“No comm rings!” Akwasi barks when I ell my fingers to make a view screen. Then he yanks the titanium comm rings off my fingers before I can make the comm request!
“What the hell, Akwasi? Give me back my rings!”
He doesn’t give me back my rings, and when I try to make a grab for them, he yells, “NO COMM RINGS!” and pushes me. Like, he legit shoves me backward. Hard. Not playfully like before at my coronation.
I nearly fall, and when I regain my feet, there’s no flirt in his eyes. None of the gentle shyness I remember. More than a few of the humans on the dance floor are staring at us now. A few of them have lit up recording rings behind their right eyes…and yep…there it is, already trending on my human news biofeed.
Look at this!!! World Basketball Association Superstar @therealAkwasi fighting with his girlfriend at his club right now!!! …with an accompanying link to the live feed.
Ugh face emoji! What the hell was Akwasi thinking, snatching my rings like that and pushing me so hard?
“It’s time to go,” he says, shoving the rings into his jacket pocket. His voice sounds dull like he didn’t just kill a bunch of endorsement deals by publicly laying hands on his girlfriend in his own nightclub.
Time to go. My brain chews on the command. No, I don’t want to go anywhere with him. But humans might not be the only ones recording. I just got crowned the Queen of North Dakota. And though I try to keep it zero fucks always, gotta admit this ain’t a good look for my very first twenty-four hours on the throne.
In the end, I draw myself up to my full height and raise my chin high. I walk with him out of the club, silently vowing to cuss him all the way out as soon as we get inside his soundproof drone.
However, when we reach the back of the club, there’s a car parked in front of Akwasi’s two-person sports drone, blocking our access to it.
And this car isn’t driverless like the one I hired to take me from Florida into the no-drone state of Mississippi for tomorrow’s triple vow renewal ceremony. It’s long and dark, and there’s a young man seated behind its steering wheel. So it’s manual, like the vintage Cadillac Escalade I drive, but way older. I can hear and smell the growling engine underneath. It runs on diesel, which makes me wonder if it even has a computer system.
And if that’s not creepy enough, the back door opens. and Damianos Drákon steps out.
My heart slams into my chest wall at the sight of him, his expression as hard and unforgiving as the black pavement beneath our feet.
“Hello again, Ola.”
Chapter Six
Damianos Drákon closes the car door behind him and rises to his full height. Large and so much more imposing than when he was sitting down. He’s got to be at least seven feet. Maybe even taller. His shadow is so long, it stretches past both of us, underneath the parking lot’s lights.
Shift! My wolf screams at me. This time, she’s not even a smidge confused about what needs doing. If I have any chance of winning a fight with this dangerous seven-foot plus dragon, I’ll have to get into wolf form—
Akwasi moves beside me, and the next thing I know he's fastening something around my neck that closes with a softly hissed click.
What the…
I reach up to feel the thing he clipped around my neck. It’s not a necklace…it’s some kind of band. Cool and smooth and completely ungiving. It doesn’t choke me, but it’s fastened so tight I can’t get my fingers underneath it so that I can pull it off with the force of my wolf strength.
I can’t see the band, but I know what it is in the next instant when my biosystem abruptly powers down inside of me without so much as a systems failure warning.
Fear rolls through me like a dark tide. Oh fuck, it’s a biocollar! A device human police officers put on suspects to keep them from accessing their biosystems while they're under arrest. However, us wolves use biocollar a little differently. Our biocollars don’t just shut down our biosystems, they also keep weres from hard shifting into their wolves when we need to detain them. Some weres also use them to keep from shifting when there’s a full moon.
My wolf whines inside of me, wanting to help but unable to come out.
And I look up at the man who’s collared me, my eyes full of betrayal. “Akwasi, why?”
“I don’t know,” he answers. His eyes are wide with fear. “I do not understand what I am doing!”
“Ola…” A dark, resonant voice calls out to me.
Akwasi and I turn to face the dragon calling my name.