Centuria Books · The Bloodfire Curse: A Dark Fantasy Romance
The Bloodfire Curse: A Dark Fantasy Romance — Read the First Chapter
The assassin came to kill the dragon; the magic made them mates—now the whole world wants her dead and he’ll burn it all down first.
Shadows at the Throat
The rain tasted like iron and ash, a fitting flavor for a suicide mission.
I clung to the slick gargoyle jutting from the side of the Storm Citadel, my boots finding purchase on stone slippery enough to send a lesser climber to a shattered death three hundred feet below. Lightning cracked, turning the night sky into a fractured mirror of white and violet. For a second, the sprawling fortress was illuminated—towers like jagged teeth biting into the heavens, walls thick enough to hold back an army of giants.
Or one very small, very motivated woman from the Lower Wards.
My fingers ached. The cold had long since seeped through my leathers, settling into the marrow of my bones, but I didn’t shiver. Shivering made you slip. Slipping meant death. And I couldn’t die until the obsidian dagger strapped to my thigh was buried to the hilt in General Valdus’s chest.
I pulled myself up, muscle by burning muscle, until I vaulted over the parapet and landed in a crouch. Silence wrapped around me instantly. I wasn’t just quiet; I was a void in the air.
The plan was simple. Stupid, but simple. Infiltrate the dragon keep. Find the High Commander’s quarters. End the monster who had turned my city into a labor camp for his war machine.
A heavy, wet sound echoed from the courtyard below the ramparts. A whimper.
I froze. That wasn’t a human sound.
My objective lay to the north, up the winding stairs to the Commander’s spire. But the sound came again—a high-pitched, gurgling cry of pain, followed by the wet thwack of leather hitting flesh.
Ignore it, Vea.
I took a step toward the spire.
Another cry. This one broke into a screech that grated against my ribs.
“Shut it up before the Commander hears,” a gruff voice growled. “Filthy beast.”
My feet stopped. I looked down into the recessed stable yard. Three guards in the blackened armor of the Sky Legion stood in a circle. They weren’t patrolling. They were entertained.
In the center of the mud, chained to a post with links heavy enough to anchor a ship, was a wyvern hatchling. It couldn’t have been more than a few months old—its scales were still soft, a mottled grey that hadn’t hardened into armor yet. Its wing was bent at a sickening angle.
One of the guards, a man with a beard like steel wool, winded up a heavy coil of rope and brought it down. The hatchling shrieked, fireless smoke puffing from its nostrils as it tried to scramble away, but the chains held it fast.
“tough leather,” the second guard laughed, taking a swig from a flask. “Make good boots.”
My hand hovered over the hilt of my dagger.
This is not the mission. Valdus was the target. Valdus was the disease; these men were just the symptoms. If I engaged, I risked noise. I risked the alarm. I risked the only chance my people had at freedom.
The hatchling looked up. Its eyes were wide, reptilian saucers of terror, reflecting the torchlight. It didn’t look like a monster. It looked like me when I was six years old, cornered in an alley with nothing but a rusted spoon to defend myself.
The guard raised the rope again. “Let’s see if it bleeds black.”
The decision hit me before my brain authorized it.
I dropped from the wall.
Falling twenty feet was nothing. I rolled upon impact, the mud silencing the thud, and sprang up like a compressed spring released. The dagger was in my hand before I finished the motion.
The bearded guard never saw me. I slammed the pommel of my blade into the base of his skull. Bone crunched. He folded like wet laundry.
The second guard dropped his flask. “What the—”
I didn’t let him finish. I swept his legs, using my low center of gravity to upend him. He hit the mud with a splash. I was on him instantly, a knee to his throat to crush the air from his windpipe.
“Intruder!” the third guard bellowed, fumbling for the sword at his hip.
Too slow. I launched myself off the gasping man on the ground, twisting in the air. I was small—barely five feet of malice and scar tissue—but I used that. I was a projectile. I slammed into the third guard’s chest, driving him back into the stone wall. My forearm pressed against his windpipe, the tip of my obsidian blade hovering over his eye.
“Drop it,” I hissed. My voice was gravel and smoke.
The sword clattered to the stones.
Silence returned to the courtyard, heavy and suffocating, broken only by the ragged breathing of the men on the ground and the soft mewling of the wyvern.
I stepped back, chest heaving. My cover was blown. The shout would bring others. I had to move. I had to kill them or run, and I didn’t have the stomach to slit the throats of unconscious drunkards.
I turned to the hatchling. It flinched, cowering against the post.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I whispered, reaching for the heavy iron lock on its collar. My hands were shaking. Not from fear, but from the adrenaline crash. I picked the lock with the tip of my dagger—a trick learned in the gutters of the Lower Wards.
The lock clicked. The chains fell away.
“Go,” I urged. “Fly, you idiot.”
The creature didn’t move. It stared past me, its pupils contracting into slits. It wasn’t looking at freedom. It was looking at the archway behind me.
The air in the courtyard changed. The temperature didn’t drop; it vanished, replaced by a pressure that made my ears pop. The rain seemed to slow down.
The hairs on my arms stood up, electrically charged.
I turned slowly.
Standing in the archway was a shadow darker than the night.
General Valdus.
The posters in the city didn’t do him justice. They depicted a man. This was not a man. This was a force of nature wrapped in black leather and midnight steel. He filled the archway, his shoulders broad enough to carry the collapse of the sky.
He didn’t hold a weapon. He didn’t need one.
He stepped into the light of the torches, and the air rushed out of my lungs.
He was terrifying. He was beautiful.
He was big in a way that felt predatory, a towering expanse of hard muscle and lethal grace. Rain plastered his dark curls to his forehead, water dripping down a face carved from granite. High cheekbones, a jawline sharp enough to cut glass, and a mouth currently set in a line of bored cruelty.
But it was the rest of him that made my mouth go dry.
He wore a sleeveless training tunic, wet and clinging to his torso like a second skin. It left nothing to the imagination. The fabric strained over the slabs of his chest, outlining abdominals that looked like cobblestones. His arms were tree trunks, roped with veins and corded muscle that shifted with every subtle movement. Scars silvered his tan skin—a map of violence that marked him as a survivor of a thousand wars.
My gaze dropped to his hands. They were massive. Hands that could crush a skull as easily as they could crush a grape. Hands that could snap me in half without trembling.
Heat, sharp and humiliating, spiked low in my belly. Stop it. He is the enemy. He is the monster.
His eyes—molten, burning gold—swept over the scene. They touched the unconscious guards, the mud, the blood. They didn’t even flicker.
Then they landed on the hatchling.
The terrifying stillness of him broke. He moved, not toward me, but toward the creature. He didn’t walk; he prowled, a apex predator acknowledging a lesser beast.
I gripped my dagger, knuckles white. This was my chance. His back was to me. I could drive the blade between his ribs.
But I couldn’t move. My feet were nailed to the mud.
Valdus knelt in the muck. He didn’t care about the pristine leather of his breeches. He reached out a hand—those massive, deadly fingers—and the hatchling didn’t recoil. It leaned in.
“Easy,” he murmured. His voice was a deep rumble that vibrated through the stones and straight into my chest. “They hurt you?”
The wyvern chirped, pressing its snout against his palm.
Valdus examined the bent wing with a tenderness that unmoored me. His touch was gentle, reverent. Golden light flared softly from his fingertips—magic, warm and healing. The hatchling let out a sigh of relief as the bones knit back together under his ministrations.
“You’re safe,” Valdus said, his voice dropping an octave, thick with a strange, possessive warmth. “Go to the aerie. Rest.”
The hatchling nudged him one last time, then scrambled back, testing its healed wing before launching itself into the rainy sky.
Valdus watched it go. For a second, the monster was gone. In his place was something else—something weary and strangely protective. Something that made the ache in my chest flare hotter.
Then he stood up.
And the monster returned.
He turned slowly, pivoting on his heel to face me. The golden warmth vanished from his eyes, replaced by a glacial, bored indifference.
He looked at me. Not at me, but through me. Like I was a smudge of dirt on his boot.
“You,” he said. One word. A judgment.
I raised my dagger, shifting into a defensive stance. “General.”
He didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t even raise his hands. He just walked toward me.
“Stay back,” I warned, feinting a lunge.
He didn’t break stride.
I struck. I was fast—faster than the guards. My blade arc for the unprotected skin of his throat.
He caught my wrist.
He didn’t block. He didn’t dodge. He just… caught me.
The impact jarred my teeth. His grip was iron. Immovable. Absolute. He stopped my momentum dead, halting a strike that would have felled an ox.
His skin was burning hot.
“Fast,” he noted, his voice devoid of praise. “For a rat.”
I twisted, trying to kick his knee, but he anticipated the movement. He jerked my arm, spinning me around and slamming my back against his chest.
The air left me in a rush. I was enveloped by him—the scent of ozone, rain, and sandalwood. His body was a wall of hard, unyielding heat against my spine. I was trapped.
His free hand—the one that had just healed a broken wing with gentle magic—wrapped around my throat.
He lifted.
My feet left the ground.
Panic flared, cold and sharp. I clawed at his forearm, my nails digging into his skin, but it was like clawing at stone. He held me suspended in the air, my boots dangling a foot above the mud.
He turned me around so I was facing him. Up close, his eyes were terrifying. Swirls of gold and black, ancient and devoid of humanity.
He squeezed. Not enough to kill. Just enough to remind me that my life existed only because he allowed it.
“Did you think,” he murmured, his face inches from mine, “that killing three drunkards authorized you to stand in my presence?”
I gasped for air, staring defiantly into that golden abyss. “They… were hurting… it.”
Something flickered in his gaze. Surprise? No. Annoyance.
He tilted his head, studying me. His thumb traced the line of my jaw, rough and calloused. The touch burned. It shouldn’t have felt like that. It should have been painful, violating. Instead, a jolt of electricity arced from his skin to mine, racing down my nerves and settling heavy between my thighs.
My body betrayed me. My heart hammered a traitorous rhythm against my ribs.
“You’re small,” he said, as if stating a fact about the weather. “Frail. A gutter rat wrapped in stolen leather.”
“I’ll… kill… you,” I choked out.
His mouth curved. It wasn’t a smile. It was a baring of teeth.
“You can’t even breathe without my permission, Little Red.”
He tightened his grip, cutting off the world for a split second. darkness fringed my vision.
Then, he released me.
He didn’t set me down. He tossed me.
I flew backward, landing hard in the mud, skidding a few feet. I gasped, sucking in greedy lungfuls of wet air, coughing as the rain plastered my hair to my face.
I scrambled to my knees, searching for my dagger. It lay in the muck near his boot.
Valdus kicked it away. It Skittered across the stones, disappearing into a drain.
He looked down at me, his expression one of utter disdain. He wiped his hand on his breeches, as if touching me had soiled him.
“The guards will wake in five minutes,” he said, turning his back to me. “If you are still here, I will feed you to the thing you just saved.”
He began to walk away, toward the castle doors.
“Why?” I screamed, the word tearing from my raw throat. “Why let me go?”
He paused, glancing over his shoulder. The look he gave me withered my soul. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t hate.
It was indifference.
“I don’t kill insects,” he said. “I step on them. And tonight, I don’t want to clean my boots.”
The heavy oak doors slammed shut behind him, the sound echoing like a thunderclap.
I sat alone in the mud, shivering violently. Not from the cold. Not from the fear.
But from the terrifying realization that when his hand had been on my throat, when his heat had engulfed me, I hadn’t wanted him to let go.
I looked at the closed doors. The monster had spared me.
He would regret it.
I pushed myself up, my legs trembling. I had failed. I had lost my weapon. I had been humiliated.
But I was still alive.
“Next time, Valdus,” I whispered to the rain, wiping the mud from my face. “Next time, you won’t see the insect coming until it stings.”
I turned and ran into the shadows, the phantom pressure of his fingers still burning a brand into my skin.
A Tether of Shadow and Steel
The storm outside battered the stone walls of the Storm Citadel, but inside the High Commander’s quarters, the silence was absolute.
I clung to the shadows of the vaulted ceiling, wedged between a heavy oak beam and the rough-hewn stone. My clothes were still sodden, sticking to my skin like a cold, wet shroud. My muscles screamed in protest, locked tight to keep me from shivering. Shivering made noise. Noise meant death.
Below me, the room was a cavern of dark luxury. Black iron, obsidian statues, and furs thick enough to swallow a person whole. A fire crackled in the grate, casting long, dancing shadows that did little to warm the ice in my veins.
General Valdus stood by the hearth.
He had stripped off his wet leather armor. Now, he wore only loose black trousers that hung low on his hips. The firelight licked across the expanse of his back—a monument of violence carved from scarred skin and corded muscle. A tattoo of a dragon in mid-flight stretched across his shoulder blades, the ink so dark it seemed to absorb the light.
He poured a drink from a crystal decanter. Amber liquid splashed into a heavy glass.
I shifted my grip on the dagger. This was madness. He had spared me once tonight, tossing me aside like refuse. Inspecting me like a bug before deciding I wasn’t worth the squashed mess on his boot. That indifference burned hotter than hate.
I would not be an insect. I would be the end of him.
He took a sip, the movement slow, deliberate.
” The rafters are dusty, Little Red,” he said.
His voice was a low rumble, carrying effortlessly to my perch. He hadn’t turned around. He hadn’t even looked up.
My heart slammed against my ribs, a trapped bird battering a cage.
“You breathe too loud,” he added, swirling his drink. “And you smell like the sewers.”
Stealth was gone. Only violence remained.
I dropped.
I didn’t aim for the floor. I aimed for his back. Gravity was my only ally against a creature of his size. I fell through the air, dagger leading, a scream of rage locked behind my teeth.
He moved with a speed that defied physics.
One moment he was facing the fire; the next, he had spun, the glass in his hand shattering on the hearth.
I expected him to block. I expected him to dodge.
He did neither.
He caught me out of the air.
His hand—massive and searing hot—snapped around my throat. The momentum of my fall should have knocked him backward. Instead, he absorbed the impact like a stone wall, his boots not even shifting on the rug.
My spine jarred as he slammed me down onto the heavy oak table in the center of the room. Wood groaned under the impact.
Air fled my lungs. Stars exploded behind my eyes.
“Persistent,” he growled, leaning over me.
I didn’t waste time gasping. I slashed.
My dagger, still clutched in my right hand, arced toward his face. He caught my wrist mid-swing, his grip crushing the delicate bones. But he was a fraction too slow, or perhaps he just didn’t care.
The obsidian blade bit into the meat of his palm.
It wasn’t a deep cut, just a graze, but it was enough.
My blood from the earlier scrape on my arm smeared against his open wound. Red mixed with red.
The world ended.
It didn’t fade to black. It dissolved into white. A sound roared through the room—not a noise, but a pressure, a thunderclap of silence that sucked the oxygen from the air and imploded the windows.
Glass shattered inward. The fire in the grate turned an impossible, blinding violet.
A shockwave blasted outward from where our skin touched. The table beneath me cracked down the center with the sound of a pistol shot.
My dagger flew from my numb fingers, clattering uselessly across the floor.
But I couldn’t watch it go. I couldn’t look away from him.
Something snapped in the center of my chest. A tether. A hook. A chain forged of pure, molten gravity slammed into my soul and anchored itself to the man looming over me.
Pain ripped through me—not physical, but existential. It was a violation. A door inside me, one I hadn’t known existed, was kicked open, and he flooded in.
I felt his shock, a jagged spike of cold. I felt his rage, a burning inferno. And beneath it all, I felt a terrifying, ancient hunger that wasn’t mine.
Mine.
The word wasn’t spoken. It vibrated in the marrow of my bones.
Valdus froze. His pupils blew wide, swallowing the gold until his eyes were two pools of endless night. The veins in his neck corded, pulsing with a rhythm that matched the frantic, heavy thudding of my own heart.
He didn’t pull away. He couldn’t.
The air in the room grew heavy, thick as syrup. The magic coiled around us, a tangible thing, tasting of ozone and blood-iron. It purred in my veins, a sickening, seductive vibration that commanded me to submit, to yield, to stay.
I hated it. I hated him.
“What…” I gasped, the word scrapping my throat. “What did you do to me?”
Valdus stared down at me, his face a mask of absolute horror. The hand on my throat loosened, but he didn’t let go. His thumb brushed the pulse point fluttering wildly beneath my jaw.
“Carrix,” he whispered. The word sounded like a curse.
Heat flared in his palm where my blade had cut him. It traveled up his arm, golden light tracing his veins like liquid fire, jumping from his skin to mine where he held me. It burned. It felt like branding iron and ice all at once.
“Get off,” I snarled, panic making my limbs thrash.
I tried to kick him. I tried to buck him off.
He didn’t budge. He weighed three hundred pounds of solid muscle, and right now, he felt like a mountain settling on top of me.
The movement seemed to snap the paralysis holding him. His eyes narrowed, the shock bleeding away into something darker. Something predatory.
He lowered his head.
“No,” I choked out.
He didn’t listen. The bond—that terrible, golden chain—yanked him down.
He buried his face in the crook of my neck.
He inhaled deeply. The sound was wet, animalistic. He was scenting me. Hunting for the truth of what the magic was screaming at him.
His nose brushed my skin, and a jolt of pleasure, sharp and unwanted, spiked through my belly. It was a betrayal of the highest order. My body arched into him before my mind could scream a protest.
“Strawberries,” he murmured against my skin, his voice rough with confusion and need. “And steel.”
“Let me go!” I drove my knee up, aiming for his groin.
He caught my leg with his free hand, pinning it to the table. Now I was splayed open beneath him, completely at his mercy.
He lifted his head. His eyes were glowing—literally glowing—with an inner, molten light. The human mask was gone. The dragon was looking at me.
“I cannot let you go,” he said. The resignation in his tone terrified me more than his anger ever could. “If I let you go, I will hunt you down before you reach the door.”
“I’ll kill you,” I promised, though my voice trembled. “I will rip your throat out.”
His gaze dropped to my mouth.
The air between us crackled, charged with enough energy to power a city. The hatred in my chest warred with the magnetic pull of the bond. It wanted me to touch him. It wanted me to crawl inside his skin.
“Try,” he challenged.
He crashed his mouth to mine.
It wasn’t a kiss. It was a collision. A claiming.
His lips were hard, unyielding, bruising mine with a desperation that tasted of ash and violence. There was no tenderness, no romance. It was a biological imperative, a predator marking his territory.
He tasted like whiskey and ruin.
I should have bitten him. I should have fought.
But the moment our mouths met, the roaring in my ears stopped. The pain in my chest eased, replaced by a terrifying sense of rightness. The magic surged, joyous and golden, welding the broken pieces of my soul to his.
My hands, traitors that they were, fisted in the loose fabric of his trousers. I wasn’t pushing him away. I was pulling him closer.
He groaned, a low vibration against my lips, and deepened the kiss. His tongue swept into my mouth, arrogant and demanding, stealing my breath, my will, my sanity.
For a second, I forgot he was the monster who burned villages. I forgot I was an assassin. I was just a woman drowning in fire, and he was the only solid thing in the universe.
Then, reality returned with the force of a hammer.
He is the enemy.
I clamped my teeth down on his lower lip. Hard.
Iron tang of blood filled my mouth.
Valdus jerked back, a growl ripping from his chest. He touched his lip, his fingers coming away red.
He didn’t look angry. He looked… wrecked. His chest heaved, his golden eyes wide and blown.
He looked at the blood on his fingers, then at me.
“You have no idea what you’ve done,” he whispered.
The door to the chamber burst open.
“General!” A voice shouted. “The explosion—we saw the light—”
Valdus moved instantly. The languid predator was gone, replaced by the Commander.
He grabbed a fur throw from the back of the broken chair and threw it over me, bundling me up until only my face was visible. He hauled me off the table, tucking me against his side like a parcel.
“Get out!” Valdus roared at the guards standing in the doorway.
The soldiers flinched, eyes darting from the shattered windows to the cracked table, and finally to the small, bundled form tucked under the General’s massive arm.
“Sir, is that… is that the assassin?” one guard asked, hand on his sword.
Valdus looked down at me. His grip on my waist was tight enough to bruise. The bond hummed between us, a live wire of panic and possession. He couldn’t let them take me. If they took me, they would kill me.
And if I died… the sudden, hollow ache in his chest told me he would die too.
“No,” Valdus lied, his voice cold as the grave. “This is my new prisoner. Prepare the Black Cell.”
” The dungeon?” the guard asked, confused. “Sir, standard protocol is execution.”
“I said the dungeon!” Valdus bellowed. The room shook. “And if anyone touches her, I will flay the skin from their bones.”
He didn’t wait for a response. He turned and dragged me toward the hidden service entrance behind the hearth.
I struggled against his grip, but I was exhausted, the magic having drained me dry.
“Where are you taking me?” I hissed into his chest.
He looked down, his jaw set in a line of grim determination.
“Somewhere no one can find you,” he muttered. “Because if the King finds out what you are to me, he will burn us both.”
“What am I to you?” I demanded.
Valdus stopped at the top of the dark stairwell. He looked at me, and for the first time, I saw genuine fear in the monster’s eyes.
“You are the end of my world, Little Red.”
He opened the door and pulled me into the dark.
Burning the World for a Taste
The door to the secret passage slammed shut, plunging us into a darkness so heavy it felt like a physical weight.
Valdus didn’t stop. His hand was a manacle around my upper arm, his grip bruising as he hauled me down the narrow, spiraling stone steps. The air here was stale, tasting of old dust and dry rot, a sharp contrast to the rain-slicked violence of the courtyard.
My boots skidded on the uneven stone. “Slow down!”
He ignored me. He moved with the terrifying, single-minded focus of a landslide. Every step he took vibrated through the floor and up my legs. The magical tether binding us—that golden, serrated chain forged in my own blood—yanked at my chest with every foot of distance I tried to put between us. It wasn’t just a pull; it was a command. Closer.
I dug my heels in. I was small, but I was dense, a center of gravity low enough to anchor against the pull.
He hit the end of the slack and stopped. The sudden halt nearly dislocated my shoulder.
Valdus turned. In the gloom, the only light came from the faint, molten glow of his eyes. They weren’t human. They were the eyes of a beast looking at its next meal, or perhaps its only lifeline.
“Do not fight me, Vea,” he rasped. The name sounded foreign on his tongue, a curse he was trying to spit out.
“Let go of me, you oversized lizard.” I clawed at his fingers. It was like trying to pry open a bear trap.
He didn’t let go. He did the opposite.
He lunged.
Before I could draw a breath, he slammed me back against the rough-hewn wall of the stairwell. The stone bit into my spine, but the pain was instantly eclipsed by the wall of heat that was General Valdus.
He pinned me there, his body pressing mine into the rock. He was too big for the narrow space, too big for the world, a suffocating expanse of hard muscle and violence. His free hand planted against the wall by my head, boxing me in, while his thigh drove between my legs, pinning me in place.
The contact sent a shockwave of golden fire through my veins. My knees buckled. Only his body kept me upright.
“What is this?” I gasped, the air squeezed from my lungs. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do this,” he growled, lowering his head until his nose brushed the shell of my ear. “You did this. You put your steel in my skin.”
He inhaled. A long, dragging breath that shuddered through his massive frame.
The sound of it—that wet, desperate intake of air—sent a spike of heat straight to my groin. It was humiliating. I was an assassin. I was a weapon. I wasn’t supposed to melt because the enemy was close enough to share my oxygen.
But the enemy looked like this.
My gaze traitorously raked over him in the dim light. Up close, the brutal reality of his size was overwhelming. He was a landscape of devastation. The damp linen of his shirt had gone translucent, clinging to a chest that looked like it had been chiseled from obsidian. Every breath he took strained the fabric, outlining the deep groove of his spine and the thick cables of muscle fastening his neck to shoulders broad enough to eclipse the sun. Pulse points hammered at his throat, frantic and heavy, betraying the icy control on his face. He was terrifyingly male, a concentrated dose of testosterone and lethal power that made every primitive instinct in my brain scream mate.
I wanted to run. I wanted to lick the sweat off his collarbone.