The Ice Tyrant’s Fated Mate

In the Ice Kingdom the strong rule, and the weak end up in slave cages.

At the top are the Elites. The cruelest and most powerful of all dragons.

Then, if you scroll all the way down to the bottom and a little more after that, you find me and my friends. The Wing-Clipped. We’re who the cages and illegal markets were made for. The product.

Unable to shift, and without a fated mate, we’re nothing more than a footnote for the Elites. All we have to look forward to is a slave collar and an early death.

Until the man with green eyes who smells like forever somehow awakens my dormant dragon. It should be impossible. It is impossible.

Because Clippys don’t have fated mates. Ever. Everyone knows that.

Everyone, it seems, except my dragon. She’s staking this one out as hers, and she isn’t afraid to throw me at the bars of my cage in a lustful fit to show it.

There are so many things wrong with that I don’t know where to start. And the list only grows when I discover who she’s claiming as our mate.

It’s the Ice Tyrant.

The strongest, most ruthless dragon in all Hollow Earth, and she’s decided he’s all ours.

But even if I had a dragon to shift into, and even if I had a mate to call my own, it wouldn’t be him. It would never be him.

And he must agree, because all I can do is stare at his absolutely-definitely-not-perfect posterior as he walks away, leaving me to rot in my cage…

Casimir

Claiming her is everything to me now. But first I’ll have to show her I’m not what the legends say. Somehow.

Because in every rumor, there’s a little truth….

Rejection hurt.

Literally. My dragon bellowed in futile effort to bring our mate back. She called to him over and over as I pressed myself to the brellwood bars of the cage. But he was gone. He’d left us.

The physical agony hit a moment later, slamming me to the ground, my body and face burning with the shame and humiliation of being so utterly and painfully rejected. I’d been told all my life I wasn’t good enough, that I was too weak, too pathetic, because I was a Clippy. That I could understand. I’d grown used to it, hardened against the insults and the sneers.

But this was something different, something else entirely, and I wasn’t ready. How could I ever have been ready for something that should never have happened to me? I couldn’t, and now I lay on the floor of the cage, moaning in pain because of it. My stomach was hollow and empty. Devoid of anything.

In no uncertain terms, I had just been told that I truly wasn’t good enough. My mate, my fated mate, the other half of my soul, had taken one look at me, and had fled in disgust rather than accept my offer.

“Anna, what the hell was that? Are you okay?”

Careful not to get between me and the corridor my mate had run away down, Ella came to my side, scooping me up into her arms and holding me.

Milly was there on my other side, brushing away the tears and doing her best to shield me from the audience that had gathered. “It’s going to be okay, Anna. You’re fine now.”

“Was that what I thought it was?” Ella asked in a low voice, not wanting to draw more attention to what had just happened.

“What are you talking about?” Milly looked from me, to Ella, and back again, lines forming between her eyebrows.

I couldn’t reply. Shame had frozen my tongue while I wallowed in the pitiful existence that was my life.

“I think, somehow, she found her mate,” Ella whispered, looking from me to the corridor where Emerald-Eyes had gone.

My dragon didn’t like her looking at him. I knew I should have been happy to have her, to finally have an awakened dragon within me, but monumental moment or not, it just didn’t matter next to the lancing pain of rejection. A pulsing agony where the mate bond should have begun to form. Where instead, there was simply nothing now. A gaping hole in my soul. A constant reminder.

“Her mate?” Milly sucked in air. “But that’s impossible. She ... we’re Clippy’s. We don’t have mates.”

“I know,” Ella said. But did you see her? Did you hear her growling? That’s the sound of a dragon. I’ve seen it happen before. It wasn’t quite that—”

“Arousing?” Milly suggested when Ella paused for words.

“Yeah. Intense, I was thinking. But it was similar.”

Ella and Milly both looked down the corridor now, then at me.

“So where did he go? Why did he leave?” Milly asked, not leaving my side.

My friends were the best. Leave it to them to not care that I had been rejected for not being good enough. To them, I was more than enough. Ella would be there with her brains to puzzle it out, and Milly ... well, Milly would use her muscles if they were needed. She was the protector, the fighter, of the three of us.

And I was the useless one. The broken. The third wheel.

“You know why he left,” I said quietly, pushing up into a sitting position, the hole in me raw and tender, but growing no worse. Maybe I could even get used to it.

Ha.

“I’m sure it wasn’t that,” Ella said, sitting with one knee behind my back as she hugged me tight, helping support me without asking.

“It was,” I growled, wishing they would be more angry. Didn’t they get it?

I stopped. Of course they didn’t get it. How could they? Until five minutes ago, we’d all been Clippy’s, on equal ground.

“He left because I wasn’t good enough. Not strong enough for him, whoever he was,” I said, struggling to push the words out. It would be easier once I said them. “He left because I was a Clippy.”

Four eyes snapped their focus onto me.

Ella moved directly in front of me, eyes narrowed to slits. “Was?”