My Hockey Alpha novel Chapter 433

My father’s voice trailed off at that point. He dropped his head a bit, as though the memories pained him to recount.

“We shared secrets with one another,” he said. “Secrets that no one else—not even your mother, Nina-ever discovered.”

“But it all went south, didn’t it?” Enzo whispered.

Aldric nodded slowly. “Mila had a small tribe of her kin; the last of her kind. It was my job to protect them in exchange for Mila’s expertise. And I failed.”

Mila burst into Aldric’s chambers, the doors swinging outwards in front of her. Her hair was wild, and her eyes glowed like two emeralds. Aldric had gotten used to the dragon’s frazzled appearance, and he went to wave her away. “I’ll speak with you in a moment-”

“No.” She stormed forward and slammed her fists on the table, causing Aldric’s werewolf council to jump in unison. Fire flickered on her fingertips; without a word, the others got up and scurried out of the room in fear of the dragon’s strength.

“What the hell, Mila?” Aldric rose from his chair once they were alone. Another one of Mila’s episodes, perhaps, he thought. But no-when he saw the tears in her eyes for the first time in twenty years, he knew that something was terribly wrong.

For the first time since Aldric had known Mila, she sobbed. Openly.

“They killed them all,” she said through her choked screams. “I went back to the village, and they’re all dead. They fucking killed them, Aldric.”

“Who?” Aldric ran around the table to meet her. He reached for her shoulders, but she pulled away with a fierce snarl. “The poachers. And I’ll fucking kill them, too.”

The sun was high in the sky by now, but Enzo and I hardly felt the passage of time. My father traced his finger around the rim of his whiskey glass as he spoke.

“Those poachers had been a problem for years,” he explained. “Seeing as there were so few dragons left, their scales –and especially their eggs-caught quite the price on the market. We staved them off as much as we could, but their underground networks ran deep. They got her kin in the end. Mila would have been killed, too, had she not been visiting my estate.”

“So you left her to die?” I asked.

“I did.” My father swallowed hard and took a big swig of his whiskey. “And there hasn’t been a day I didn’t regret it. Over the years, I heard whispers of a dragon queen gone mad off the noxious fumes inside the mountain, but…”

“But you never went to her. Not even once.” I was standing now without even realizing it. “And now she’s out there with a cult following her every whim.”

My father was silent for some time, his hand gripping his whiskey glass so tightly that his knuckles turned white. Then, finally, he knocked back the rest of the amber liquid and slammed his glass down on the windowsill.

“This is my fault,” he said. “But I intend to end her reign of terror. And I’d like to recruit the New Peacekeepers for this cause.”