Page 23 of Dragons' Mate
"You didn’t kill anyone, that’s your metric of cooperation?” Stopping a pace away, Kit crossed her arms over her chest. Quinton wasn’t sure how someone so small that she had to crane her head back just to look him in the eye could fill the room with her presence, but when it came to Kit nothing made sense. She shook her head. “Stop playing at lone wolf," she ordered. "Or lone dragon. Whatever."
"It’s what I am."
"That's what you were." Her eyes flashed.
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Quinton hissed, his pulse pounding through him. Yes, that should damn well count for something. Everything about the chamber was feeling too small, the walls too tight. His voice rose. “If you imagine anything about watching you -” he cut off, not knowing what to say. His back hurt. His soul ached. It was all he could do to salvage the tatters of himself. “What do you want from me?” he demanded.
Breaching the few feet of distance between them, Kit pressed her hand against Quinton’s cheek. She had no idea how much that soft touch made him ache with need. Too much. “Honesty,” she said softly.
“She also wants you to stop moving away,” Tavias added, coming to stand beside Kit. As if the scent he’d already left on her wasn’t enough. A band tightened around Quinton’s chest, making it hard to draw breath.
“Honesty?” He grabbed Kit’s wrist harder than he’d intended and she winced. A small movement but it was the last strain Quinton could weather. Everything inside him exploded. “You want honesty? Here is honesty.” The words came in a harsh burst, clouded by pain and need and fraying self-control. “What you want, what you deserve, is a pack. And I’m not pack. Not this one, not any one. I’m a shadow. That is all I am and will ever be.”
Quinton did not realize the truth—and sting—of those words until he shouted them into Kit’s face. His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides looking for purchase that wasn’t there. “If you don’t trust your own eyes and instincts, then trust theirs.” He jerked his head toward Tavias. “Do you know why I had to keep your coming to the pledge ball a secret? Because I knew that a real pack would not allow its heart to be served up on a silver platter for scavengers to hunt. Dragons protect their mates. But that’s not what I did. So let’s all call the truths as they are. I’m darkness and ruthlessness. I’m the shadow that takes lives in the night. And yes, maybe I deserve to watch you savor my brothers’ touch, knowing that you only tolerate mine from instinct—but that’s one punishment that’s too harsh for me to bear. So I’m not. I’m turning away like a coward.”
A tremor ran through him, drops of blood from his back splattering on the white marble floor. He drew a ragged breath, meeting Kit’s wide eyes. “You are the one bright light I’ve ever had in my dark existence. You don’t think I know that I don’t deserve you? That what I did, mating with you, bringing you here, might extinguish it once and for all? I do many things human, but there is one that I do not—I don’t lie to myself.”
Quinton clamped his mouth shut, his panting breath the only sound in the room that had suddenly gone preternaturally silent. He felt the weight of everyone’s stares burning through him like fire arrows and opened his shoulders to accept them all. One after another, after another. He… he hadn’t meant to say any of that. Not aloud. But Kit had asked for the truth and he… Blight take him. For the first time in his life Quinton did not know how to fight.
He took a step back.
Kit took a step forward.
Quinton stopped.
She did as well. She didn’t speak. Instead, her fingers went to the buttons of the shirt he had so painstakingly put back on before returning. The first. Second. Third. The shirt opened to his sternum, the air touching his skin. He didn’t know what Kit thought she was doing, but he desperately hoped she wasn’t going to try to get the thing off of him.
It would hurt too much in too many different ways. Yet he was powerless to stop her.
“What are you doing?” Quinton asked when Kit thankfully stopped with the buttons.
“Looking for the right spot.” She ran her fingers over his neck, right where it met his shoulder. The jolt of sensation speared down his spine.
“For?” Quinton ground out.
The tip of her finger stopped right over Quinton’s pounding pulse. He could feel his skin pressing against her touch with every beat of his heart. If she were to plunge a dagger there, he’d bleed out in minutes. But blight take him, he wouldn’t fight her if she did.
He tilted his head a fraction, exposing more of his vulnerable neck. If Kit wanted his life for bringing her into this mess, then she had it.
“You are too tall,” she said after a moment. “I need you to kneel.”
Quinton did, dropping to his knees before her without hesitation.
“Thank you,” Kit said softly. And then she braced one hand on the back of his neck and bit him.
Quinton jerked, the tiny sting blossoming on his neck demanding his singular focus. His hands gripped Kit’s hips involuntarily, though he was unsure whose balance he was trying to save. When she pulled back though, his blood red on her lips, he knew it was his own need for stability that kept him from moving.
“I claim you as my mate, Quinton of Massa’eve,” Kit said, her palm over his cheek. “My bite might not have dragon magic the way yours does, but you’ve enough for us both on that front. So there we go. No more of this one sidedI dragged you into thishorseshit.”
“But Idid-”
“You bound us. And I brought us here. I think we are even. And if you don’t like lying to yourself, then you should practice saying a new truth: you aren’t a lone shadow anymore. You are bonded. Mated. Tied to me. You can like it or not. That’s your choice. But being alone? That’s done.”
Kit’s words rang over the room, sinking into Quinton’s bones. Still on his knees, he pressed his forehead into Kit’s shoulder. He had no words, not for the powerful sensation echoing through him. Kit was wrong about not having magic. She had power. A kind that could slay a dragon right where he knelt.
There was movement behind him and the tussling of clothes and bodies as Tavias cut the back of Quinton’s shirt and Cyril pulled out the vial of Dragon Tears. Hauck, who’d managed to fetch a pitcher of water and a wash bowl in the last few minutes, dabbed a washcloth at the top of Quinton’s shoulder and growled in soft disapproval.
None of it was odd in isolation exactly, but taken together, it felt an awful lot like his brothers were fussing.
