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“That’s not true.”

“Go look. Then get ready to run properly this time, because he knows we’re getting closer to end game. He knows he’s on the verge of losing control somehow. That’s why he spanked your ass publicly. He’s trying to make a point to you and to everyone else. It’s too little, too late.”

I am sore and hurt, and so is Nox, just in a different way.

“Are you a prisoner here too?”

“My mother was brought here as a prisoner, bred as a prisoner, and she died giving birth to me. They act like a human is a loved mate. She is nothing more than a vessel for seed that will likely destroy her when it emerges. My father went mad with grief. It’s a long story, but it all amounts to the same thing in the end. This place tells the same story over and over again. Steal a human, mate her, breed a royal heir with human blood—because human blood is powerful in its own right, not that they’d ever admit that. You deserve to be free. Ornix does not deserve to hoard the power that this realm holds.”

Next, I go down to the dungeons. Skipping class is going to get me in trouble, maybe, but I want to see what Nox was talking about. If there’s really a dungeon down here with my name on it, I want to know.

I pass guards, who barely pay attention to me. They’ll report to Ornix later and tell him I was down here. Nothing about this visit is secret and I know it will lead to trouble, but I’m planning on escaping so who cares.

At first, everything seems like it did before. I wonder if Equinox was lying to me, if he’s hatching some plan. I remember him hiding the true seal, or trying to. I’m sure he has some agenda only he knows about.

Then I see it. The part of the dungeon that had to be rebuilt because the last time I was here I was summoning bread and portals like a mad messiah who didn’t read the prompt properly.

There it is. The cell with the bars spaced closely enough together that I can’t slip through them. There’s more, too. A bed inside, smaller than most dragon beds and covered in pink linens. Some of my personal things are already there, brought from the boxes I stored at Tempest’s house.

A cold chill runs through me. Equinox was right. Ornix has been preparing to keep me captive here. He must have given the order to put this together, to amend the spacing of the bars, to put the plushie toys I’d deny owning if he hadn’t obviously found them in my things, behind bars, on the bed. He’s fucking jailed my toys.

I hear guards snapping to attention. That’s how I know he is behind me.

I turn slowly.

“What is this, Ornix?”

His eyes gleam unrepentantly. “This is where bad girls go, humans who do not listen to their mates. Like when they are supposed to be in class, and yet they sneak out and down to the dungeons for reasons I cannot begin to imagine.”

A tremor runs through me. I know that I am in the kind of trouble I cannot easily come back from, but he has behaved sostrangely, so entirely darkly that I almost feel as though I have a leg to stand on.

“You have my stuff in this weird cell,” I say. “Why?”

“Because you have been taken from me once before, and because you have not been obedient for more than a few minutes at a time before or since. You are an uncontrollable quantity. I like to make arrangements for all manner of outcomes. This is one. It is also possible that you continue to sleep in our bed and enjoy my favor. It very much depends on you.”

I can’t tell him what my actual plan is, that I am intending to run away and never, ever see him again because he spanked me and I hated it. When I think it that way in my brain, I do feel like I might be overreacting. But then again, I am a captive facing yet more captivity. The fact that my thoughts are not clear does not mean they are wrong. It also doesn’t mean they’re right. Fuck. I don’t know what to think or do. I just know that I am completely furious and ashamed and now freaked out by the cell.

“I thought you loved me.”

“I do. That is why I intend to keep you.” He reaches over me and opens the door of the cell. “Step in. Let’s see you experience a little captivity for your disobedience.”

“I don’t want to go in there.”

“I don’t know why you keep thinking you have a choice,” he says, sounding every inch the villain, and looking like it too. He’s wearing his golden scaled armor again, his long, dark hair half up and half down. Ornix is incredibly and impossibly attractive. He is so fuckable that even in this moment of him saying something truly horrible, I’m kind of turned on.

I splay my arms and legs and wings like a cat trying to avoid a bath as he nudges me in.

“Oh, my, you absolutely cannot cooperate in any sense, can you?” he growls, grabbing me up in his arms and carrying me in.

I start fighting. Scrabbling for the door, biting him and kicking him and doing about as much damage as I’d do if I were trying to bite an actual dragon.

“Let me fucking go!” I scream. “Let me fucking go!”

And then I remember that I know how to summon a portal. The next word that comes out of my mouth isn’t a shriek for mercy or a curse at him. It’s the word that rips worlds open. And it works. Immediately.

Ornix has not dragged me into a cell. I have dragged him directly onto the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The two of us appear outside a theater, me gripped in his massive arms.

“You!”