Dragons Realm by Tessa Dawn Page B

fantas­ies had a way of evolving into adult­hood real­it­ies. Child­ish hope gave way to ma­ture ac­cept­ance; ju­ven­ile dreams gave way to reasoned ob­jectiv­ity; and over time, Dante had come to un­der­stand ex­actly who and what De­mitri Dragona was…
    And was not .
    No, he was not a lov­ing father.
    And no, he was not a pa­tient or kindly king.
    But he was an an­cient, prim­or­dial dragon, the eld­est of their kind, and at 269 years old, he was the only dragon in the Realm who could fully shift into pure drago­nian form, at will. As it stood, Dante would not reach the age of mat­ur­a­tion for an­other thirty-one years; Damian still had fifty-one ahead of him; and Drake still had fifty-four. Con­sequently, King De­mitri Dragona was the single force that held the Realm to­gether and kept their en­emies at bay. He was the only creature power­ful enough to in­cin­er­ate an en­tire vil­lage in one fell swoop, turn the ocean tides into a ra­ging sea with the flut­ter of his wings, or bury a city block be­neath a crum­bling crater with the simple wag of his tail. In short, he was death on wings if he chose to be: fire, ash, and fury at will.
    And he was all that stood between the four provinces and the hordes of con­quer­ing Lycani­ans, shifters who lived across the rest­less sea.
    Dante shif­ted his weight from one foot to the other and drew in a deep breath as the truth of that state­ment sank in for the hun­dredth time: De­mitri Dragona was the sov­er­eign king of a land that could ex­plode into chaos and vi­ol­ence at any mo­ment, simply be­cause it housed so many sav­age, bru­tal, and power­ful in­hab­it­ants. If his laws were not obeyed, if the shad­ows or the war­locks were to rise to even­tual power, if the sheer num­bers of sub­jects were to unite and stage an or­gan­ized up­ris­ing, then it was King De­mitri Dragona who could rees­tab­lish or­der. And while each of his sons played a crit­ical role in main­tain­ing the Realm’s del­ic­ate bal­ance—while each would rule his own dis­trict, sus­tain life, en­sure prosper­ity, and main­tain law and or­der—De­mitri was the paste that held it all to­gether.
    The mere threat of his fury in­spired obed­i­ence and awe.
    The king cleared his throat in an un­usu­ally coarse fash­ion, and Dante’s eyes shot back to the throne. “Dante, did you hear a single word your brother just said?”
    Dante cast a side­ways glance at Drake, as if he could some­how in­tuit the crux of the con­ver­sa­tion from his brother’s ex­pres­sion, and frowned. “I’m sorry, Father. I was—”
    Just then, there was a loud bang from be­hind the east­ern wall of the throne room, a sud­den crash of crates or boxes, and the shuffle of small feet stum­bling to re­gain their pur­chase.
    A dragon’s hear­ing was highly acute.
    “What the hell was that?” Damian snarled, even as the Malo Clan guards stood to in­stant at­ten­tion.
    “In­deed,” the king said, in­stantly for­get­ting his nit-pick­ing with Dante. He flicked his wrist in the dir­ec­tion of the sound, in­dic­at­ing the private back en­trance to the throne room, and both guards im­me­di­ately headed in the dir­ec­tion of the clamor.
    Dante, how­ever, did not need to wait on the guards’ re­port.
    He had fed from one of the Sk­la­vos Ahavi.
    He had tasted her blood and con­sumed her heat.
    And now that he was aware of an in­truder, he could smell her from here.
    Mina Louvet.
    *
    Mina stared through the nar­row pee­p­h­ole in the cramped, dusky stor­age room, eye­ing the elab­or­ate throne room with its ex­tra­vag­ant, or­nate fur­nish­ings and listen­ing as Prince Drake ex­plained in minute de­tail how he in­ten­ded to ap­ply the new tax in the com­mon­lands , ac­cord­ing to the king’s be­hest. While she couldn’t make out every word—she was far more con­cerned about how