Nuri looks fantastic, too. Her amber eyes are glowing, and her tight black curls are unbound for the first time that I’ve ever seen. As the ballroom lights catch her dress, I realize it’s not the basic black I thought it was but a deep, dark, iridescent violet that sparkles every time she moves. Now Aiden’s choice of attire begins to make a lot more sense.

The dragon queen takes the microphone first, welcoming everyone to this year’s Wyvernhoard celebration. She sounds as giddy as a little kid, and the smile on Flint’s face as he watches his mother signals to me that she’s being totally genuine when she tells everyone that this is her favorite holiday.

“It will forever be among the greatest honors of my life,” she continues, looking out over the ballroom of almost a thousand people, “to be able to invite you into my home for this holiday. Thousands of years ago, dragons were reviled, homeless, hiding wherever we could in a futile attempt to survive human wrath and detection.”

She looks from face to face. “But not anymore. We joined the Circle, were gifted a Dragon Boneyard so our loved ones’ remains would not be violated by humans, fought for our rightful place beside the vampires, the witches, and the wolves.” She says the last with a little sneer that makes her captive audience laugh. “Through our alliance with the witches, we have combined our magic to create the necessary illusions to live in such a hoard-worthy city and still fly in dragon form undetected.

“And now, here we are!” She throws her arms wide enough to encompass not just the ballroom and the hoard but the entire city glowing right outside the windows. “This world belongs to us now, and we are going to have it all!”

82

The Old Ball Gown

and Chain

Towering applause and shrill whistles greet Nuri’s passionate words, but I can’t help noticing that Macy, Hudson, and Luca aren’t applauding. In fact, they’re just kind of looking at one another like they’re trying to figure out if Nuri is being hyperbolic…or if she just announced that she’s planning a Circle coup.

And while I’d like to say that my time in her office today reassured me that it’s the former, that would be a lie. Yes, she made a deal with me, one focused on destroying Cyrus’s reign so that we can bring peace to the Circle and save the lives of the people we love. But she never said what happened next, what she thought that peace would look like to her.

My mistake for not asking.

And when she wraps up her little “dragons rule” speech by introducing the vampires, witch, and gargoyle in their midst, I can’t help wondering if she’s honoring us as she says…or painting targets on our backs. The looks on my friends’ faces—even Flint’s—say they’re wondering the same thing.

Still, there’s not much time to worry about it now, as Nuri has this banquet choreographed to a T.

Dinner is served right after Nuri and Aiden give their speeches, and it is beyond delicious. How they avoid the curse of the rubber chicken at a gathering of this size, I don’t know. But I guess if you have enough money, you can avoid anything.

Flint, Macy, Eden, and I stuff ourselves on a wide variety of fancy appetizers that are served family-style on the table, followed by the most beautiful salad I’ve ever seen. We have a choice for the main course, and I choose a vegetarian pasta dish that melts in my mouth and a truffle garlic bread that’s to die for. By the time dessert rolls around, I’m so full, I can barely move, but I take a couple of bites of the tiramisu anyway. Because it’s tiramisu and I have to.

Nuri provides blood for the vamps, too, and from the looks Hudson and Luca exchange when they drink it, it’s definitely not the same old animal blood they usually have at Katmere.

As we eat, a fifteen-person orchestra plays softly in the background, and once plates are cleared, several couples move onto the dance floor in the center of the room.

A handful of dragon girls circles our table, and at first I think all the commotion is about Flint, which makes me chuckle a little, since Luca has all his attention. But then I realize it’s for Hudson’s benefit, and I totally start to feel like a third wheel—especially when they start moving in to ask him to dance, and he keeps using me as an excuse as to why he can’t.

Finally, after one girl tosses me a particularly pissed-off look—one that says she’s not just wishing me dead but covered in honey and staked over a fire-ant hill—I tell him, “You really don’t have to keep doing that, you know.”

“Doing what?” he asks, and once again, he’s got that confused look on his face.

“Turning them down. If you want to dance, dance,” I clarify with a studied nonchalance that I’m far from feeling.

“Oh yeah?” He glances around the ballroom at several of the younger dragons who are giving him attention…which doesn’t seem fair. I mean, I’m glad that the dragons are giving Macy and me a wide berth—I have more men on my hands right now than I can handle—but is it so wrong to want your mate to ask you to dance? Or is there a reason he doesn’t want to dance with me in front of a room full of the Dragon Court elite?

I’m so busy arguing with myself in my own head that I almost miss it when he asks, “So who do you think I should dance with?”

I swallow. Oh shit, what if he does ask me to dance? I’ll probably just embarrass him in these shoes. “Umm don’t you think that’s a question you should answer for yourself?”

“You have a point,” he says with a surprisingly bright grin. “Maybe I should ask—”

He was definitely going to ask me to dance. “Flint?” I interrupt.

“You think I should dance with Flint?” he asks, giving me a confused look.

“No, I think I should dance with Flint.” I turn to look at the dragon in question and ask, “Will you dance with me?”

No one looks more confused than he does, considering the last conversation we had, but well…tripping around on the dance floor with Flint seems somehow less embarrassing than with Hudson. Plus, I owe Flint an apology. And he owes me one. I should have talked to him earlier, when I returned from the dungeon, but I didn’t know what to say…and, admittedly, I was hoping he would come to me. But he didn’t, and now it’s this huge thing between us, and I have the sick feeling that it’s gotten weird enough that if we don’t deal with it now, we won’t deal with it at all.

And I don’t want that to happen.

So if asking him to dance will get us past this weirdness—and save me from having to embarrass myself in front of Hudson—then I’m good with killing two birds with one stone.

“You want to dance with Flint?” Hudson asks, his eyes bouncing back and forth between the two of us.

“I do,” I say, holding a hand out to him, and decide not to ask again and instead just tell him. “Let’s dance.”

“Umm, yeah. Of course.” Flint and Luca exchange a what-the-hell look, then Flint stands up and takes my hand. “I’d love to, New Girl.”

“Okay, then,” Hudson snarks as I push my chair back and climb to my feet, hoping I won’t sprain an ankle on these ridiculous shoes Macy talked me into packing. “Careful not to come back with fleas.”

“Excuse me?” Flint says.

“You too.” I give Hudson my most saccharin smile, then grab Flint’s hand and all but pull him out onto the dance floor.

“What was that about?” he asks, looking over his shoulder like he’s worried about getting a fang in the back.

“Nothing,” I tell him as he takes one of my hands and then presses his other against my lower back. “We were just having words.”

“Yeah, well, I know that feeling,” he says as we start to move with the other dancers. And can I just say, Flint is an excellent dancer. I have no idea how to do much more than hold on to my partner and sway when it comes to slow dances, but Flint is strong enough at leading that he is actually waltzing me around the dance floor.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him after a second. “I went off on you this afternoon, and it was uncalled for.”

“I wouldn’t say uncalled for,” he answers. “There was a lot of validity in what you said.”

The cold ball of ice that’s been hovering somewhere around the vicinity of my heart ever since we had our fight starts to melt. “I agree,” I tell him. “But I didn’t need to hurl insults at you, and I definitely didn’t need to tell you off in front of everyone. I was just so worried about Hudson and so mad at you—” I break off, because it’s not a very good apology if you start lambasting the person all over again.

“So mad at me for not seeing the parallels. You’re right. I didn’t.” He pulls me in for a hug before moving us back into the waltz. “I apologized to you once, but it wasn’t enough. I really am sorry, Grace. I can’t believe I ever thought that was even an option. I feel like such an asshole.”

“Thank you,” I tell him. “I know you wouldn’t make the same choice today, so…let’s just never talk about it again, okay?”

“Okay,” he says, just as the music changes to something that sounds like it’s probably a swing song. “Besides, we’ve got some dancing to do.”

He snaps his arm out and sends me spinning, then pulls me back in. I’m so not expecting it that I half laugh, half scream as I grab on to his shoulders for dear life.