Page 58 of Destined Dawn

This isn’t the West I expected. The desert land, yes. But towns? A city?

The city is packed tight with tall dark towers, nobody visible on the narrow streets below. It seems newer, more sophisticated even than the capital back home. Smarter, cleaner, in a way more intimidating. These people aren’t struggling. They aren’t struggling at all. They are thriving.

I scan my gaze over the huge mass of city, looking for any sign of where we might be headed, and then I spot it, right in the center of the city itself, slightly raised above the other buildings on a mound: a large compound with dark walls of metal ringing its buildings, inside what can only be described as a grand palace, manicured gardens – the first green we’ve seen in miles and miles.

The dragons swoop around in a circle, spiraling lowerand lower, and I see just how grand the castle is. No sandy-colored mansions here or grand white pillars, all dark sleek metal and black-paned windows; even the plants in the gardens are a dark shade of purple. There are also guards hidden among the buildings and the gardens and they step out forming a ring as the dragons circle lower and lower until we land on a flat patch of grass right in the center of that ring.

The soldiers are not like the ones that tried to ambush me. No grotty uniforms, no balaclavas. They wear grand sweeping cloaks that remind me of the one Christopher Kennedy wore, long leather gloves and black pointed helmets. They all stand with their heads bowed, waiting.

“We have her,” the Black Prince calls from on top of his brown dragon. “My daughter has returned.” The guards lift their heads in unison, thrusting their fists into the air and stamping their feet. My dad lifts his hand and they fall quiet. “Tonight we feast.”

23

Renzo

I slidedown the dragon’s back and land in the garden of some snooty-looking palace.

Me? Renzo fucking Barone in a palace? I snort and shake my head, my brain unable to compute it.

You spend your whole life as an outsider. Never fitting in. Different. Knowing other people don’t work the same way you do. Peering in windows at other people’s lives. Banned from fucking places because they’ll arrest you and lock you up.

And now here I fucking am, strolling straight through these fancy gardens and towards the palace itself.

How the fucking tables turn.

I have what Lowsky used to call my ‘shit-eating grin’ stretched across my face. The way my face would look everytime I fulfilled an assignment in record time, or with special enjoyment.

I’m wearing this grin for a different reason today, because I belong here now. No matter what all those snotty motherfuckers with their long last names may think. I belong.

Never minded not belonging. Never bothered by it. But now I do – now I belong with her and to her – I realize how much I’ve been fucking missing out.

Not that my little rabbit’s grinning. She’s chewing on her thumb, eyes darting all around the place like they used to do when we first met. I’m guessing that means she’s scared. Of what? She’s a fucking princess. Literally. If what they’re saying is true. What does she have to be scared of?

I wrap my arm around her neck and tug her towards me, an action that rewards me with pissy looks from her other mates. They don’t like me manhandling her. But she likes it. She has a side they can’t see. And I may be shit at reading most things but I don’t miss the way her eye lights up with excitement whenever I touch her.

Little man is peaky from our dragon-flight but trotting alongside us nonetheless.

“Little rabbit,” I whisper into her ear as we pass through an archway made of dark steel and into a courtyard, the high shiny walls of the palace on all sides, “you wanna get out of here, you just say the word and I’ll shoot us somewhere far away.”

“If we go,” little rabbit says, “we all go together.”

“Seriously?” I say. I mean I’d blast them all out of here if she asked me to. The whole dying thing was a fucking trip. I’d do it again if it didn’t make her sad. Then again, I don’t want to die without fucking her some more. That would makemesad.

She looks up at me. Fuck, those eyes of hers. They do things to my insides. Jumble them up. On second thought, fucking her is much better than the dying.

Much, much better.

“I don’t mean …” she says, “I’m just saying, we’re all sticking together from now on.”

I glance over to where the man in black and the professor are talking, all serious like, together.

I think things would be more fun with just her and me, without the others, and maybe once upon a time I’d have done something to ensure it was just us. No other dudes hanging about, diverting her attention away from me and my dick. But there you have it. I haven’t and I won’t – and not just because it makes me hard every time I imagine one of them with her – something I’m chewing my fucking right leg off to watch – but because I know this is how things have to be.

Look at me, accepting things. My mom is probably turning in that shallow grave I buried her in.

“Whatever you want,” I tell her. “Just know, I’m on your side, little rabbit, and your side only. I don’t give a shit about fate, or prophecies, or parents or anything like that.”

“I know,” she says, and rests her head against my shoulder in a way that has the useless heart in my chest pounding.