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Chapter

One

Leo

I might have been an omega, but I wasn’t afraid of anything. I was a prince, for one, despite the fact that my father treated me and my omega brothers like we were lower than the lowest servants in the castle’s scullery. I had royal blood in my veins. Not only that, I had goodness and fortitude, I hoped, that I’d inherited from my beloved Papa. I missed Papa every day of my life, and from the moment he’d died, I’d vowed to live my life in a way to make him proud.

Even if there was nothing particularly proud or dignified in being constantly locked in the bedchamber I shared with now three of my brothers.

“You will tell me what happened to the other two,” our father, King Freslik, growled and huffed as he paced back and forth on one side of our large, circular room. “I refuse to believe that they have simply vanished and that you pitiful lot do not know where they are,” he went on, the four guards standing near the door behind him looking stiff and uncomfortable. “And I most definitely refuse to believe that there have only ever been four of you, not six.”

I tried to hide the wicked grin that pulled at the corners of my mouth as I peeked across the line my brothers and I stood in at my youngest brother, Obi. In the month since our brother Selle had mated with his gold dragon, Gildur, birthed a beautiful, golden dragon egg, and made the decision to move into the magical world full-time, my remaining brothers, Rumi, Misha, Obi, and I had amused ourselves by concocting as many different stories as we could about what had happened to Selle and our other brother, Tovey, who had also met his fated mate and birthed twin eggs, and who had chosen to move entirely to the magical world. Obi had come up with the idea of pretending that Selle and Tovey never existed. Father didn’t believe it, but it had been fun trying to convince him.

“You are hiding them,” Father said, pausing his pacing to stare first at the four of us, then around our bedchamber. “Yes, that is it!” he gasped, as if struck by inspiration. “You’re hiding those wretches somewhere in this room, I know it. Guards! Search the room!”

My smirk vanished and I snapped straighter, alarmed. My brothers and I exchanged anxious looks as the lumbering guards shook out of the near stupor they’d fallen into as they listened to my father’s daily admonishments.

“Search the room?” one of the dull guards asked, blinking.

“Yes! The room, the room! Search it at once!” Father shouted and huffed.

I met my brother Rumi’s eyes before both of us glanced quickly to his bed off to one side of the great room. Rumi was the eldest of my brothers and something of a leader to us. But more than that, he had a mysterious beau, who he’d thought was just an ordinary man when they’d met, but who he’d discovered much later was, in fact, a dragon, who had gifted him with a bit of magic in the form of an emerald marble. That marble had rolled under Rumi’s bed and formed a doorway into the magical world.

In the months since that fateful night, my brothers and I had used the doorway to escape into a world that was filled with wonders. We’d begun by making our way to an enchanted pavilion in the middle of a crystalline lake in order to dance the nights away with any number of fantastical new friends, but our adventures had expanded in exciting ways from there.

The magical world was where Tovey and Selle had met their fated mates, dragons who were princes in their own right. They were kin to Rumi’s emerald dragon, and my absent brothers had fallen very much in love with their mates.

I had met a dragon at those dances as well, and although as of yet, all we’d done was dance and flirt. As far as I could tell, my dragon was a clever rogue who loved nothing more than dancing and enjoying life. He was handsome and amusing, and I could feel our time to be together approaching.

But none of that would happen if Father’s guards found the door under Rumi’s bed.

“You cannot search our things as though we are criminals,” I said, scowling at my father. “We have rights, you know.”

As expected, Father did not take my defiance well.

“You have no rights,” he insisted, eyes going wide with offense. He marched right up to me, using his natural alpha height to tower over me. I despised being shorter than I felt I should be. “You are criminals, as far as I am concerned. You are a lot of disobedient, conniving, ungrateful criminals who have stolen two sons from me. I could have married those two off to some of the wealthiest alphas in the land in order to secure their riches and support.”

I so badly wanted to reply by telling him if he really had the ability to marry us to men we despised to enrich himself that he would have done so already. I knew better, though. I knew he could trade us like commodities whenever he wanted, but for the time being, we were of more use to him as lures to dangle over the heads of the noblemen he wanted to woo.

“The only reason you would object to me searching this room is if you truly have something to hide,” Father went on.

He gestured to the guards to get on with their search. Unfortunately for my brothers and I, they did as they were instructed.

I held my breath and Misha, who stood next to me, reached for my hand for comfort as the four guards spread through the room, opening wardrobe doors, ripping bedcovers from our beds, and upsetting the tables beside each of our beds. They focused their efforts on Tovey and Selle’s things at first, but they didn’t stop there.

I held my breath and squeezed Misha’s hand in return as one of the guards reached Rumi’s bed and began tearing it apart. Magic, as I had learned, was a funny thing, and there was as much a chance as not that if the guard pushed the bed aside, the door into the magical world wouldn’t be there. But if it disappeared now, would it ever reappear?

There was a dragon in the castle, disguised as one of Father’s councilors, I knew. If Rumi’s magical door vanished, perhaps we could search him out for help. But we didn’t know who he was specifically, and without the door, we would be locked in our bedchamber for real without any way to seek the other dragon out.

“Um, Your Majesty, there’s nothing here,” the guard searching Rumi’s bed said at last with a shrug, stepping away.

I wasn’t ready to breathe in relief yet. The oaf could still bend over to check under the bed.

Fortunately, Father had very little patience.

“I know you’re hiding something from me,” he growled at the four of us, eyes narrowing. “It has something to do with that sorceress, doesn’t it.”

I did as good a job as I could of looking blank and confused, and so did my brothers. There had been a sorceress in our castle a month ago. She had come from the magical world with the intention of conquering my father’s kingdom and our entire world. Fortunately, she’d been defeated. Selle and his dragon had something to do with it all.

The trouble was, I didn’t really remember what had happened. None of us did. Selle informed us that everyone’s memory of the event had been magically altered after the fact. That included Father’s memory, but something of those events must have stuck with him. He was now obsessed with sorceresses and witches.

It was a good thing that everyone in the castle thought he was losing his mind a little and that they didn’t believe sorceresses or magic was real.

“I’ll sniff it out eventually, mark my words,” he went on. “And then I’ll make your lives even more miserable than they already are. You will not be fed tomorrow!” he declared, then turned to stomp out of the room .

The guards left with him, banging the door shut so loudly that it knocked one of the pictures on the nearby wall askew.

“And stay out!” I shouted, as if we’d kicked them out.

Obi snorted with laughter, but the four of us were too traumatized by Father’s visit to laugh about it the way we’d laughed when the visits had begun, when Tovey went missing.

“He’s just going to get worse and worse,” Misha sighed, still holding my hand. “How long can we hold out before everything becomes intolerable?”

“I can hold out as long as he can,” I said, chin tilted up. “So can you. All of us are stronger than he is by far.”

“Stronger, yes,” Obi said, looking tired. “But being strong is exhausting.”

We all took a moment to breathe and release the tension that Father’s visit had brought. Our room was a mess, so we wandered to our own parts of the room to begin cleaning up.

“I would leave this place forever and pledge myself to my dragon mate if I wasn’t so worried for the people of our kingdom,” Rumi said with a sigh as he picked up the clothes the guards had flung out of his wardrobe.

“Sometimes I wish that another savior would come along to make everything alright so that we could move to the magical kingdom, like I know we are fated to do,” Misha said sadly.

I hummed, pretending to agree, but I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t like the idea of someone else being the champion when I was perfectly capable of saving people myself. I might have been an omega, but I was strong and brave.

“Enough of this,” Rumi said after only five minutes of cleaning. He’d just pulled the bedcovers back over his bed, but then he leaned down and pushed the bed aside, revealing the magical door. “Time hardly moves in this world at all when we’re in the magical world. I feel like dancing now and cleaning this place up later.”

We all made sounds of agreement and threw our things aside, heading to Rumi’s bed and the door. It had been a long, exhausting day in our world, and I was more than ready to dance the night away, hopefully in the arms of a certain alpha I already knew was mine.

The magical door opened easily for Rumi, and the golden staircase that descended down from it took us quickly into the nighttime forest of the magical kingdom. I loved everything about the magical world, everything I’d discovered about it so far. I loved how the sky was a deep purple at night, dotted with stars like diamonds. I loved how fragrant the trees and grass were. I loved that the trees seemed to be hung and dripping with jewels of every description.

Most of all, I loved the feeling that blossomed in my heart as we approached the lake and its pavilion. It wasn’t just the beauty of the decorations or the sweet strains of music. It wasn’t even the knowledge that there were tables of the most delicious food inside that would satisfy me after being given only bread and water all day in our bedchamber. It was the knowledge that we all now had friends in this magical world and that they were waiting to greet us with open arms.

It was also the knowledge that my fated mate was part of this world and that he might very well be a part of the festivities that night.

“You’re here!” Selle greeted us as the four of us crossed over the magical bridge of grass that formed specifically for us to cross over the lake and into the pavilion. “Every night, I worry that something has happened to you and that the four of you will be lost to us forever.”

“Never,” I said, stepping over to my brother and closing my arms around him, and the egg he wore in a sling against his belly, in a manly hug. “If something happened and Rumi’s door disappeared, I would move heaven and earth to find a different way to come back here.”

Selle laughed as he hugged me back. My shoulder bumped his glasses askew as we separated. Even though Selle’s dragon had the ability to correct his vision so that he didn’t need glasses, it only ever stayed fixed for a day or two at a time, so Selle had gone back to wearing gold-rimmed glasses.

“I’m certain there are all sorts of ways to open magical portals into our old world,” Tovey said as he hugged us all in greeting as well. He had his eggs with him, but since his had grown to the size of the balls we kicked around in our Papa’s garden sometimes, he wore them in a pack strapped to his back instead of against his stomach.

“Oh! There are!” Selle said, brimming with excitement. “I forgot to tell you the other day,” he said to Tovey. “Billi gave me the most amazing gift last week.” He started rummaging in the small satchel slung over one of his shoulders.

“Billi is the one you think is a unicorn?” Obi asked, eyes bright with excitement.

“He is a unicorn,” Selle said, taking a large, glass disk just slightly bigger than his hand out of the satchel. “He transformed for me a couple weeks ago to prove it. And he had the magic to make this for me.”

We all crowded around as Selle held out the disk to show us.

“What is it?” Misha asked, blinking curiously .

“It’s a scrying glass,” Selle said. “Well, something like that.”

“Good gracious, is that our bedchamber?” Obi exclaimed, shifting to squeeze up against Selle’s side as he looked into the glass.

“It’s a window into our room,” Rumi said with a delighted laugh.

“Someone’s made a right mess of it,” Tovey said, shaking his head.

“That was Father’s guards,” I told him. “Father got it into his head that we were hiding the two of you in there somewhere.”

“I do not miss that man at all,” Tovey sniffed.

“Oh! Look!” Obi went on. “It’s not just our bedchamber. That looks like Father’s bedchamber.”

“What is he doing?” Rumi asked, then suddenly said, “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

I might have laughed and made a joke about what Father did at night, but a warm tingling began to spread through me and my heart began to race. I caught my breath and stood straighter. I knew what that feeling meant. Even though we hadn’t bonded yet, I knew when my fated mate was nearby.

I dragged my eyes away from the scrying glass and took a few steps deeper into the pavilion, away from my brothers, searching this way and that. I’d met him early on in our time in the magical world. We’d danced together once and I’d known in my heart and in my womb that the two of us were meant to be.

Unlike Tovey’s and Selle’s dragon mates, Diamant hadn’t rushed in to claim me immediately. Part of me wished he had, but as he’d whispered to me in a moment when the dance had us curled around each other, palms to palms, our lips only a breath away from each other, sometimes the dance was as beautiful as where it led.

I caught my breath when I spotted him striding toward me from the far end of the pavilion. Diamant was one of the most magnificent alphas I’d ever seen. He was tall with broad shoulders and strong legs. The fine clothing he wore couldn’t disguise the power of his body underneath. He had white-blond hair that seemed to glitter like diamonds in certain light, and his eyes were ice blue, and yet somehow filled with fire.

When he spotted me staring at him, his shapely mouth formed into a rake’s smile. He slowed his steps, approaching with swagger, like he had already claimed me and was on his way to retrieve his property.

The feeling that an alpha already believed he owned me was strangely thrilling. Not because I longed to be claimed, like Tovey, or even like Misha, who was as afraid of the claiming as he craved it, but because I longed to challenge Diamant’s insistence that he owned me. I pulsed with excitement at the idea of butting heads with my dragon.

“Well, well,” Diamant said as he reached me. He rested his weight on one leg, crossed his arms, and caressed me with a glance. I was certain he’d worn tight breeches on purpose so that the bulge they concealed was more pronounced, like he was flaunting his alphaness at me. “Aren’t you looking full of yourself tonight,” he said, meeting my eyes with a fiery grin.

“Just tonight?” I asked, crossing my arms in imitation of him. “I’m full of myself all the time.”

Diamant laughed. The sound had my blood pumping and slick threatening to pour out of me. His rich, alpha scent, like expensive, exotic spices, intensified my body’s reaction to him.

My womb seemed to wake up inside me, which was slightly disconcerting. I didn’t see myself as an omega brood mare at all. Tovey and Selle might be happy to have babies, or rather, eggs, but I wanted more from a bond with my fated mate than that. My body’s reminders that it didn’t care what I wanted created anxious sparks in the back of my mind.

I pushed them aside in favor of flirting with Diamant.

“Why am I not surprised?” he asked, coming forward and offering his hand as the musicians started into the opening strains of the next dance.

As soon as I took his hand and our skin touched, my body seemed to dance with light. Especially when Diamant tugged me closer with exciting force, leaned close to my ear, and whispered, “Of course, I’d rather you be full of me.”

I wanted him so desperately that I was breathless for a moment. My hole squeezed like it longed to milk him, and if it were not for the reinforced pants I wore under my trousers, I would have embarrassed myself with slick stains.

It was completely unlike me. I’d never been attracted to arrogance or anything close to the indifference to responsibility that radiated from Diamant. But the fact that he was so different from the sort of mate I’d always thought I might end up with, if Father had allowed it, felt like a delicious challenge.

“And what if it is I who wishes to claim you?” I whispered right back, tempted to bite his neck the way Tovey and Selle had described their mates biting them when they were claimed.

Diamant laughed, the sound warm and inviting as it rumbled through him and vibrated through me. “I think I might like that,” he said .

I could hardly breathe. I loved the arousal that Diamant sparked in me. I loved the promise of all the ways we would enjoy each other when the seduction we’d begun months ago reached its consummation. I ached for that day.

At the same time, I knew my heat was growing nearer with every day. I wanted it, but I feared it, too. Diamant would take me through that heat, I was certain, but I’d seen what had happened to Tovey and Selle. One glance to the side and I could see the eggs they both now had with them.

I wasn’t a papa, I was a warrior. I wanted to mate with my dragon and claim him as he claimed me, but I didn’t want to then end up floundering in ordinary papahood when I knew the world needed me to be a fighter.

“Do not worry, my fiery omega,” Diamant whispered against my ear. “I will be gentle with you.”

I shook myself out of my thoughts and grinned at my dragon, aroused all over again. I loved this kind of flirting. I loved that we were growing bolder and bolder with each other as we got to know each other better.

“How do you know I want you to be gentle?” I asked him, arching one eyebrow. “I’ve no intention of being gentle with you.”

Diamant’s eyes lit up. “You make me question my decision to wait with you,” he growled.

“ Your decision?” I gave him an incredulous look.

He tugged me closer still, and I was certain he would wrap his arm around my waist and pull me flush against him. He might have even slanted his mouth over mind in a possessive kiss, despite the fact we were in public.

But instead, Obi’s cry of, “That looks like an army, and they’re attacking a village!” shook me straight out of my thoughts .

Diamant and I both turned to where my brothers were all crowded around Selle, gazing into the scrying glass.

“What is that and where did you find it?” Diamant asked, stepping away from me to see what was going on.

Selle glanced up at Diamant as though he were someone who was part of his life every day and said, “Billi gave this glass to me. It sees into my father’s world.”

Diamant frowned. “Magic like that is regulated. Does Gildur know about this gift?”

His question, which was so fussy I would have to tease him about it later, was ignored.

“I know that village,” Rumi said. “It’s to the far west of the castle, but it’s right along the road leading to our neighboring kingdom.”

“Is the neighboring kingdom attacking us?” Obi asked.

“No, look!” Tovey said, pointing at the glass. “That’s Rottum leading the army.”

Rottum was our father’s chief of guards. He’d been missing from the castle for a few weeks. Hearing that he was leading an army in attack of one of our own villages was disconcerting.

“Is Father trying to attack his own people again?” Tovey asked.

“It looks like it,” Rumi said, rubbing the back of his neck.

“We have to do something about it,” I said, making the decision right then and there. “We have to go back to our father’s world and find a way to put a stop to the attack.”