if that someone was his own brother. No one touched his fated mate—
Tanya was not his mate!
“Why did you wish to kill Vaughn?” Vladimir pressed the brother. He could have used his compulsion to force the answer, but doubted it was necessary with zealots such as the Petrovs.
Izzi was the one to answer. “They believe the Romanov dragons killed their parents ten years ago.”
Deryk Pendragon glanced at Vladimir. “Did you?”
“Absolutely not,” he answered without hesitation. It had been centuries since any of their dragons had killed anyone, and even then, it had only been in defense of their family or during war. Vladimir knew, without a doubt, that neither he nor any of his brothers had killed the older Petrov couple.
“Liar!” Tanya bit out fiercely, trying and failing to break free of Deryk’s restraining hold. “You ripped them both apart like the wild animals you really are.”
Mine.
“Take Izabella and go,” Vladimir instructed Deryk as his dragon fought and railed against his confinement when they could both see another dragon shifter was touching their mate.
The harshness of his voice caused Deryk to look at him through narrowed lids. A gaze Vladimir did his best to withstand, but knew he had failed when he saw the dawning realization in Deryk’s golden eyes.
Deryk removed his hand from Tanya’s arm, which in turn immediately alleviated the tightness in Vladimir’s chest.
Leaving him with no other choice but to accept that Tanya Petrova was indeed his mate.
A mating he could choose not to accept if he so wished.
Ours, his dragon disagreed.
Chapter One
Present day,
Mikhailov Palace, St. Petersburg
“Isn’t it time you killed her and put the both of you out of your misery? Or maybe to do that you need to fuck her and then kill her?”
Vladimir had been enjoying the view of a snow-covered St. Petersburg from the window of his study in one of the turrets of the palace. A fitting place to welcome back his brother, Vaughn, from his few weeks sojourn at their winter dacha several hours’ dragon flight away.
Turning away from the picture-postcard scene, Vladimir now moved to sit behind his desk before focusing glacial dark eyes on Vaughn, the youngest of his six brothers. Not that anyone seeing them together would make that familial connection.
Admittedly, they were both six and a half feet tall, but Vaughn was fair-haired with green eyes, where Vladimir was dark-haired and had eyes as black as coal. Vaughn had the heavy and toned muscles of the superheroes the young of today loved so much, whereas Vladimir was elegance personified, though no less powerful. His defined musculature came from daily runs through the streets of St. Petersburg, but that strength was more often than not clothed in the bespoke suits and silk shirts and ties he preferred to wear, in contrast to Vaughn’s jeans and T-shirts.
Vaughn’s casual clothing reflected the fact that, at only two hundred years old, he was the youngest and so the most adaptable of the seven Romanov dragon-shifter brothers. At a thousand years old, Vladimir was the eldest, and he had already lived through many changes, both in fashion and family. Amongst those changes were the deaths of his parents over a hundred years ago and that of his brother Karl, who had died half a century ago after his mate refused him.
Which brought Vaughn’s comment into sharp focus.
Vladimir looked down the sharp blade of his nose at his brother. “I believe, now you have returned, what we were discussing was you flying to London to assist the Pendragon brothers in the protection of a member of one of our Russian ballet companies currently touring Europe.”
“I believe you were the one discussing that, Your Majesty,” Vaughn came back challengingly as he lounged in the chair on the opposite side of Vladimir’s desk.
“Don’t call me that!” Vladimir rasped.
Vaugh shrugged. “Not calling you by your title doesn’t change the fact that you’re our king.”
Vladimir was well aware of that. He simply preferred not to use the title.
The human Romanovs had been the tsars of Russia for three hundred years, but the dragon Romanovs had been kings of the dragon world for millennia. Unfortunately, during the course of the past five hundred years, the dragons had slowly begun to die, without procreating. Strangely, the royal family had not suffered the same dearth of younglings, having produced eight sons in all. The seven remaining Romanov brothers were all that remained of the Russian dragons.
Vladimir saw no reason to call himself king over his own brothers.
He gave a terse