Page 44 of Dragon Exposed

“I know we’ll have to take you home, back to your friends, your job. But I’m not trying to make you forget. I’m just doing what feels natural. One of the ways our mother always showed love when we were growing up was to feed us, to make sure all of our needs were met. Watching her cook, learning how to work with my hands, was as much a part of her love for her family as bedtime stories or playing make-believe in the courtyard of the castle.” I shrugged. “Cooking for you feels like… I don’t know, like I’m sharing a piece of who I am. Like caring for you in that way gives you an idea of what sort of man I am, what sort of mate I would be. What sort of father I could be to our children.”

Before she could say anything more, before she could explain the reason why her eyes grew wide at my words, I slipped off into the walk-in closet, not daring to come out again until I was fully clothed, and her breathing had slowed.

If she rejected me, if she denied our mating bond, I didn’t know what I would do. I knew I was jumping the gun, even thinking about children, but ever since the first time I saw her in Epsilon, I knew she was mine, and the more time I spent with her, the more I got to know her, the more sure I got that she was my mate.

The mental image of her, belly heavy with our child, just added to the surety in my head.

Right now, though, I had to figure out just how long my unwanted house guest needed to stick around.

I found Declan standing in the backyard, looking surly like someone pissed into the wind.

“I thought you were smarter than this.”

“Excuse me?” I snarled at him, already ready for a fight. “Weren’t you the one who told me you’d do anything it took to keep your mate safe, if you had one? Now you’re giving me shit for doing exactly that?”

Declan wheeled around on me, his eyes a deep, vibrant purple and his fingernails extended out into claws. “How is this keeping her safe? You dove off a building, exposed us all, and kidnapped her away from her life. You killed a vampire together, which can’t be good for a human’s psyche, and you’re acting like everything you’ve done is forher. You’re a selfish bastard, and you put all of dragonkind at risk with your damned dive.” He looked like he was barely holding off from lunging at me as he added, “With the list out there, do you know how hard it’s going to be foranyof us to find a mate after you? To find the right woman, even if she’s not human? No one’s going to even consider mating with the brother of a traitor to our kind. To all supernatural kind. And what about Krystana? Did you even think about her?”

“Of course, I thought about her. I thought about the whole damned family. I would never intentionally make it harder for any of you to find your mates. But we’ve always trusted in fate, trusted in the heartstones and the magic of our ways to make sure that we find the person we’re meant to be with. Are you really telling me I should’ve left my mate, my Izobelle, at the hands of bloodsucking monsters who have already nearly killed her once? Would you have left your mate?” I shook my head. “There was no way I could’ve won in this situation, Dec. If I hadn’t gone down there, my mate would’ve been lost to me, no doubt bled dry. You would’ve lost a brother to the craze, because there’s no way I would’ve been able to survive losing her. Whether you can understand that or see it now doesn’t matter. I did the only thing I could do, to make sure my mate was safe.”

Declan’s lip curled up, and a low, rumbling growl rolled out of his mouth from deep in his core. “You act like you’re the only one in the family who could lose a mate over this. Like your mate is more important than anyone else’s.”

He looked like he was barely holding onto his dragon, barely holding onto his own sanity, and for the first time, I wondered if we needed to worry that Declan—quiet, docile, observant Declan—was closer to being lost to the craze than any dragon I’d ever seen.

As far as I knew, no dragon had ever fallen to the craze unless they’d lost their mate, or they’d lost hope of ever finding one.

If Declan was already this far gone… I didn’t want to think about what that could mean for our family, for dragonkind.

“What’s going on with you, Dec? You’re the last brother I would’ve expected to show up full of fight.”

His shoulders slumped and he just sort of crumpled onto the grass, sitting cross-legged and staring off into the distance. “Am I not allowed to be pissed off? Am I not allowed to be irritated that Ash, our king apparent who won’t just take the crown he rightfully deserves, would send me here, so that he can stay in the arms of his pregnant mate? Am I not allowed to be jealous that Ash, Henrik, and now you too have found your rightful mates? Human or not, they accept you, they look at you like your heart is the missing piece to theirs. Am I not allowed to want that for myself?”

I sat next to him, resting my hand on his knee as I let my gaze drift out to the horizon with his. “Your mate is out there, Dec. You’ll find her.”

He just shook his head. “You should go back inside, make your mate dinner, enjoy this time you have together, before the rest of the clan, the rest of the world crashes in around you.”

I wanted to press him, to figure out what was going through his mind, what was keeping him from having the hope, even the tentative hope, that the rest of us have had since we were children. But the way he was zoning out, the way he seemed to shift his emotions on a dime, I didn’t want to risk setting him off and giving Izobelle more reasons to fear dragons.

“Oh, before you go, there’s a vial on the counter from Syrena. She said to have your mate pour it into a bath with a box of Epsom salts and let it soak into her skin. It should wash the thrall away.”

“Thank you, brother. Come inside when you’re ready. I think Izobelle would like to meet some of my family.” I stood on the back porch for a few more minutes, watching Declan carefully. I could hear his elevated heart rate. His whole countenance was off, and if he showed even the slightest sign of being dangerous, of being ready to attack me, or more importantly, my mate, I wouldn’t hesitate to chain him up and demand our other brothers came to take him away.

Maybe Syrena would have an explanation, something to ease whatever ailed him.

Or maybe Declan was just suffering, like we all were, with the grief of losing our parents, our home, any sense of security we once had. The human world wasn’t full of terrors in the same way the old stories would have us believe, but it hadn’t made acclimating to it any easier.

If Declan needed other dragons, needed others he could bond with, maybe it was time to start building allies of our own. Other clans, other dragons who weren’t as stuck in the old ways, who weren’t as afraid of what exposure could mean. If we could find any.

With a long sigh, I headed inside and trudged up the stairs, my heart heavy in my chest as I went to check on my mate.

I’d done everything I could to keep her safe, to make sure that she wouldn’t end up like the rest of her family, drained at the fangs of a vampire. But what if Declan was right? What if everything I’d done, everything I was still doing, was just a selfish dragon’s need to find the place he belonged, the heart that fit with his own? I still didn’t have my tourmaline, and it wasn’t like Izobelle had a heartstone to light up.

It was hard to deny the way her seafoam eyes twinkled whenever she saw me, though. Maybe a human’s heartstone wasn’t physical, but it certainly seemed like I knew how to light up my mate.

No matter what anyone else said, it was the only thing that I kept coming back to. She had to be mine. She had to be the woman I was destined to love.

She was cuddled into my blankets, leaving her scent all over my pillow. It was almost too adorable, watching her sleep, to wake her and ask her to go back into the bathroom, to try to break the thrall.

I only ever wanted her to be at peace, and I knew that no matter what happened from here on, peace wouldn’t be an option. At least not for a good, long while, unless I could convince her to move to somewhere remote, somewhere we could build a palace of our own, somewhere we could raise young dragons with the safety of impassable terrain and heavy forests to keep us safe.

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