“Just stay here. No one better have moved an inch by the time we return!” The guard shouted his orders as he followed the vice president into the meeting room, leaving the bulk of the security team in the hallway.
“I’m going to kill them all,” I muttered, heat pouring off me as my elemental energy attempted to escape and fulfill my wish of mass-murder. It had been a fucking long month dealing with this shit, and every day it got harder. Harder to be away from my family and home, away from the forests of Stratford that soothed my energy.
As I dropped back against the wall, Justice at my side, I fought the tremble in my limbs of heat burning through my veins. It was growing abundantly clear that fire had always been my strongest elemental affinity due to the bond I would one day have with my dragon. Now that we had finally merged our souls, it changed everything. When I ached to release my flames, the dragon pushed to stretch his wings. Always together, in sync, but also separate from the other.
One truth we both shared: we hated these humans.
“Calm down,” Justice murmured under her breath, her white teeth flashing as her lips curled.
In the time we’d been together here, we’d actually grown closer. Close enough that she was confident in smacking me down when I lost my shit. Not that she’d ever been shy with her spitfire of a personality.
Right now, though, I was seriously not in the mood.
“I am calm,” I bit out.
My fire chose that moment to call me a liar, burning hotter and stretching in slow arching swirls across my fingers to the edge of my short, bluntly cut nails.
Justice shook her head. “Jacob, friend, I don’t mean to point out the obvious, but you can’t do that here.” She moved to try block me from sight.
Friend. The fuck did that mean?
There were times Justice managed to piss me off so thoroughly that it was actually impressive, and considering Jessa Lebron-Compass was my pack mate…
I was well used to strong-willed women with stronger attitudes. They were my preference.
But Justice was…
Who the fuck knew?
Small flames licked all the way over my arms and across my shoulders, and it was only through my own hard-earned control that I managed to dial it back. My perfect mask, the one that hid my emotions from the world, was cracking. It was the fey way to present a perfect, polished front. But I’d failed miserably since my dragon mating. Animals were anything but fake—they were raw and emotional and strong. Real in a way that very few beings were, be that human or supe.
Justice pressed her hands to my chest, and if anything, that made my energy worse. “What the hell is going on with you?” she asked in a rushed whisper. “You almost let the humans see you half on fire? Where is the sophisticated smartass of a fey that I know and don’t love? You’re a lit fuse barreling toward the bomb. I keep waiting for you to explode.”
I snorted. “Trust me, Justice, if I was going to explode, you’d know about it.”
Thankfully, she pulled back, looking at her hands like she hadn’t even realized she’d touched me. I ran a hand through my hair, before remembering it was too short to have the same effect. All the soldiers under the president’s command had military cuts. Justice was the only one to escape this order, keeping her long, blond, streaked-with-the-ruby waves intact. Marcus, head dick measurer in this sector, had tried to get her to lose the length. He’d almost lost his head instead.
Not from me—apparently Justice had a temper to rival my own these days.
“You both know that bombs aren’t really the lit fuse type any longer, right?” O’Malley said from beside us, the only one close enough to overhear our conversation.
For the most part, the humans in the presidential guard were sanctimonious assholes in love with their own importance, but Bryce O’Malley was tolerable. The Irishman didn’t put his nose where it wasn’t wanted and had no obvious biases toward the supernatural world. His dry sense of humor was a welcomed relief during the nights where poker and drinking were the norm.
He was doing an okay job at redeeming a race I’d been starting to think might be unredeemable. Of course, that could have a lot to do with the company of humans we were keeping.
The president, who was both stupid and afraid—a truly disastrous