Page 11 of Beast of Blood and Ash (Drakarn Mates #6)

REIKA

I missed home.

That was a freaking joke.

When I’d boarded that starship, I didn’t look back.

I’d packed for a new life, not a memory.

My bags were filled with practical things, clothes and tools, and not a single photograph or scrap of nostalgia to weigh me down.

I’d wanted the stars, any stars, a clean break from the dirt and suffocating cities of Earth.

I just hadn’t planned on this place.

Not Volcaryth. Not a planet of monsters, volcanoes, and slavery, nights that pressed in until I couldn’t tell the difference between dream, memory, and the shape of my own body clawing free from a too-small room.

The nightmares were getting worse.

I kept waking tangled in rough bedding, sweat turning to ice on my skin.

The room stank of fear, the shadow of terror so thick it felt like it should leave bruises.

Some nights, the fear seeped into my bones before I even slept, a slow poison creeping in with the drip of water through stone, the distant clang of steel where Drakarn warriors sparred.

But lately, it was the dreams that cut the deepest.

And they were making Kira bold.

She sat beside me now, knees tucked to her chest, hair sticking out sideways from another restless night. Kira always watched me like she was waiting for the cracks to show. The heat crystal on the wall flickered, throwing a sickly yellow light across her too-bright eyes. She looked exhausted.

Join the party.

“When you saw Larissa,” she started, her voice a fragile thing in the heavy air, “was she doing all right? Vega said she didn’t see her, but she’s alive. What’s it like there? How bad is it?”

Kira’s sister, Larissa. Taken prisoner alongside me and every other human unlucky enough to crash near Ignarath. Every day, Kira asked. Every day, I dodged. Today, I was already strung out, my edges raw with panic and the ghosts clinging to the walls.

I didn’t want to talk about Ignarath. Didn’t want to remember the shriek of cage doors, the screams that echoed through the stone bowels of that hell.

I didn’t want to taste the sand packed in my mouth or the copper of my own blood, didn’t want to see the way the Draskeer and his guards laughed while they bet on how many days we’d last.

But it was there anyway. The memory. Hot and bright. The arena, the snap of whips, the hiss of flesh meeting hot metal. Larissa’s face, slack with exhaustion, her eyes dull but stubbornly, impossibly alive. That was all I could ever give Kira. Alive.

I wanted to lie. To conjure some shimmering hope from the dregs of what I’d seen. But I wasn’t built for it. The lie would crumble before it left my mouth.

She waited, her silence a twisting knife.

“I don’t fucking know! She’s a fucking prisoner, what do you expect?” The words exploded out of me, too loud, too harsh. A whip-crack in the stale air that left scorch marks on the silence.

Kira’s face flickered. Hurt, then a wall of anger. She pulled her thin blanket tight, her mouth a bloodless line. “Sorry for asking.” Her voice was flat, wounded in that way only someone close can make you feel.

I wanted to take it back. To tell her I was sorry, that she didn’t deserve the shrapnel of my nightmares. But the words were there, a lump of jagged glass I couldn’t cough up. All I could do was clench my fists, staring at the terror-stained stone beside my sleeping platform.

The silence between us cracked open, jagged and ugly.

Finally, Kira shoved herself to her feet, her movements sharp enough to slice the air. She grabbed her threadbare coat, patched in three places, and fumbled with the door latch, her knuckles turning white.

“I hope you feel better,” she muttered, her voice trembling with something I’d put there. “Because I don’t know how to help you anymore.”

The heavy door scraped open, the scrape of stone echoing the tension in my jaw. She slipped out. She didn't look back.

The slam of the door left me alone. Alone with the choke of sulfur, the pulse hammering a frantic rhythm in my throat. Alone with the small, battered trunk smashed into the corner, as if it could absorb the violence of just existing there.

My hands were shaking. I was going to throw up. Tears burned hot behind my eyes, and I squeezed them shut so tight it hurt. I just wanted to go home.

Why was this my life?

I pressed my palms to the rough stone wall, letting its unforgiving chill seep into my skin, more real than the fire in my lungs. The room was a coffin now, the corners closing in, the walls slick with condensation and the ghosts of a thousand sleepless nights.

You are not broken, I told myself. Again. Again. The words rang hollow, brittle as bone.

Safe is always a lie.

I tried to breathe around the thought, but the stale, sulfur-laced air only burned.

It mixed with the scent of wilted mintine and dried fire-thistle spilling from the herb satchel by my bed.

I could hear the city somewhere above, beyond the iron-latched door.

Water dripping. Muffled voices. Clanging metal. Life going on, uncaring.

My body curled in on itself, knees to chest, arms wrapped tight.

I was poison. That was the truth of it. I lashed out, and everything I touched curdled.

The memory of Ignarath rose unbidden, mud sucking at my boots, the throb of blood in my mouth.

Drakarn voices, guttural and gleeful, promising pain.

In Scalvaris, they said I was safe. But this stone was just a different kind of prison. Kira was gone. And even there, deep under a city built by monsters, I had nowhere left to run.

The air thickened, pressing in. My heart jerked, a stuttering, frantic bird against my ribs. I squeezed my legs tighter, gasping, sweat slick on my brow. The panic boiled over.

When I opened my eyes, there was a monster in the doorway.

A scream snagged in my throat, a hook in my flesh, unable to break free. I saw blood. A sword. Red scales. Giant wings. The figure filled the entire entry, too wide for the frame, his head ducked under the lintel. His tail flicked with restless, deadly intent.

He was going to take me back.

Oh god. Oh god. No.

I scrambled backward, my legs tangling in the thin bedding.

I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. My body locked down as the monster stepped into my room.

Blood dripped from his blade to the floor, scenting the air with copper and smoke and a wave of Drakarn heat that was too much, burning, suffocating me.

“Reika.”

That voice. Deep, a rumble like shifting stone, yet gentle. The sound was a strange comfort, frayed around the edges but careful, as if he knew what fear tasted like.

Omvar.

Though he was covered in blood, he didn’t raise his weapon. His massive silhouette pulsed in the heat crystal’s wavering light, gold eyes fixed on me, unreadable.

“You need to come with me.”

He sounded wrong. Too calm, too controlled for the carnage staining his arms and claws. Muscle flexed under red-black scales as his sword swung low at his side. Blood, some of it his, most of it not, spattered his chest and trickled across the ritual scars that mapped a history of violence.

My mouth worked, but no sound came out. Then I found my voice, a jagged croak. “What?”

He stepped closer, moving with the caution of a man approaching an animal about to bolt. I pressed myself farther away. My herb satchel spilled to the floor, mint and fire-thistle, my only shield, utterly useless.

“It’s Ignarath,” Omvar said. He sounded like he bit the words in half to keep from snarling them. “It isn’t safe.”

The world shrank to the beat of my own heart. Ignarath. The name was a blade pressed to my throat.

I drove my back against the icy wall. “No. No. I’m safe here.” My voice was a thin thread of sound. My nails dug into the stone at my side, seeking an anchor. I shook my head, again and again. “I’m safe here.”

Omvar’s eyes flickered with an emotion that was there and then gone.

Regret, maybe. He crouched, a mountain of muscle and scale, folding his wings as if to make himself smaller.

“You’ll be safer with me.” His voice was steady now, a low drum in my bones, but something wild burned behind it.

“I walked through the city, and no one tried to stop me. Do you think they’d stop someone else? Skorai wants you back.”

Skorai. Tournament Master of Ignarath. The monster’s monster.

My skin went cold. No one tried to stop him. The realization trickled through my panic, chilling me to the bone. My safety here was a lie, just another thin door between me and the jaws of the world.

I dug my heels into the sleeping platform, trying to ground myself against the terror flooding every vein. “I’m not going. I can’t.” My voice broke, all my intended fury coming out as brittle desperation.

He sheathed his blade, the movement slow and deliberate, a statement hanging in the air between us. He raised both hands, claws tipped with blood, palms up in a gesture of surrender.

“I swear on the Forge and my honor,” he said, the words thick, like a prayer, “that no harm will come to you. Not while I breathe.”

A Drakarn oath. The Forge. Even I knew what that meant. Words that could not be broken.

My vision swam. I was shaking so hard my teeth clicked together. “Why would you do that?” I rasped.

He didn’t answer right away. The silence stretched, heavy with his scent, smoke and ozone and something I couldn’t name that called to a part of me I refused to acknowledge.

His chest rose and fell. The faint, terrifying pulse of the mate-bond thrummed under my skin, ancient and wild.

My body wanted to lean into that heat, to let it burn away the chill, but I recoiled from the memory of what his kind could do.

Omvar moved closer, one step, two, so careful.

He stopped just out of reach, lowering his massive body to his knees to be level with me.

His hand rose and hovered over my wrist. He didn’t touch.

I could see the tremor in him, a fight against the urge to grab me, to drag me to the safety he promised. But he didn’t. He waited.

I stared at his hand. Fangs. Claws. Blood.

Fight or freeze.

I closed my eyes, trying to follow the memory of his voice. Gentle. Always gentle, even when his presence made every alarm in my body shriek.

My breathing slowed a fraction. I let my arm fall, a silent permission. He brushed his huge, warm fingers over my wrist, grounding me. Anchoring, not caging. The heat of his touch was a shock, a sudden fire that burned away some of the cold. The nightmare receded, just a little.

He leaned in, his voice a low whisper.

“If you stay here, they’ll find you. Ignarath infiltrators are coming. No one else can stop them. I won’t let you be taken. I swear it, on my own life.”

Drakarn didn’t break a Forge vow.

The stone under me felt sharp and real. The air still stank of blood and old fear, but I could taste something else now. A sliver of hope, tangled in dread. My hands still trembled, but I didn’t pull away.

He was right. No one else was coming.

This wasn’t surrender. This was survival.

I met his eyes, forcing myself not to look away. “Where are we going?”