Page 175 of The Wild Prince’s Favorite (The Dragon Empire Saga #3)

He glanced up at his dragon, who landed on a mountain, letting out a loud, long, and frustrated growl, and began scratching it furiously.

Kassein immediately understood and ran even faster to reach the point under the mountain where his dragon had last seen Alezya.

He glanced up, and a wall of snow and mud-covered dark rock stared back.

It was humongous and ominous, but he didn’t care.

If he had to search an entire mountain for Alezya, he would.

“Alezya!” he called, his voice echoing in the mountain.

He had a dreadful feeling, and he couldn’t shake it off. The fact that she’d disappeared during a battle, vanished from the safe position of his dragon’s back, was gnawing at his insides.

Something had gone wrong, and he had to find her, quickly.

“Commander!”

He barely glanced back to find Dajan and the handful of his men who had followed him. There were still kneeling tribesmen surrounding them, and Kassein wasn’t sure if his men had followed him out of curiosity, to offer support, or ensure the enemy was subdued, but he didn’t care.

He swallowed.

“Alezya,” he muttered. “I need to find her. ...Help me find her.”

He heard a quiet gasp. Kassein had never asked anything of his men. And he had certainly never asked for help. But right then, he didn’t care.

He would ask and beg anyone he needed to so he could find Alezya even a second faster.

Kassein knew precisely why he was more terrified than ever before: Alezya could be anywhere, and in those mountains, it wasn’t a good thing.

The burning memory of her limp body, bruised and battered in the snow, came to mind.

He couldn’t see her like that again. He shouldn’t have let her go at all.

This was like the night Cessilia had gone off.

He had let her go, and he shouldn’t have.

If anything had happened to Alezya and their child. ..

“We will find her, sir,” Dajan replied with a determined voice, pulling him out of his dark thoughts. “We will find Lady Alezya.”

Then, he turned around, speaking to his unit.

“Come on! I need a unit in the heights to look for the nearby cliffs and two units down here!” he spoke with sudden urgency.

“Somebody go and warn General Sazaran we’re looking for Lady Alezya, and I want someone to report to Grand Intendant Tievin too!

Dispatch medical units over here immediately!

Also, offer medical assistance to the tribespeople who will take it!

Kill anyone who tries to start a fight again!

And bring some torches! Come on, the Commander in Chief needs us! Let’s move!”

Kassein was already arms-deep into the snow, searching for Alezya, when the first men moved. He didn’t care about what they were doing. He was focused on one thing only, and nothing else mattered.

He searched and searched, using every ounce of strength he had left and then some, drilling furiously, shoveling through the wall of snow and mud facing him. Kassein would have rather faced twice as many armies alone than this feeling, than not knowing where Alezya was.

Why had she left his dragon? Why wasn’t she back already?

Was she hiding away safely? She had to have heard the war had stopped, so why wasn’t she coming out?

The feeling of dread was numbing his mind, making him fear in a way he hadn’t experienced in years.

All of a sudden, Kassein was that four-year-old boy again, shivering in the Onyx Castle’s garden while waiting for his siblings to find his missing older sister.

Except this time, he was the one searching and the one who would have to face whatever they found.

“Kassein!”

His sister’s voice pulled him from the grip of panic.

Looking up, he saw Kiera waving from above. He had barely looked around when Kiki came in to scoop him up and flew up there. Now several dozen feet higher, Kiera stood on a cliff with a somber expression, her back turned to the opening as she stared into the mountain.

Kassein found the body she was staring at just as he stepped inside.

A man was lying in a pool of blood, his throat ripped wide open. He immediately knew a blade hadn’t caused the wound; it was too large, like it had been ripped open, not sliced.

“Looks like a baby dragon’s work,” Kiera commented.

“Niiru,” Kassein muttered.

It was the only dragon they knew who would have been the right size for this injury and had all the reasons to be there. Kassein swallowed and moved deeper into the cave, his heart anxiously thumping faster and faster as they found one body after another.

While a young dragon’s sharp fangs had obviously ripped apart the first one, this one had been violently stabbed by a proper blade.

“Alezya,” he muttered.

After the second body, Kassein’s eyes stopped on what, at first, looked like just a lump of bloodied fur. He almost threw himself on his knees, his hands frantically grabbing the ripped coat while his heart pounded in his chest. He’d put that very coat on Alezya just hours ago.

Now, it was ripped in multiple places, and worse, it was stained with blood. A lot of blood. Kassein’s mouth was horribly dry.

“Looks like our girl fought and took this off,” Kiera noted.

His sister’s voice barely reached him. He scrambled to his feet and continued down the tunnel, finding two more dead men, but no Alezya.

He reached the end of the tunnel, and that was it.

Four dead men, a ripped coat, signs that she and Niiru had been there, but Alezya was nowhere to be found.

“She had to have come out either way–”

He didn’t listen to the end of his sister’s sentence; Kassein ran back to the cliff, and looked down at the impossible height. Kiera let out a faint, ragged breath behind him.

“Kassein, if she fell–”

“Don’t say it,” he cut her off angrily.

Kein growled in the distance too. He was staring down from that height, and there was nothing his sister could say that he didn’t already know. Kassein forced himself to breathe; even his throat was impossibly tight and painful. He had to find her.

He took out his blade, ignoring the protests of his sore, aching muscles as he began to climb down.

Maybe she’d managed to fall on a cliff somewhere below.

Maybe she’d landed in a shallow crevice, and the snow had stopped her fall.

Maybe she was just stuck somewhere. Maybe she just couldn’t hear him calling her name.

Maybe she couldn’t hear all his men calling her name.

Kassein climbed down, and his sister flew on Kiki, making another loop around the mountain, looking for an impossible scenario, something they might have missed. It was about a fifty-foot drop from the cliff to where Dajan and his men were searching the hill of snow and rocks.

The rain had stopped, and it was night now, dark, infinite, and cold. The temperatures were dropping scarily low, the ice-cold air biting. Kein growled in the distance, his dragon touring the entire rift as if Alezya could appear anywhere.

Kassein climbed down, looking for any crevice, any small hill, anything he could have missed between the cliff and the ground.

The minutes stretched into hours. He was vaguely aware that the gorge had emptied, the men had been taken to the infirmary, and his generals and Tievin were leading the other rescues and assessing the aftermath.

Kassein couldn’t have cared less. All he cared about was this small area and finding Alezya, wherever she was.

“Commander!”

He heard Dajan’s voice and jumped down as fast as he could, not caring how painfully he landed.

The Captain’s voice made it seem like they had found something, and Kassein couldn’t tell if his tone had sounded good, bad, or just shocked.

He ran to them, and his heart sank as they were slowly extracting a body.

They had gotten rid of most of the snow, but it took Kassein seconds to focus, and recognize that the broken mound of blood-covered limbs wasn’t Alezya.

It was an older man, whose body had visibly been broken in several places in the fall; he had probably died on impact, given the state of his skull.

“Darak,” one of the nearby tribesmen gasped.

Kassein’s eyes whipped to them. That man was the Deklaan Tribe leader? The man who had spoken paled under his stare, but pointed a shivering finger.

“ Tyo Darak! ” he exclaimed. “ Te Deklaan Kulani bastarko! ”

And then, the man spat at Darak’s body.

Many other tribesmen reacted angrily too, sending obscene gestures at the dead man’s body, some of them glancing up at the mountain before they got even angrier for some reason.

“I guess they won’t fight anymore now,” Dajan commented.

“...Keep searching,” Kassein muttered in a broken voice.

Now he knew why Alezya had been up there. She’d dug out the man responsible for this war. She had killed her father, the one responsible for all this, the one who’d caused her so much hurt. But at what cost?

Kassein glanced up, his heart turning to stone as he contemplated the height. The horrible, gaping height from which her father’s body had fallen.

Suddenly, a sound reached his ear, immediately followed by Kein’s louder growl above. Kassein blinked, staring at the snow, wondering if he had hallucinated when he heard it again.

A high-pitched, weak sound.

“...Niiru,” he muttered.

Kassein threw himself into the snow, scooping and pushing through armfuls of ice and rocks. His fingers were turning purple from the cold and painfully numb. His arms were gradually covered in bronze scales, but he ignored all of it and kept digging, his heart in his throat.

Niiru’s weak whines were scarily faint. Kassein realized he was shaking violently, but he wasn’t sure if it was the cold or fear; it felt like a block of ice had settled in his stomach while a dangerous blend of despair and hope kept him moving.

Tears were pricking his eyes too, but he ignored it all, the pain and the fear, and he kept going.