her while fucking her isn’t going to hurt her?
Well… Maybe, at first. But it was necessary.
She might not see it that way.
Deryk wasn’t sure if he was soothing his dragon or the other way round. Either way, one of them was seeing reason. He had a feeling it wasn’t him.
Having been born in the late fifth century, the first thousand years of Deryk’s existence as a warrior and dragon shifter had been filled with battles and bloodshed, which satisfied his dragon’s needs as well as his own. But since the humans started to come round to the idea of considering themselves civilized, leaders of the human world, those battles hadn’t been so plentiful.
Civilization was overrated, Deryk had decided after the first two hundred years of being reined back, and the last three hundred had become nothing more than a torture of boredom he and his dragon had to get through.
There had been a couple of world wars last century they could get their teeth—and talons—into, of course. But otherwise, he and his brothers now concentrated their attention, through the legitimate security business they owned and ran, on ridding the world of its scumbags and bullies.
For the last fifty years, Deryk’s biggest battle had been against allowing his dragon to take over completely. A battle that could only be halted by finding his mate. It was a battle he lost a little more each day he didn’t find her.
Once he became dragon and stayed that way, his brothers would have no choice but to put him down. They couldn’t allow a feral dragon to be on the loose, indiscriminately killing whoever the hell he felt like killing. Because when the dragon rage took possession of him, Deryk wanted to kill everyone.
Grigor and Bryn had only just managed to get him inside the castle this time, before his anger caused him to shift into an almost twenty-foot-tall dragon and he scared the shit out of the locals. They could all use their dragon compulsion to block those memories, of course, but only if Deryk didn’t harm or kill someone while he was in that rage.
His brother Nathaniel had recently found his mate. A human. But one who possessed enough dragon DNA in her blood to be able to withstand the bite of a dragon mating, which a normal human woman couldn’t. Chloe was now pregnant with the first dragon young to be born to the Pendragon dragons in the fifteen hundred years of their existence.
It had given the seven remaining brothers the hope they might find their own mate in the human world too. For Deryk, on the brink of becoming dragon and remaining that way, it had only made the torture harder to bear, knowing that his mate could be close and yet she still remained elusive.
“There’s something I need you and Bryn to do.”
Deryk forced himself to refocus on Grigor. “A mission?”
“Not as such, no,” his brother said slowly. “Vlad Romanov has invited some of us to go to St. Petersburg for a visit.”
“A visit?” Deryk repeated doubtfully. “As in a ‘come on over for afternoon tea’ sort of visit?” Six months ago, the seven brothers of the Romanov clan of dragons had come to Pendragon Castle so the two clans could exchange knowledge and join forces in the search for their elusive mates. Apparently, the Russian dragons now required that some of the Pendragon family pay a return visit to them.
Grigor looked his usual unamused self at Deryk’s levity. “We all need to learn more about our two clans, dragon born and dragon made, and everyone else but you and Bryn is busy right now.”
The seven Russian dragons had been born to a single mated pair. With a surname like Romanov, Deryk was guessing the Russian dragons had also once been related to the royal family assassinated in the revolution during the early part of last century. With typical dragon guile, the Romanovs had managed to evade being involved in the slaughter of that revolution. But, like the Pendragons, none of the seven Russian dragons had so far managed to find his mate.
The Pendragons brothers had also been born, but of a human father and the ten Welsh goddesses capable of birthing sons who could shift into dragons. Two of their brothers had perished, Gideon over fourteen hundred years ago, and Rufus during the days of the Victorian dragon hunters. But of the eight remaining, only Nathaniel had so far found a mate.
If both clans were to survive, they had agreed they needed to join forces and so double their efforts in the search for those mates.
Deryk raised one blond brow. “You want to send me and Bryn on a diplomatic visit with the Russians?” Deryk was unstable at worst, and sarcastic and rude at best, but Bryn was… Well, Bryn was Bryn. Gruff, arrogant, and chauvinistic to the point some woman was probably going to end up wanting to shoot him if or when he tried to mate her. Not that a bullet would kill Bryn. Only having their heads chopped off with their own sword could kill the Pendragon brothers. But being shot certainly wouldn’t improve Bryn’s taciturn temperament any. Especially if that bullet came from his mate.
“I don’t want to send the two of you anywhere,” Grigor admitted. “But as I said, everyone else is occupied with other work right now, and Dylan needs to remain here so that he can monitor Chloe through her pregnancy.”
None of them knew yet whether the young would be born human or dragon. So far it looked human on ultrasound, but there were still a couple of months to go, and the baby could shift to dragon before the birth.
Deryk frowned. “And where are you going to be?”
“I’m going to my nest for a while.”
All the brothers had their own “nests.” Usually a cave somewhere remote and undetectable by humans. The brothers had lived together for fifteen hundred years, but as dragons were naturally solitary creatures, they all had their own private cave somewhere in the four corners of the world. It was where they kept their most valuable treasures, and somewhere they could also be alone and completely dragon for a few days. Grigor’s nest, predictably, happened to be a cave in the wilds of Alaska.
“Why?” Deryk probed.
Grigor rose to his intimidating height of an inch over six and a half feet. “Mind you own fucking business!”
Deryk studied his eldest brother through narrowed lids. Grigor had untidy and overlong dark hair, eyes so dark a brown they almost looked black, and features that looked as rock-hewn as this dungeon.
He also noted the fierce glitter in the darkness of Grigor’s eyes. The tightness of his jaw. Hands clenched into fists, the talons threatening to burst free from his fingertips. Deryk recognized those signs only too well.
“How close are you?” he prompted softly.
“Very,” Grigor bit out between clenched teeth. “But I would appreciate it if you would keep that information to yourself,” he added bleakly.
Goddess knows Deryk didn’t wish his own torment on anyone, least of all his eldest brother and their leader. “When do you want Bryn and me to leave?”
Some of Grigor’s tension eased. “As soon as you’re ready. I’ll contact Vlad before I go and tell him to expect the two of you.”
Vladimir Romanov. Didn’t get any more Russian than that. The leader of the Russian clan was also one of the most arrogant bastards Deryk had ever met.
Which should make this a very interesting visit.