Page 17 of Knotted By the Triad

“It was the drug,” I interrupted him.

“If it was the drug, then why was I affected?” Daemin asked. “She was drugged, not me.”

I stared at him, unable to answer right away.

Daemin leaned forward. “And when I got closer to her, I could smell...” He swiped a hand over his face. “I could smell her slick.”

I leaned back in my chair, my eyes dropping to the desk. I’d smelled it too. Her strawberry-and-chocolate scent had grown stronger as her arousal increased, and my dragon had become almost impossible to ignore.

My mouth watered from just thinking about it. A cold omega wasn't supposed to react that way. Zuri Bane had supposedly never developed a proper omega scent. She'd never experienced a heat.

According to our informant, she’d undergone multiple tests to determine her designation because her body hadn't presented the way an omega's normally did. In the end, her family learned she’d never be able to shift, never develop normal scent glands, and would require meds to go into heat and procreate.

Yet tonight, her sweet scent had filled the entire room. And Daemin getting close to her had been enough to make her slick for him. The insane rush of jealousy I’d felt at that moment had shocked and frightened me. Not once had I been jealous of Daemin or Zian being near Mei Lin.

Yet, watching our new bride’s eyes widen, her lips part, her body shiver as Daemin approached her had caused my dragon to roar in jealousy. None of this made sense. Not her response to us or my response to her.

“That's not all,” Daemin added. “My dragon was affected by her too. He’d wanted me to move closer to her. It had taken everything in me to walk out of that room and not pull her into my arms so I could bury my face in her neck and breathe in her scent.”

“My dragon had reacted also,” Zian admitted, brows drawn, unease etched into the lines of his face. He rubbed his chest. “He's still restless within me, urging me to go to her. I've never felt this way before. It... unsettles me.”

My dragon paced restlessly within me, just as he'd been doing ever since we'd left Zuri's courtyard. He wanted me to return to her. To apologize for how rude I’d been. I ignored him. Our dragons must have been affected by the drug. That was the only explanation.

“It has to be the drug,” I insisted.

“I want to agree,” Zian told me. “But a drug doesn't explain our dragons being affected. And don't deny it. Yours was affected too.”

I gritted my teeth but said nothing. However, Zian wasn’t done talking.

“Part of the reason we put off marrying Lin'er all these years was because we were waiting for our dragons to react to her. They never did. Yet, tonight, they reacted to...”

“Don't,” I hissed.

“I’m just stating facts, Kai. The only reason we rushed to marry Lin’er now was because she said if we waited any longer, our new wife would take charge of the household before she could, and she was afraid the Bane daughter would bully her,” Zian stated. “We wanted to give Lin’er a title and move her into the manor so she wouldn’t feel slighted. She's our friend. We care for her. She’s always followed us around, and we’ve always protected her. But tonight, with Zuri, we all felt something we'd never felt before. We can’t ignore this feeling. I don’t want to ignore it.”

His words irritated the hell out of me because I couldn't deny them. Lin'er had been part of our lives for years. We'd grown up together. We'd protected her, cared for her, and thought one day our dragons would recognize her as our mate.

We’d never been intimate with her, for fear she'd one day find her true mate and regret having been involved with us. We’d seen what that could do to a person. Years ago, one of Daemin’s cousins, Chen, had married his chosen mate only for her to later meet her Fated one and fall in love with him.

Their marriage was annulled because, by law, a Fated bond took precedence over a chosen one. I still remembered what it had done to Chen when the woman he loved admitted she wished she’d waited for her Fated mate instead of giving herself to him.

None of us wanted that to become our future with Mei Lin. We didn't want to hear her say she regretted choosing us if her Fated mate appeared one day. We also didn’t want to be the reason she was heartbroken if we one day found our Fated One.

That’s why, when we came of age, the four of us began taking suppressants. They kept our urges and desires under control while we waited to see whether our dragons would ever react to her dragon.

That never happened. Eventually, we decided that if our dragons never recognized a Fated mate, we would stop waiting for a bond that might never come and marry the woman who was already at the center of our lives.

But our plans changed when my cousin became the King, and we replaced him as leaders of the Triad. He’d also given us the title of princes, trying to make us appear less threatening to the citizens.

Mei Lin’s father was the Prime Minister. As Prime Minister, he already held considerable influence in the royal court, and he'd made no secret of his opposition to many of my cousin’s decisions.

Taking Lin'er as our primary wife would only strengthen her father’s position in the court, making things difficult for King Zhen Zeyan. The three of us weren't only princes. We also controlled the three clans that made up the Triad.

Giving the Prime Minister's daughter the highest position in our household would tie his family too closely to ours and give him an advantage Zeyan had no intention of handing him. That was why the King had insisted our primary wife come from another noble family.

A family that would be of no threat to him. A family he could control. The decree had forced our hands. However, we’d refused to bring a Bane daughter into this manor as our primary wife without giving Lin'er a proper title.

She deserved better than that. So we married Lin'er today, solidifying her place in our household. Zuri's arrival had been different. She'd been too drugged to walk, so we'd had her brought into the manor through the side courtyard.