Chapter 2

My husband could not believe I had agreed to dissolve our bond so easily.

He stared at my lowered ears and asked whether money was truly all I cared about.

He even pulled the agreement halfway out of my reach and told me that if I begged, he would tear it up on the spot.

But all I could remember was the night I lost my baby three years ago.

I had been five months pregnant, curled alone inside our mating den while pain tore through my body.

My snow-leopard tail wound so tightly around the bedpost that my muscles cramped. Sweat soaked the fur around my ears. I called my husband seventeen times.

He never answered.

He returned at dawn.

My sister’s sweet heat scent clung to his collar, and the black scales along his throat were still warm from mating.

I was lying in a bed soaked with blood.

He did not hold me.

He did not ask whether I was in pain.

He only frowned and ordered the servants to clean the blood before my sister smelled it.

She was pregnant, he said. Blood would upset her.

Later, he brought me forged hospital documents and claimed that although my body could no longer carry our child, my sister had “saved” the pregnancy.

I believed him.

I had even been grateful to her.

Only now did I understand that the child he had been worried about that night was never mine.

It was the baby growing inside my sister.

Even now, he still believed I would never truly leave.

He promised that once the hatchling entered the bloodline registry, he would restore my title as Serpent Consort and move me back into the main residence.

I pretended to believe him and asked him to book me a flight to the mountains.

There was a lake there we had promised to visit when we were young.

Relief softened his face. His tail circled my waist as he pulled me into his arms.

“Go ahead of me.”

“When everything is settled, I’ll come find you.”

I rested against his shoulder and said nothing.

Because I knew I would never wait for him again.

Then he asked for the keys to our mating residence.

My sister had just given birth. Her senses were delicate, and the cedar scent I had left throughout the house made her anxious.

He wanted me to remove all my belongings so I would not upset her or the hatchling.

I calmly placed the keys in his palm.

We had designed that house together.

I had chosen the curtains, the rugs, the temperature of the den, and every piece of furniture in the nursery.

I once believed we would raise our own child there.

But while I lost our baby alone, he had been in my sister’s bed.

After I left, I did not go to the new villa he had prepared for me.

I went to the shifter containment facility.

For three years, every time I visited the father and brother I believed had gone feral, I had seen a young black dragon locked in solitary confinement.

He had been framed during a family succession war.

One of his horns had been sawed short. Suppression rings clamped his pointed black ears, and iron chains bound the still-growing wings at his back.

Everyone claimed he had lost his mind.

I was the only one who knew he had been lucid all along.

I opened the isolation cell and removed his suppression collar.

“I have the money.”

“I’m taking you home.”

My husband had no idea that I was never going to the mountains.

I was crossing the ocean to the overseas territory ruled by the deep-sea black dragons.