Page 4 of Aria's Ascension

Aria nodded readily. “He makes me feel safe. I trust him, more than I’ve ever trusted anyone, even Foster. He knows I can take care of myself, but he’s always got my back. He’s right there if I need him.”

Holding her mom’s gaze, she added, “I think I love him, Amá.”

Her mother gasped and pressed her hands to her chest, smiling widely, her eyes going misty.

Aria kept going, imagining Kix now. “He’s quiet. Thoughtful. And, yet, he’s… intense. Definitely a man of few words, but I can see so much going on behind his eyes, so much happening under the surface. He’s also very… perceptive. It’s like he knows what I’m feeling before I do, like he knowsme, all of me, even the parts that aren’t pretty, and he accepts me. I love that. I lovehim.”

She didn’t intend to mention the dragon. He wasn’t hers, not like Tirox and Kix were. Hell, she’d met him, if you could call it that, for all of two seconds and all of that was spent fighting. But, the words seemed to spill from her lips of their own accord before she could stop them.

“He’s scarred. You can see how much pain he’s endured. I know what that’s like, to have been hurt. He could’ve turned cruel, angry, vicious, uncaring, but he didn’t, not entirely, anyway. He still tries to protect others, complete strangers, even when it would be easier not to. It was odd. The moment I looked into his eyes, I felt like I knew him.”

“That sounds like a very… complicated man, mijita. Almost like he is different men,” her mom commented with a suspicious glint in her eyes.

Aria whipped a startled look up at her mom.

How the hell does she always see through me like that?

As if she could hear that thought, her mom cocked a haughty eyebrow and smirked, just slightly, before her expression settled back into a demand for answers.

Well, fuck.

Thinking back over what she’d said, she realized she’d given entirely too much away with her descriptions. How was it that all her training flew out the damn window the second she was around her parents?

Aria tried to backtrack, stumbling over a denial while her mom’s eyes narrowed further and further. Finally, she sighed and gave a smile that was half grimace and all guilt.

Her dad was glancing between them, looking confused before it seemed to click and he stared at her almost comically wide-eyed.

Her mom rubbed her forehead and muttered, “I always knew you were the difficult child.”

“Amá!” Aria gasped.

“Well, you are! I get my hopes up you’re finally going to get married and give me grandbabies, and then you come in here trying to be sneaky telling me about three men!Three! Why can’t you be more like your brother? He has a wife, children, a safe career!”

She exploded into rapid-fire Spanish, half of which was lost on Aria, because she was speaking too quickly. She caught the gist though, and her cringe deepened.

After a few minutes of ranting, her mom calmed and blew out a long breath. Staring at her closely, she asked as if she couldn’t quite believe it, “Do you really love them?Allof them?”

“I… yes. Two of them, anyway. The third I just met recently, but there was… a spark there. The minute I looked into his eye…sss, I felt like I knew him.”

Her mother frowned, but she began to look curious despite herself.

“And they’re okay with this? They don’t try to kill each other?”

“Actually… it was their idea.” Before her mom could voice the doubts Aria could see spreading across her face, she interjected, “Like I said, they’re foreign. They do things a littledifferentlythan we do. I’m not saying they’ve never shown a little jealousy, but the three of us have become close. We’ve made a… family, of sorts. We trust and depend on each other in a place where trust is damn hard to find.”

“Language, mijita,” her mom scolded, but it was automatic. Aria could see the wheels turning in her mind.

Her dad was still gaping between them, clearly shocked, but waiting to see how her mom handled it before making his own feelings known.

Aessa…

Aria heard a whisper and whipped a startled look behind her, but no one was there. A feeling of vertigo hit her when the faint impression of hands cradling her body, stroking her hair and face, feathered over her skin, at complete odds with the sensation of the chair under her and the box fan to her left fluttering her hair across her back.

“Kix?” Aria whispered.

Open your eyes, my heart.

“Tirox… ”

---