The Twiceborn Queen (The Proving Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

day.
    Unless … I stopped at a set of lights on the Pacific Highway and frowned at the lone car heading across the intersection. Unless this was Alicia, back in the game already?
    Normally I wouldn’t even consider it. When Valeria had taken trueshape and come arrowing out of the heart of the bushfire like an angel of fiery death, where had Alicia been? Struggling hand-to-hand against Valeria’s forces with the rest of us, choking on smoke and blistered by a hundred flying sparks? Or even up in the roiling sky, taking on Valeria dragon to dragon?
    Not bloody likely. She’d been hiding in her special fireproof bunker, waiting, as usual, for someone else to do the dirty work until she could emerge, make-up unsmudged. It was hard to believe she’d hatched from the same clutch as the rest of us. Her whole strategy so far had consisted of “hide and hope the others kill each other off”.
    But now she had Luce on her side. My hands clenched the wheel till my knuckles whitened. Luce was my security chief, but now she was bound to Alicia by an arcane ritual, forced to aid her instead of me. Just thinking about it made me want to hurt someone. Preferably Alicia.
    Luce wasn’t the type to cross her fingers and hide. She was a wyvern with all the natural wiles of her kind, plus a go get ’em attitude that made her as unstoppable as a force of nature. Luce would be prodding Alicia into action, making her own luck as usual.
    “People say I’m lucky,” she’d told me once, not long after we started working together. “But I’ve noticed the harder I work, the luckier I get.”
    So I could totally see Luce dragging Alicia out of her comfort zone and making her actually do something for a change. The tricky part was seeing why Luce would think attacking Ben would be the best move for my sister.
    I glanced across at Ben. He had his eyes shut, head tipped back against the passenger seat, but he wasn’t asleep—unlike Lachie, whose heavy breathing from the back seat was the only sound in the car. Obviously I’d be distraught if I lost him, but from a practical point of view targeting him didn’t make a lot of sense. She’d be better off taking out Garth, if she could. In her absence he was my right-hand man. Ben had connections to the heralds that might prove useful, but he was hardly a key player.
    Much as I hated to admit it, it was more likely that Ben’s past as a herald was coming back to bite us in the arse. Or, more specifically, his sudden exit from the ranks of the heralds. We’d always known there could be a price to pay for that change in allegiance, and it looked like the bill was coming due. Elizabeth must have decided to make an example of him.
    She had a history of doing that—like the time she called me and my remaining sisters into her study in the aftermath of the disastrous Presentation Ball. I hadn’t fully realised until that moment what a cold-blooded killer she was.
     
    We stood in front of Elizabeth’s massive mahogany desk like naughty children called before the headmistress. It was impossible to think of her as our mother. Dragons didn’t do motherhood, not in the way that humans and other shifters understood it.
    Her cold blue gaze travelled across each of us in turn. By coincidence, or perhaps unconsciously, we’d lined up in order, oldest to youngest. Valeria stood with her arms folded across her blood-spattered chest, chin lifted in challenge. That pale blue satin would never be the same again. Most people would trash it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she kept it as a souvenir of her first kill. Because, despite her denials, I was one hundred per cent certain she was responsible for the bomb blast.
    Next to her stood Alicia, her stark black-and-white ball gown still pristine. She’d been way across the other side of the room when the bomb went off. Ingrid, closest to me in age, was next in line and similarly unruffled. Now that Monique was dead, she was the only brunette among us. I