The Warrior King (Inferno Rising #3) - Abigail Owen Page 0,70

trust, whether she realized it or not, total. And humbling. Something about that touch got to him, opened him up and ripped out his heart. Had his life been that wrong? Everything he’d been protecting been the wrong way? The weight of the implications hit Samael hard enough that he bowed his head, staring blankly at a spot on the uneven stone floor of the cavern.

Had keeping his clan safe been the wrong move? Isolation meant that black dragons hadn’t suffered, or that was how the thinking had gone. Had their people been impacted anyway? In the colonies. In lives lost that could have been prevented. In mates they didn’t even know were gone.

Rune stepped into him. “If you’re going to take the throne—”

Samael jerked his head up. “I can’t—”

Rune cut him off with a pointed look at Meira. Based on the way her eyes tightened, Meira caught it, and she understood the implication but said nothing.

“If you do,” Rune insisted, “I suggest you be ready to fight. That’s what we need now. A warrior. It’s what we always needed.”

Samael shook his head. “Gorgon is alive. We’ll find him, and he’s a fighter now. He was waiting for the right time, the right allies, and he’s found that in Brand and Ladon.”

Rune settled back, the passion dying from him as though stripped away, replaced by a bitter disappointment. In Samael? Or in Gorgon? Or all of it? “I pray you’re right.”

“We’ll figure it out together.” Meira’s voice dropped quiet as rain into the void, soothing and yet, at the same time, filling Samael with an odd sort of pride. He squeezed her hand.

Rune gave a sharp nod. “Together or not at all.”

“Then let’s get on the same side,” she said. A challenge to everyone in the room, though put so mildly, it sounded almost like an entreaty.

“If we’re on the same side, then we can’t abandon you,” Aidan said. Each man in the room straightened, turning to face her fully. Even the green shifter in the back.

Except Samael knew Meira. She wasn’t going to allow them to protect her at the cost of their own lives. Not if she could save them. To a big heart like hers, the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. Always.

He knew he was right the second she sighed, the sound determined. “As the only queen in this room,” she said slowly, “I believe I outrank you all.”

Gods, she was incredible. “There’s a way we can all get away, but the timing has to be right.”

…

“This is only going to work if we can get enough of a head start. Agreed?”

Samael’s voice when he was in dragon form dropped lower, more of the animal in the raspy, dark tones. After years fearing the creature he was, Meira half expected to be terrified right now, standing beside the massive black shadow of a beast. But she wasn’t. Not even close.

They’d walked down the narrow tunnel leading out of the mountain, even Meira had needed to stoop to get through. How Sam, well over six feet, managed it, she didn’t know, though a few soft grunts told her he hadn’t been entirely successful.

Now they stood in unspeaking silence inside a wide caldera with a hole in the ceiling overhead, the moonless sky black above, stars scattered as though the gods had thrown diamonds up there. Only things that flew could get in and out of the room they stood in.

Only the two of them. The others waited for Samael’s signal.

Meira nodded.

“If I’m going to fly silent, I need to lay my spikes flat. You won’t have anything to hold on to, so I’m going to carry you.”

Not her preferred way to try dragon flight for the first time, but she understood. She gave a thumbs-up.

“Even the smallest sound, before we’re ready for whoever is after us to know where we are, could alert them to our presence.”

She kept herself from rolling her eyes and gave a more exaggerated double thumbs-up.

“Right.” It said a lot for Samael’s tension levels that he didn’t laugh. She almost expected him to.

Instead, he stood on all fours and flipped one large taloned claw under, opening the spikes of razor-sharp talons for her to be able to walk through and stand on his palm, before closing the talons upward around her, like a creepy birdcage.

With more qualms than she wanted to give voice to, or he’d talk her out of this—they’d all already tried to—she sat down in his