CHAPTER 1
Stereotypes, Handsome Intruders, and Very Bad Days
Octavia Ashbloom was slowly going mad. Lying back with her long, black, curly hair fanned out around her like a dark angel, she stared at the ceiling. The incessantpitter-patterof rain hitting the shingles was inescapable, loud, and horribly annoying. The walls of this too-small shack were closing in on her.
She groaned, dropping her face into her hands. Drop by drop, minute by minute, hour by hour, the rain was chipping away at her sanity… and there wasn’t much there to begin with.
Every time the thunder roared like an infuriated dragon, the paper-thin walls shook. Her heart sped up, and her lungs tightened to the point of pain. She was surprised the roof was still holding on.
She’d been okay the first few days, but the storm had been going on for a week. Who knew rain could be so devastating? Day and night, the torrential deluge continued. At this point, sleep was a distant memory. Every time Octavia closed her eyes and tried to rest, the storm picked up again.
She was exhausted and cranky. Very, very cranky. Her grandma Gertrude used to call this “burn the house down”cranky. That was a fair assessment. Anger in their kind usually resulted in a few fires.
Octavia had never understood what her grandmother was talking about until this week. Everything was too loud, too sharp, too irritating. She had never considered herself particularly inclined to murder, having been raised with the belief that excessive violence was usually unnecessary, but at this point, she would kill someone if it got her out of this mess.
She could already hear the village gossips, gathering around the well as they shared the daily news.
“Did you hear what Octavia Ashbloom did?” someone, probably the chatterbox Millicent Firebreath, would ask.
“That failed messenger? What has she done now?” another busybody—likely one of the Ignis sisters, they were so nosy—would reply.
“She murdered someone just to get out of a storm. Can you imagine? What kind of dragon shifter doesn’t like the rain?”
The gossips would titter and gasp, but no one would be surprised. After all, Octavia wasn’t exactly adored by the members of her village. They would just assume her temper got the best of her.
Talk about stereotypes. People always assumed that dragon shifters lived in a state of continual anger, but that wasn’t the case. They just had shorter tempers and tended to set things on fire on a regular basis.
It was usually an accident.
Thunder boomed outside, and Octavia pressed her hands against her ears.
“Make it stop,” she moaned, pleading to whatever gods might be listening.
She loved being a dragon shifter—not that she had a choice in the matter since she was born that way—but sometimes, the extra-sensitive hearing and powerful sense of smell became toomuch for her to handle. Each drop of water pelting the roof was like a needle being shoved beneath her skin.
As if mocking her pleas, another boom of thunder rolled over the forest, and the rain picked up.
“Why is this my life?” Octavia grumbled.
No one answered. Of course not. She was the only one there.
Seven days ago, Octavia had been hiking through the endless woods when the storm had moved in. Green, angry clouds had swirled in the sky. The temperature, which had been a comfortable summer heat, dropped. Silence fell on the forest minutes before the tempest began.
The rain was so bad it was as though Nontia, the goddess of the sea, was angry with the land and wanted to drown all living creatures. She had certainly put forth a valiant effort.
By the time Octavia had stumbled upon this shack, the rain had soaked through her tunic and leggings. Despite her efforts to protect her belongings, even her messenger bag had been water-logged.
She’d found shelter inside and had been here ever since.
It had been a long week. All she had were trail rations, a small water bottle, and her own miserable company.
During that time, Octavia had learned two things.
First, collecting and drinking rainwater was unpleasant on the best of days. Doing so when you were trapped in a small hunter’s shack in the middle of the gods-damned wild with no company to talk to and four tiny walls to look at was even worse.
Second, and probably more importantly, Octavia was terrible company when she was grumpy, wet, and alone. If she survived this, she would have to do some introspection to determine what, exactly, that said about her.
She pushed herself to a sitting position on the bed/chair/table/only-piece-of-furniture in the entire shack and shook her head. “This is what you get for volunteering to make a deliveryto Winifred Black.” She kicked her bag, which was now dry and sitting at her feet. “Regaining your reputation as an honorable messenger won’t help much if you’re dead.”