you do, it doesn’t seem to have been a restful one. You’ve become silent and withdrawn. Admit it, Vladimir. Tanya is your mate.”
His nostrils flared. “She is unworthy.”
“In what way?” Vaughn challenged. “For five years, she did whatever she had to do to provide a home for her younger brother when he left the orphanage. Six months ago, she entrapped a dragon because she believed he was one of the shifters responsible for killing her parents. She tried to kill that dragon. She almost fucking succeeded because I was distracted by thoughts of seducing her— Ah,” he murmured in satisfaction at the sound of Vladimir growling low in his throat. “Jealousy. The final proof I needed that Tanya is indeed your mate.”
“I cannot accept that,” Vladimir grated.
“Because she had to sell her body on the streets of St. Petersburg in order to survive?” Vaughn made no effort to hide his disgust. Toward Vladimir.
“No, of course not.” Vladimir stood. “I’ve been in existence for many centuries, and during that time, I have lost count of the number of women I’ve taken to my bed.” Those women had dwindled to none during the last two centuries. He no longer had the appetite to bed a woman who wasn’t his mate. “I have no intention of apologizing for them, so why should Tanya do so? She did what she had to do for the survival of her brother and herself. I would never judge her for that.”
Vaughn looked puzzled as he gave a shake of his head. “Then why the fuck haven’t you mated her yet and given us all some damned hope we might one day find our own mate?”
He stared at his brother in disbelief. “You really would accept her as your queen?”
“Accept her and rejoice at your good fortune.”
“Do our brothers feel the same way you do?”
“Yes.”
“You sound very sure of that.”
“Because I am. At eight hundred years old, Aleksey is next in age to you, and he would very much appreciate it if you completed your mating and thus removed yourself from the mating market.”
Vladimir snorted. “This is not some Regency novel where the eldest daughter must be married—or in this case, mated—before the next daughter can be considered for marriage.”
“Well, of course not, because we’re all males,” Vaughn dismissed impatiently. “But it might just be that the rest of us won’t begin to find our mates until the brothers older than us have found theirs.”
“I have no idea where you came by such logic, but that is not how it happened to the Pendragon brothers. Their matings were random and not by age.”
Vaughn nodded. “Two of them even have the same mate. Nevertheless, that’s how Aleksey feels. Maksim, Rafail, Viktor, and Benedikt too.”
“You all, without exception, believe and accept that Tanya Petrova is my mate and queen?” Vladimir asked slowly.
“Yes.”
He sighed heavily. “Even if I could persuade her into mating with me—and that is a big if when she considers us all nothing but vicious animals and murderers—how can I be sure she will not kill me one night as I sleep beside her?”
“Deryk assures me the ecstasy of the mating is worth dying for,” Vaughn taunted.
He scowled darkly. “I wish you would not associate with that male.”
Vaughn shrugged. “As I said, he’s a badass.”
“And a bad influence on you.”
His brother grimaced. “At least he’s accepted and embraced his mate, even though she was under the protection of a Russian family of dragon shifters he initially wanted nothing to do with. You should find the same acceptance in regard to Tanya.”
Vladimir turned to once again stare out the window at the freshly falling snow. “We will not talk of this anymore.”
“Because you say we won’t?”
“Because if I should decide to see Tanya again, it will not be because my baby brother told me to do so.”
Vaughn snorted. “As I’ve been the youngest for two hundred years, and will always be so, that older brother crap ceased working on me a century ago.”
Vladimir sighed. “Are you going to London to meet up with whichever Pendragon brother is already guarding the Ruscov ballet company, or must I send someone else in your place?”
“I’ll go,” Vaughn accepted wearily.
And Vladimir would go to the family’s winter palace.
To confront the woman who was his mate and queen.
Chapter Two
Rapunzel!
For months, Tanya had been trying to think of the heroine in the German fairy tale who had been locked away in a high turreted tower, without stairs or a door to enable her to escape.
Tanya