Claimed by the Dragon’s Debt by itsvlada
Claimed by the Dragon’s Debt
Description
Aurora was raised to be a bargaining chip. A nobleman's daughter promised to a man she'd rather die than marry. So she runs. Straight into Solventar, a college where monsters go to be broken, where the strong survive and the weak feed the ground. She has no fangs. No claws. No monster at all. Just a reason to be here: the boy she loves, and the desperate hope she can keep him alive. Then Raze claims her for his team. A cruel, beautiful dragon with a killer's reputation and eyes that burn straight through her. He should be the last thing she wants. He makes her survival his business, and he won't say why. She doesn't trust him. She can't stop wanting him. And in a place built to dissolve everything she used to be, the only thing more dangerous than her enemies... is the one sworn to keep her breathing. Survive the college. Resist the dragon. Try not to burn.
Chapter 1
Aug 21, 2026
Aurora's POV
"I reject all five of you, monsters!"
My voice cracks through the hall before I've even found my footing on the marble.
Every head at my own engagement banquet turns at once. Wine goblets stop halfway to mouths. Someone's fork clatters against a plate.
I stand in the doorway with my hem torn to the knee. My long red hair has come loose from its pins and is tangled over one shoulder.
A handprint is blooming purple on my wrist because I have just escaped from five suitors who tried to rape me in my father's guest room.
For one long second nobody in this room breathes.
Good. Let them see exactly what kind of beasts my country calls its finest suitors.
"Aurora." My father's low voice is the first thing that moves.
He's already rising from the high table, unfolding his wings.
He's a griffin, just like my sister — the one thing about Wren he's never had to be disappointed by.
And I know that stillness in his shoulders. It's the one right before he decides how loud he's going to get.
"They tried to rape me, Dad!" The words come out tripping over each other, like if I slow down even once I'll lose the nerve to say the rest. "Ask them how I got this dress."
Dorel, standing nearest the dais with a wine goblet, has the decency to go pale. But I bet his jackal-thin patience is already fraying at the edges.
Cassian, the spider, just watches me with that patient, unbothered smile he wears like a second face, cold-blooded and unhurried.
"She's confused." Rendal says it to my father, not to me. A bull's thickness is already settling into his neck. "Nothing happened that she didn't want to happen."
"Aurora's always had a temper for drama." Petyr's grin doesn't waver — fox-quick, already looking for the angle that gets him out clean. "Ask anyone. She exaggerates."
"She's lying." Ilvan says it flatly, folding his arms over a chest that's already widening past what silk was tailored for, a bear settling its weight. "I never touched her."
My father crosses the floor and grips my upper arm before I can flinch away.
His fingers land exactly where Dorel's already left a bruise, and the pain flashes white behind my eyes.
"You will lower your voice, Aurora," he says, close to my ear.
He looks pleasant enough that anyone watching from ten feet back would think he's comforting me.
"But Dad..." He doesn't even blink.
I just told him five men almost raped me and he's still talking about my voice?
"You embarrass this house," he adds.
"Dad, did you not hear me? They tried to…"
"I don't care what they tried." His thumb finds the bruise on my arm again, presses it. "You had five men to choose from. Five. Do you understand what that concession cost me? Your mother begged for that mercy, and this is how you spend it?"
I could laugh. I don't, because I know exactly what my laughing would cost me later, in a room with no witnesses.
"No, Dad. You just put me on a leash with five names on it."
"A leash you were free to pick." His voice still doesn't rise. "Other daughters get given away with no say at all. You got a vote and you wasted it."
"Because they tried to RAPE me, Dad!"
Something in his face finally gives. The stillness cracks first in his jaw, then all at once.
His fingers dig in hard enough that I gasp. When he speaks again, the calm is gone. His voice is pitched loud enough to carry to the back of the hall.
"You will be married by the season's end, do you hear me? I don't care who. You'll stand at an altar and you'll smile through it even if I have to hold your jaw shut myself."
A vein stands out along his temple. Spit catches the candlelight when he says married.
I look past his shoulder for my mother. She's still seated at the high table.
For one flickering second her hand lifts off her lap an inch, maybe two, like she means to stand, to speak, to do anything at all.
Then her fingers curl back into her skirts. She sets her jaw and looks at the tablecloth instead. I watch her choose it. That's worse than if she'd never moved at all.
Right, how could I forget? A daughter with no monster is only ever worth one thing to a house like mine: whoever she's traded to.
I don't remember deciding to run. I remember my father's grip loosening in surprise when I wrench free. I remember the corridor.
The servants' gate is where I'm heading. The one with the latch that always sticks, the one I used to slip through as a girl to avoid tutors I hated.
It sticks tonight too. I put my whole shoulder into it, twice, while footsteps gather weight in the corridor behind me. On the third try it gives.
Then I'm out in the cold with torn skirts. A lantern swings awake somewhere above the wall. I have no plan beyond away.
There's exactly one place I can think to go, and it isn't a good one.
Bram, the only man I fully trust, is being shipped to Solventar tonight. I know because his father told mine over dinner two weeks ago.
Solventar is the only alternative to a death sentence criminals under twenty-five get.
Fifty years ago the war between species ended. The peace that followed came with a price: every broken law carries exactly one punishment, no matter how small the crime. Death, except for the young.
They built it in the war's last year, when the peacemakers realized executing every violent seventeen-year-old would just start the next war early.
So instead they raised a college that dissolves your identity: whoever you were before you walk through those gates stops mattering the moment you do.
Bram refused an order, and for an orc that's the same as treason. Now he has three years to learn how to comply. Or die instead.
A shout goes up somewhere behind the wall. I duck into the lee of a hedge until it passes. My own pulse is loud enough to drown out whatever they're saying.
I cut through the kitchen garden instead of the main road — fewer torches — and let myself think of Wren for exactly as long as it takes to cross it.
She's asleep in the east wing, sixteen. Marriage isn't on the table for her for two more years. She's safe from tonight in a way I never will be again.
Right now I need to focus on Bram. I've loved him since we were children too young to even know what the word meant. And today he is walking into Solventar alone.
I know the transport route; I've known it since I was twelve, sneaking out to watch the prison wagons pass the eastern road.
If I go now, I can still catch him before the checkpoint. Better to fight for my life somewhere I chose than die slowly in a marriage I didn't.
I'm still telling myself that when I clear the garden wall and start to run in earnest.
I'm three streets from the checkpoint, lungs burning, when a shape peels off the shadow of the old grain house and another falls in behind me.
Dorel and Cassian. The other three are probably back at the high table already, playing wounded for my father. These two came for the part where nobody's watching at all.
"You made us look like animals in there," Dorel says, closing the distance faster than I expected. "My father heard what you accused us of."
"You were animals in there. I just said it out loud."
His hand snaps out and closes on my sleeve.
Fabric tears free in his fist as I twist away. But his fingers catch a fistful of my hair instead, yanking my head back hard enough that the street tilts sideways.
"You should've picked one of us and kept your mouth shut." Cassian's smile still doesn't move, even as Dorel's grip forces a sound out of me I hate. "This would've been over faster. Now you'll learn to mind your tongue."
Claimed by the Dragon’s Debt
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