Page 5 of Dragon King’s Bullied Mate

She watched until he disappeared down the hallway and then turned back to the man lying half-frozen on her floor.

Mikael. An injured king.

Lyra exhaled slowly, her hands already moving to assess the damage. She wasn’t a nurse, but growing up with her brothers, she had learned to treat injuries. Her parents never would have been able to afford a doctor’s visit every time one of them got hurt.

She cleaned up the bigger cuts and the nasty bruise on his shoulder and applied salve to the smaller abrasions. She ignored the fact that she was staring at a naked king in her own home. She needed to call the castle to get help, but something stopped her. It was the unknown details that made no sense.

“What were you doing here, Mikael?”

All that answered her question was silence.

Chapter 3

Mikael

At first, there was only pain. It pulsed through Mikael in deep, relentless waves. The pain burned sharp along his ribs and through his shoulders. Every breath he tried to take sent icy daggers through his chest until even the act of being alive felt like something forced upon him rather than chosen.

Beneath it all, the cold lingered still. Not the kind from being buried in the snow, but something that had seeped into his bones and refused to release its claim.

Then came the sounds. First it was nothing more than a buzz like a cicada in the summer. Loud, obnoxious, and with no purpose to a human being. But then slowly, words started to swirl out of the hum. Someone was speaking, but to who? Him?

The tornado in his head kept any coherent thoughts from forming. He tried to move, but his body was disconnected from any commands. He couldn’t even open his eyes. Through the pain and the chaos, he was a prisoner within his own body.

But then she moved closer. Or maybe she had already been close, he wasn’t sure. He was so cold, but he recognized that the only warmth he felt was when she touched him. A touch that seemed to allow his dragon to stir from its slumber even when it should have been healing him.

Why was he not healed?

Her hands pressed against his skin as she examined him. He felt their heat followed by the inexplicable chill when she pulled away. He wanted to protest when she moved away, but his voice failed him time after time.

A voice came with the touch. It was soft and low, yet somehow familiar. He couldn’t grasp the words at first as they moved through the haze. He tried to follow it blindly, but his thought process was too sluggish. He couldn’t pull himself from the bog that he seemed to have fallen into.

“…easy… you’re alright…”

The words slipped through him but dissolved before he could hold onto them. Frustration flickered weakly because he should understand, and he managed to move his hand slightly, but beyond that, he didn’t have the strength.

There was another voice nearby. It was a child’s voice, but Mikael couldn’t understand his words any better. Panic flared through the chaos and he tried to make sense out of… anything. He had no idea where he was and no matter how much he fought, he couldn’t remember how or why he got there.

Freezing cold… free falling…

Mikael’s thoughts tried to latch onto something solid, anything to make sense of his situation or the events leading up to it, but the effort was too much and slipped away from him.

He felt her move away and tried to stop her. All he managed was a slight groan.

“It’s okay,” the woman murmured as she moved closer again. “I’m right here.”

Something in him quieted, but not entirely and he had no idea why. Beyond the pain and the cold sensation, his dragon twitched and tried to respond. That only added to the complexity of the situation. His dragon felt sluggish and detached, something that had never happened before. But somehow, much as he himself felt the warmth of her touch, the dragon was drawn toward the woman’s voice like it recognized her.

But also, just like his own mind, he could feel the confusion in his dragon. Nothing was as it should be. It should have been pushing against the injuries and forcing his body back into alignment the way it always had before, the way it was meant to. Mikael should have been healed by now, regardless of the injuries.

But he wasn’t. His dragon was pretty much useless.

Mikael became aware of that slowly as his thoughts struggled to piece themselves together but all he could come up with is that his body was still broken in ways the dragon should not have allowed.

Why?

The question dragged through him but the answer remained incomplete. He couldn’t focus long enough to come close to a solution.

Stay.