“Which means we're safe in dragon paradise, at least for a while.” Alyx stretched in the sunlight.
Liana had given her some of her clothes, and now that she was no longer wearing the scorched shirt and jeans they'd escaped in, Alyx was even more striking.
Instead of the fierce woman with angry eyes who'd risked everything to escape, he now saw Alyx the way she must have been before they'd imprisoned her underground and made her serve the firebird.
Wearing a thin yellow shirt and flowing skirt with confidence, Alyx lounged in the sun as if Steele should be afraid of her instead.
And he should be.
Braeden would have fought him anyway. It was his duty—to the council of elements and also to all vulnerable humans and shifters. He was the master of fire. Who but he could deal with that threat?
But now that he knew that Steele had captured his mate and imprisoned her underground, using her for strange experiments and then just throwing her away when she didn't prove useful...
His dragon hissed with rage, the flame at the heart of him burning high with protective anger.
He couldn't undo what had happened to Alyx. But he could make sure that it would never, ever happen again.
And from the way Alyx looked at him with sudden heat in her eyes, he knew that she'd only cheer him on.
Chapter Eleven: Alyx
“Time to explore your shifter paradise?” Alyx smiled at Braeden, nodding towards where the beach stretched away from the house.
Earlier, Braeden and Timothy had vanished for half an hour to update the council of elements they kept mentioning. Alyx had been glad to get a moment of quiet.
Especially as it meant that she got to chat with Liana a little.
The curvy black woman who seemed to go nowhere without her tiny laptop was refreshingly normal. Although Braeden had called her the Lady of the Water, Alyx wouldn't have been surprised at all to meet her in her favorite coffee shop back home, hacking away at her keyboard in her comic print shirt.
But for all that Alyx used to report on the latest fashion trends, right now she felt incredibly grateful to wear a clean shirt with a Captain America print on it.
There was a time for fashion and makeup and her unfortunate addiction to nail polishes. Escaping from an erupting volcano was not that time.
Still, it was good to be back in the real world. If the curious little shifter island counted as real.
But even though Liana had told her about bunny shifters, weregulls, and a pair of retired werewolves who lived around the corner, it felt real. It felt normal, the way the fire dragon caves hadn't.
Perhaps because the werewolves on this island seemed more bothered about how the fish weren't biting today.
“Here are John and James,” Braeden said when he waved to two old men in a small wooden boat not far from the shore.
“The werewolves?”
Liana had told Alyx about them, but the two men giving them a nod looked like any other retired couple she'd ever seen.
“The werewolves,” Braeden confirmed with a grin, clearly pleased by her bafflement.
It was nice to walk in the sunshine, werewolves or not. She hadn't even realized how much she'd missed the light of the sun.
In the caves, there had been the fake sun of dragon fire, and lamps and torches. But to feel the warmth of real sunlight on her face and her bare arms again was incredible.
“They've clearly got good taste if they retired here.” Alyx raised her own hand in greeting.
They hadn't come racing towards her to sniff her or bite her, or whatever it was werewolves did in fairy tales. They seemed way too preoccupied with staring at their fishing rods.
Truly the most boring hobby.
Not that she'd tell them that to their face. She preferred a fishing werewolf to a hunting fire dragon, in any case.