Page 53 of Bad Blood Alpha

That was the wrong thing to say.

Flynn turned on her, the knives clutched in his hands. “A good soldier? That fucking says it all. He didn’t give a shit about me. None of them did. All they cared about was how they could use me. Use me, and make me fucking proud to be used!”

He threw a knife viciously, and it cracked the target.

“He loved you,” she said.

Flynn took a step forward, pointing one of the knives at her for emphasis. “Don’t you fucking talk to me about love. Markus didn’t know the first thing about love. None of your precious Al-Maddeiri dragons knew the first thing about it. You don’t use people you love. You don’t brainwash them into taking a magical oath that they’ll never be free of, just to serve the purposes of a dying breed of dragons. Who fucking died anyway. They died anyway!”

He threw the knife sidearm, not even looking, and it still hit the middle of the target, the handle vibrating with the force of the impact.

“Flynn—” He was clutching the remaining knife by the blade, and it cut into his palm. Blood dripped down, but he didn’t seem to feel it.

Or maybe he needed the pain.

“I was twelve years old,” he said. “The world I knew was collapsing in hell and fire. Markus sent me with a message, up to the summer palace. To try to warn you. All the magical avenues of warning were cut off. Everything was in chaos.”

He looked off into the distance, as if seeing it once more. “He told me to go by a secret route. He told me to go lion, to run as fast as I could and not look back. He told me not to think about anything else, that everything depended on me going as fast as I could.”

He shook his head. “And so I ran. I ran for my life, ran myself into exhaustion. I almost fucking died. And I didn’t get there in time.”

He focused his gaze on her. “Do you understand? I didn’t make it. By the time I got there, the summer palace was in ruins. All the dragons were dead. You were dead. The princess I was pledged to protect. The princess I was magically bonded to.”

“I wasn’t,” she said.

“I felt it,” he said. “Did you know that? Did fucking Markus know that? I felt it in my bones, like something being ripped out of me that I could never get back. Like I’d be walking around, half a person, maimed for the rest of my life.”

She shook her head, confused. “How could you? I wasn’t dead—”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it was when Markus hid you, when he bound your dragon. Do you think that makes it better? That you didn’t die, but he let me think you did? I was twelve years old, and alone, and crippled inside. I’d failed Markus, failed you. Everyone I cared about was dead. He could have found me, let me know it wasn’t true. But he didn’t. He fucking let me live with it.”

He watched the blood dripping down his hand.

“None of the clans would take me in. I had to find my way to this world, learn to take care of myself. And I did. And now I find out that he was here all along. Living in a mansion, taking care of the princess.” His eyes burned into hers. “But not me.”

“It wasn’t like that—”

“Don’t you fucking tell me what it was like!”

The fury in his voice made her take a step back.

“And don’t you make excuses for him. You’re just as bad as he was.”

“I was five years old!”

“Yeah? And what about when you were eighteen? Or twenty-one? You didn’t bother to look for me because you didn’t need me. Now you do, and here you come running, using your magic to reel me in, to make me feel things—”

He stopped. “Neither of you ever cared about me at all.”

He clenched his bloody hand, willing power from the bracelets until the bleeding stopped and the cut healed over.

He threw the last knife at the target and it quivered there, still stained with his blood.

Then he turned and walked away into the forest. A moment later, she heard the furious roar of a lion.