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“That’s right. If we’re speaking plainly, I could already be carrying the next heir.

Ornix might have threatened me with discipline, but he’d never actually do it.

Maybe you should start thinking about the enemies you’re making.

Because one of these days, I won’t just know how to fly.

I’ll be wielding power you can’t even imagine. I… oop!”

I am snatched up from behind, roughly, by the back of my neck. Ornix pulls me back against his chest, wraps an arm around my waist, and growls in my ear:

“Excuse me, little one, what was that?”

“I didn’t know you were there!”

“That’s not what I was asking about,” he says, shifting me in his arms. “I heard that you don’t think I’ll spank you publicly. I also heard you threatening your instructor not minutes after I ordered you to respect him. Let’s address all of that at once, shall we?”

“No! Ornix! No!”

“Yes,” he says firmly. “After hearing what you had to say, absolutely yes.”

I kick and squirm as Ornix carries me back to class, but none of it does me any good.

The others are still there, chatting amongst themselves quite animatedly in the aftermath of my scandalous behavior.

They fall dead silent as Ornix walks in, and I feel the incredible power he has over his subjects in this moment.

“Nobody is above discipline in this keep,” he says, putting his foot up on the chair Wraith likes to retreat to when he’s yelling at us about our wing positioning. He proceeds to sling me over his thigh, leaving me to swing over the fulcrum of his leg.

I am never going to be able to come back to this class ever again.

It hasn’t even started and I know I am never, ever, ever going to come back here.

I am never going to look at a single one of these people.

He did get me moved into the class with older dragons, those closer to my age looking to further refine their flying, but all it’s done is make me deeply aware of how very behind I am.

I’ve already decided that I can’t handle this. The second I can, I am running straight to Nox and begging him to open a portal back to the human world for me.

Ornix addresses the class. “My mate is under the misconception that her connection with me makes her above the need to be polite in her classes. She is wrong, and I told her as much, but it has become obvious that a demonstration is necessary.”

I want to beg him not to do this, but begging him not to do this is more embarrassing than what is already happening, which is his hand meeting my ass with swift, hard slaps.

The class is dead silent. I stuff my hand into my mouth so I don’t cry out, so all anybody can hear is the sound of a massive dragon hand meeting my rear. He’s letting me keep my skirt down for the moment, but I have a feeling that could change.

Two dozen of those damn hard slaps land, pushing me past the ability to stay entirely quiet. I start to grunt, and then to whimper, and finally I am crying out as the entirety of my haunches start to feel like he’s turning them to molten lava under the world’s scratchiest silk skirt.

He puts me down on my feet, abandons me to my own balance. I don’t want to rub my ass, but I also want to rub it more than I want to do literally anything else in the world.

“Behave yourself, my love,” he says, dropping a kiss on my head. “I will see you at the end of the day.”

“Back into position,” Wraith says, following up as Ornix leaves.

I shuffle to the back of the class, ignoring everybody studiously, wanting to sink through the floor. I really wish I could just fucking disappear right now. I know I was running my mouth, but being spanked like that is the most humiliating thing that has ever happened to me.

I feel like I was just laid bare in front of everybody, as if everyone knows how ashamed I am. I hope they don’t know how wet that made me. It might have been a spanking intended to discipline, but I am the sort of girl who gets turned on by anything rough.

“Are you okay?” The girl next to me whispers the question.

“Thank you, yes,” I say, blinking back tears.

I can’t believe Ornix did that. No aftercare. No tenderness besides the little kiss. Just discipline and leaving me to my humiliation. I am definitely going to run the fuck away first chance I get. I am going to make them all regret this.

We get a break and I leave immediately, looking at nobody.

I scoot up the stairs as quietly and unobtrusively as possible.

I am absolutely burning with fury. How dare he correct me in front of others, how dare he turn me into an example.

Just because I said something slightly out of pocket, he gets to publicly whip me?

I don’t think so. I am not going to be disrespected like this.

I am not going to have to earn my place in a place that I was fucking abducted to in the first instance.

I push the door to Nox’s room closed behind me as soon as I sneak inside.

“Fuck!” Nox jumps up from his new bank of computers, which are now located further from the door, but not far enough to stop him from startling like a frightened gazelle when someone comes in.

“I thought you were him. Fuck!”

He looks nervous and skittish. But given what I know about Ornix, I don’t blame him. Everybody in this damn keep lives under the oversight of his whims and wills.

I wipe my eyes quickly and shake my head. “Not him.”

He stands up and walks over to me, frowning slightly. “What happened?”

“I got beaten because I didn’t want to act like Wraith is some genius and we’re all the sorry people,” I say. It doesn’t really make sense. It doesn’t have to. Tone contains the emotion.

“Yeah. I don’t know why he’s putting you through that. He could have organized private tuition for you. The whole thing seems designed to make your life as hard as possible for no real reason.”

“I want to go back home,” I say, nervous because I know what I am about to ask him to do is fully insane and he will get in more trouble than either one of us can probably fathom if he actually does it.

“I know you got in a lot of trouble last time, but… could you… open another portal for me? Shit, I’m so sorry, no, forget I asked. That was fucked up of me. I’m just…”

Nox shrugs, reaches out and ruffles my hair. “Don’t worry about it,” he says with a smile that’s way brighter than I expected. “I’m happy to help. I’ll get you out of here. I was always going to get you out of here.”

Hope rises in place of the shame I was carrying for daring to ask.

“You’ll do it? Really? He’ll fucking kill you.”

“Not this time,” he says with a reckless grin that makes my hope lift and nervous butterflies start dancing in my stomach.

“This time I’m coming with you. You’re not the only one who is done with sitting here, being at the mercy of a king who does not care for anything besides maintaining tradition, separation, and his own rule. ”

“We have to do it now. They will come looking for me when I don’t go back to class after the meal break, and then Ornix will probably come and look for me and whip me again, and fuck that.”

“I’m not ready just yet,” he says. “This time, I need to prepare properly so I don’t end up in his fucking dungeon again.

You might have to go back to the class until I can prepare properly.

And you might need to think about what you’re going to do this time.

Because I won’t be the only one he comes for.

He will hunt you down, and there is now a dungeon cell with smaller bars that will fit you perfectly. ”

“There is not.”

“There is. Go look for yourself. He saw how you walked in and out of my cell and he had adjustments made. Why would he do that unless he intended to confine a human? There’s only one human in this entire realm.”

“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.