Page 59 of Beautiful Beast

Before I could pull him back, he forced himself away from me and out the door. Varí blinked sleepily from his little bowl, and Belleo covered her mouth to stifle the laughter. “Sorry to interrupt. Having a good time?”

Shaking my head, my mind was still blank. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around what happened. When I didn’t speak, she did laugh, helping me off the stool and guiding me from the room. Varí came with us. “Are you all right?”

I only told her the truth. “I have absolutely no idea.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

________

ZOVAI

Istrode up the spiraling stairs two at a time, anyone who was in my path seeking to get out of the way as quickly as possible. It was a good thing we were interrupted.

It was a good thing.

It was a good thing.

If I kept the sentiment alive in my mind, perhaps both me and my dragon would believe it.

Another breath and I would have laid her out on the table, right on top of that scroll, and finally found out what she tasted like.

I didn’t quite make it to the door, leaning my hands against the wall next to our chambers. “Fuck.”

Over the years the Elders had tried to mate us. Whether taking a mate together or separately. They wanted Heirs beyond us, and though the three of us took our pleasure when we had need, no one had ever appealed to us in that way.

So why was a human woman the first creature that had enraptured me? Not just me, but all three of us?

Idroal’s words to us kept rattling around in my mind like loose stones. What you are experiencing was once not so uncommon.

All of a sudden I was racing back down the stairs and it was still too slow. I leapt into the open space of the spiral and fell, catching myself on the stairs every few floors until I reached the bottom.

Most of the dragons in Skalisméra hated it down here. Some worked here out of necessity, some lived here because of punishment, like those we’d just sentenced. And then there were the few who loved the mountain more than the air and reveled in it.

Idroal was one of those dragons.

The door to their apartment opened before I could raise my fist to knock, and they lifted an eyebrow. “Your method of getting here was loud, my lord.”

I smiled in spite of myself and brushed past them into the apartment. Easily the largest one beneath the bastion, and it glowed cheerily with warmth. Idroal returned to their couch and the pipe with smoke still curling from it. “To what do I owe this great honor?” It was lightly teasing.

“I know there will be some questions you can’t answer,” I said. “But I still must ask them.”

They smiled and blew a smoke ring toward me. “Of course, my lord. And you know as well as I do that a lack of an answer is an answer all the same.”

Wasn’t that the truth. Every time we asked the Elders to release the power binding Endre, they responded the same way: with silence. It was as clear a message as any.

Idroal gestured to the couch across from them, but I couldn’t sit. Not now. “You said this wasn’t uncommon long ago. Do you mean you’ve seen this before?”

“Yes.”

“A dragon, or more than one, drawn to a human.”

“Yes,” they said again.

I drove my hands into my hair before pressing my palms against my eyes. There were too many things to ask and I couldn’t think of them and all I wanted to do was go back and find Lena and finish kissing her if only to feel the heat of her lips beneath mine. “I shouldn’t have come here,” I said. “I’m sorry for disturbing you.”

“Zovai, sit down.”

They were one of the few in the world that could speak to us in such a manner and have it be tolerated. Idroal had been there since my birth and had served the three of us without wavering. In many ways, they were more of a parent than our own sires and savans.

---