Dark Dragon Daddy Read online

  Dark Dragon Daddy

  Alpha Dragon Club Series

  Abigail Raines

  Contents

  Chapter One: David

  Chapter Two: Dana

  Chapter Three: David

  Chapter Four: Dana

  Chapter Five: David

  Chapter Six: Dana

  Chapter Seven: David

  Chapter Eight: Dana

  Chapter Nine: David

  Chapter Ten: Dana

  Chapter Eleven: David

  Chapter Twelve: David

  Chapter Thirteen: Dana

  Chapter Fourteen: David

  Chapter Fifteen: Dana

  Chapter Sixteen: David

  Chapter Seventeen: Dana

  Also by Abigail Raines

  About the Author

  © Copyright 2019 - All rights reserved.

  It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental.

  Chapter One: David

  The nightmares were just as terrifying as always, if not surprising. I was trapped again. I was forced to stay shifted, my wings chained to the wall, a tonic to repress my fire poured down my throat. I would never get out. I would never see my parents again. I would die here alone, and never fly…

  I woke up sweating. That wasn’t unusual. The nightmares, at this point, were part of a routine. The terror of them at least went away quickly. Sometimes I couldn’t help but think of them later. But in the morning, depending on my mood, I was usually able to shake them off. It was those unexpected flashbacks that really did a number on me from time to time. But it had been a while since I’d experienced anything like that.

  Now I stretched in bed, stirring as the virtual assistant whose small, sleek silver pillar stood on the antique dresser attempted to get me up.

  “Good morning, David,” Ella said in her pleasant albeit monotone. “It’s time to get up, sir. Good morning, David. It’s time to get up, sir…”

  “Okay, Ella,” I mumbled, rolling out of bed and rubbing my eyes. “I’m up. I’m up.”

  My room was drafty today. My mansion sits on a shady corner on the Upper East Side of New York. As mansions go, it’s an old one, my family having settled here back in the 1890s. That dragon shifters were a part of the old Gilded Age aristocracy shocks some dragon shifters who are new in town (meaning they settled here with in the last forty years). But shifters have been woven into the fabric of American life more than even most magical folk realize.

  “Ella, what time is it?” I mumbled, getting to my feet. I shuddered at the cold of the floor on my bare feet.

  My friends had told me multiple times that I needed to update the house. The place was old and it looked old, as opulent as it was. But I hated the idea of changing it from how my parents had kept it. I liked to remember how it was when they were here, back when I was a kid. Before I was taken and they died and everything changed.

  “It’s half past six o’clock in the morning, David,” Ella said. I reached for the robe hanging from a hat rack by my dresser, curling my toes in the welcome plushness of the area rug under my feet. For the millionth time I reminded myself to buy a nice area rug just forgetting out of bed so I wouldn’t freeze toes off in that one barren space cold wood. But I knew I’d forget again.

  I shut my eyes and headed to the bathroom and saw there in the darkness the cell and the chains. I could feel that sensation of suffocating because I couldn’t breathe my fire.

  I gasped and stumbled, falling against the wall. It had been a long time since a nightmare had affected me. I knew it didn’t make me weak but sometimes that was difficult to remember. Later, I told myself, I’d go up to the roof and shift and get out some of this bad energy. But right now, I needed to go about my routine. I liked my routine. Sometimes I was sure that it was the only thing keeping me sane.

  “Would you like me to wake Miles, sir?” Ella said.

  I waved a hand at the silver pillar as if it could see my gesture. Miles was my cook and housekeeper. He was the only staff I kept on a daily basis on site and he still felt superfluous but he had worked for my parents and I felt a little sentimental about him. He was probably necessary anyway. The place was way too big to keep up myself.

  “No,” I muttered. “I’m just gonna have a coffee and a bagel today. Miles can sleep in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I grabbed my laptop from my desk and headed downstairs. The mansion had seven bedrooms. It had a greenhouse, a pool, a deck, a rose garden, a library, a dining room that would have been useful if I ever had people over properly. It had a turret with a nice reading nook in a window seat. The mansion was way too much house for one man. But I had only been home for two years. I still didn’t know what to do with it. And it had been my parents place. That heartbreak still felt fresh. I didn’t want to let them go.

  I didn’t have a regular job. At least, I didn’t have a regular job like my most of my friends did. I’d inherited too much money and now I managed and maintained and grew and invested it. Besides that, I gave it away. It had surprised me to find out that giving away money was nearly as difficult as making it, at least when you were handling large sums. That was what I spent a lot of my time on. When I wasn’t doing that, I was doing favours for acquaintances; investing their money for them because they’d heard I was pretty good at it. Or else, I was reading or gardening or doing anything that might drown out the flashbacks and nightmares. If I were smart, I would have gone out more often. I need people, activities, events. I’d become somewhat of a hermit, at least during the day. My friends teased me about it, but they had seemed truly worried.

  But they didn’t know my night-time hobby.

  I was planning on going out tonight, in fact. I just had a few things to do and then I would be free to take on New York in the dark.

  The day was slow and filled with the little bits of business I keep myself entertained by. My friends, consisting of a small group of dragon shifters who also happen to be fairly wealthy men in their own right, had sent me a few texts lately. They wanted to get together. There were four of them. We called ourselves the Alpha Dragon Club even though, strictly speaking, dragons don’t have alphas. It was just a name, our little designate or our exclusive little circle. We got together to have drinks and shoot the breeze and shift and fly. I hadn’t seen them in a while. But these texts back and forth always went the same way. I would tell them I was busy and they would keep nudging me until I agreed to get together with them. I did tend to be a stick in the mud about agreeing to socialize.

  But tonight, I truly had other plans.

  That evening I ate dinner in the kitchen as usual, reading the news. The mansion could be lonely, even for a hermit like me. It was one reason I liked keeping Miles around. Most nights he ate with me. It wasn’t the usual way of servants. But then again, who was I keeping up conventions for at this point?

  Miles was in his sixties now. He was short and stout and mostly bald. But he was cheerful. That was nice to have around too. We were used to each other. Set in our ways.

  “Are you going out tonight, Mr. Kagen?” Miles said now.

  The kitchen was a massive room of marble counters and open shelving. The last renovation, back when my parents were alive, had put French doors out to the patio and the greenhouse beyond. Now the blinds were drawn, letting in the setting sun. I put down my iPad and blinked out the win
dows as I swallowed my Chicken Marsala. I had been set on going out tonight. It was a habit of mine, though I did have a strange feeling about this night in particular. I had the unsettling and restless feeling that something significant was going to happen. It was almost a giddy and childish feeling. I hadn’t felt anything like it since childhood, long before I was taken.

  “I thought I would,” I said simply, refusing to let on about my strange feelings.

  “Please be careful, sir,” Miles said, his brows drawn together.

  “I will be.” I took a sip of wine and sat back in my chair. “It’s a big city. And there’s no one else to look after the shifters. The wolves do alright, but there aren’t enough of them.”

  New York had its share of shifter citizens. But it also had its share of shifter villains. Shifters usually knew better than to mess with humans. Then you’d get human law enforcement coming after you. We had our own magical world. Witches, shifters, werewolves, vampires… There were wolf packs and others in New York who tried to keep a handle on things. But it could get dicey out there. Humans didn’t like vigilante justice. But shifters had to rely on it sometimes.

  I finished up my dinner and drank some water as darkness set in. Upstairs, I read for a bit and watched some TV. I was only biding my time, waiting for the hour to grow late before I went out.

  At around ten, I finally ventured out. I headed upstairs to the roof. I usually take the spiral staircase from the third floor that lets out on the flat roof that looks out on the Upper East Side.

  My dragon is small. I’m a fierce fighter but my dragon’s growth was stunted as a result of being contained and imprisoned for so long while shifted. I was lucky not to have died. But what I lack in size, I make up for in stealth and swiftness. I also have a hotter than average fire. I would’ve thought I’d have a weak fire but apparently being forced to contain it for so long, actually made the fire fiercer. Go figure. But the means was torturous. No dragon should attempt it just for the sake of a hot fire.

  On the roof, I shifted and spread my wings. My scales are a deep black. I tend to melt right into shadow when I go out at night.

  There’s a ward over New York City. A lot of shifters don’t know about it. I don’t tell even people I know about it because I think it makes people more careful to know they might be seen. It was one of my ancestors, back in the early 1900s who put the ward over Manhattan. It doesn’t make shifters entirely invisible to humans, but it makes them difficult to see. Dragons could go hog wild right over Central Park and breath fire right and left on a Sunday afternoon and the bulk of human New Yorkers would not see it. The truth is, New York is full of magic. It has been for a long time. That’s why so many shifters live here, even if they don’t know it.

  I flew up high and headed toward the park, quickly feinting down, low over the trees, keeping my eyes and ears open. When shit goes down between shifters or other magical folk, it tends to be in the park. It’s a giant, open space for the shifters to be their true animal selves late at night. There are plenty of places to hide and plenty of secret, hidden places for other magical folk to do their work.

  Sometimes, I don’t see anything. Sometimes, I end up busting up a werewolf war. It all depends. Tonight, I wasn’t seeing much action at all. I flew down, sniffing some fear among fox shifters, and only found some kits out late and playing a game. Their fear was only down to them being out alone at night. I flew down to talk to them and they seemed so intimidated by the sight of a dragon that they ran off back home before I could tell them too.

  I patrolled around the city, widening my perimeter by degrees, breaking up little scuffles here and here. But there was nothing serious tonight. It confused me just a little. I was sure I’d had a strange feeling about going out. I put it down to my own addled brain. I still had nightmares and flashbacks about being taken. There was every chance my emotions might wreak havoc and tell me something was wrong when it wasn’t.

  I was low over the park again when I heard a female scream.

  “No! No! Let go!” The girl was shouting. I turned in a flash toward the sound and flew down into the tree line.

  There was a big guy, a henchman type, dragging a young woman through the park. They would reach the street in a few minutes. He was not attacking her, but he had her by the arm and was pulling her along. The immediate urge was, of course, to go down there and save the girl right away. But the situation was ambiguous enough that I wanted to see where it went. He was taking her somewhere. That kind of situation might mean that he was taking her somewhere where the real villain was waiting or perhaps where there were other victims in peril. Anyway, it was worth investigating.

  The henchman dragged the girl over to a car and I flew after them in short bursts of flight from building to building, hiding in the shadows. They didn’t go far, parking in front of an old apartment building further toward Midtown. I perched on a ledge of the building, high over their heads, and watched the henchman drag the girl inside. This next part would be tricky. I wanted to watch them from the outside but who knew what floor they’d got off at. I climbed down, sticking to darkness, one talon over another. I’m tough as hell but I really am a runt of a dragon. But that means it’s a lot easier for me to sneak. I got low enough that I could sniff my targets. They were both dragons, which was somewhat rare. Although I had heard that there more dragon shifters in New York in the last few years. I caught the scent when they were well inside and probably heading upstairs, I started stealthily sneaking around the building, trying my best not to be seen by any humans inside. The ward over New York helped us quite a lot but it wasn’t a sure thing either. This late, most people were in bed, even in the city that supposedly never slept. But I still tried to be careful.

  I snuck around and around and I was about to get dizzy when I finally caught the scent two stories up. I followed the scent of the two shifters and ducked back, my talons gripping the stone ledge of the building, my wings retracted as I peeked in the window just in time to see the henchman drag the girl into a dingy bedroom.

  “You stay in here!” He shouted.

  “I’m not going back,” the girl said. She sounded like she was trying really hard to be defiant, but she was clearly terrified. She was a pretty young woman too. She had long black hair, nearly to her waist, now pulled back in a ponytail. She wore jeans and a baggy sweater under a denim jacket. She was a little dishevelled and she’d been carrying a backpack that she dropped to the floor now.

  “He can’t make me!” She cried.

  “You belong to him,” he henchman snarled, looming over her. “He paid good money for you!”

  Oh shit.

  This sounded like some sex slavery bullshit. That was enough for me to act. I heard police sirens nearing but I couldn’t tell if they were coming to this particular building. I glanced down and saw them just a block away.

  Everything happened very quickly.

  I glanced up and saw the henchman backhand the girl across the face and before I was even thinking clearly, I was shutting the window with my snout, the glass hardly scratching my thick hide. The henchman was startled, jumping away, far enough from the girl that I could get a good shot. Inside a second I was breathing in and then blowing a narrow blast of flame at the man. I heard his screams and almost simultaneously I heard the cop cars stopping below. If they looked up and saw a fire breathing dragon on the ledge just a couple of floors up, no magical ward would make them un-see that. It was too much to disguise even with the aid of a veil.

  So I shifted.

  I kept a tight grip on the ledge and shifted and I nearly fell, my human body always feeling so horribly frail right after I shifted. It was a close thing but then the cop cars were pulling out again They hadn’t been coming here after all. I grimaced and looked in the window just in time to see the girl stumbling back and the henchman, still on fire, and drawing a gun. I’d blown past him a little and the wall behind him was in flames.

  “Oh fuck,” I said, just as the girl sc
reamed and he shot his gun. I should’ve jumped. It all happened inside a second or I would have. Instead, I was shot. I felt a jolt of terrible pressure in my shoulder and even as I fell back, tipping right off the ledge and plunging toward the ground, I thought that I was lucky because the wound was nowhere near fatal or even very injurious. I guess the guy was too distracted being on fire to have a good aim.

  It was three stories to the ground but it was a car that broke my fall. My leg twisted behind me in the air and in that moment I thought: Oh, that’s going to be bad.

  I hit the roof of the car and heard the crunch of bone snapping but it was seconds before I felt the white hot sharp pain of a bone break coupled with a bullet in my shoulder. It hurt so badly my brain sort of turned off for a moment, switching from coherent thoughts to a wordless now.

  That girl, I thought, as consciousness faded. I hope that girl is okay.

  Chapter Two: Dana

  I smelled the dragon at the window before Gus did. I tried not to give myself away but the dragon who was black as a shadow and hovering on the ledge right outside was the first hope I’d had since Gus had spotted me in the park. I’d been trying to hide out, instinct telling me that Darien’s men were on my tail. New York was supposed to have been somewhere I could get lost. But somehow they’d tracked me down.

  The dragon in the window was under-sized. My first thought was that it was a young dragon, a teenager. An adult dragon would be twice as large and he definitely smelled male. Then all at once I was breaking away from Gus who was abruptly on fire. The dragon in the window shifted and Gus shot him. I screamed but in the chaos of siren outside, gunshots, and fire, I was able to grab Gus’s gun. It was reflex really. I grabbed the gun, pointed it at Gus, and squeezed the trigger before I could think twice about it. People would hear the gunshots. There would be cops. I had to get gone fast. Shifters and human law enforcement just don’t mix. I dropped the gun, grabbed my backpack, and high-tailed it down the stairs as fast as I could. I was all the way down the sidewalk by the time I realized that nobody cared about the gunshots because the building was on fire as people poured out and from far away a fire engine howled. My mysterious protector had saved my ass. He’d also potentially destroyed an entire building. Not that I really cared.