Page 48 of Dragon Bodyguard
Ilya rolled his eyes.
“Right,” he said. “Dmitri, always a pleasure, but…”
“No,” Dmitri said. “You’re staying here until I can figure out what to do with you.”
“What to do with me?” Ilya asked. “There’s nothing to do. She’s not family. I’ve broken no oath, no blood bond.”
“You’ve named her a blood relative of yours,” Dmitri contested. “You’re casting her off. There are stipulations around circumstances such as this one.”
“Stipulations,” Ilya huffed. “Please.”
But Dmitri didn’t budge.
Ilya stared at him, then at Aleksander, who simply shook his head. Ilya would get no backing from his eldest son.
Kristina leaned into Misha, thankful for the support. She didn’t feel sorry for losing her family—they had never been her family to begin with—but the truth of what had been done to her was beginning to feel like a stone around her ankle, dragging her down to places unknown.
A century wasted when she could have known who she was all along.
Then again… perhaps she never would have met Misha.
“You can’t be serious,” Ilya was saying. “Come on…” And then he reached out for the nearest gun, snatching it out of the bodyguard's grasp and turning, about to point it at Kristina’s head. But her reflexes were superior to his.
The second he reached for the gun, Kristina was already moving. And when he turned around to aim at her, she was already by him. Her hand grasped his arm in a hold so tight it could have shattered the bone. The following instant she was glowing white, her irises burning bright. There was heat unlike any she had ever felt rising up through her chest. It formed instinctively and somewhere in the back of her head came a thought that she wasn’t meant to breathe fire in human form, but her inner dragon discarded that notion.
She wasn’t any dragon.
Her dragon fire moved up her throat and it was as though she had swallowed the sun itself and yet she remained unscathed. There was terror in Ilya’s eyes, but she felt no sympathy. Instead, she parted her lips and breathed white flames onto the hand of Ilya’s holding the gun.
He was screaming and, by the time she stopped, he was half-unconscious.
She let him go, watching him go down on one knee, holding his wrist where nothing but a scorched stump remained where his hand used to be. The gun had been melted away completely, along with flesh and bone.
“If you tell me I’m terrible,” she said, voice gentle as she leaned down until she was eye-level with him. As though he was a child. “Then I’ll give you terrible,” she added.
He would never get to tell her who she was ever again.
The only person who got to decide was her.
She felt Misha’s arm at her waist, tugging her to step away from the man at her feet.
“Let’s get out of here,” Misha murmured. “We’re done.”
She turned her head to him, questioning frown on. Did he mean it?
He held her gaze, a small smile appearing on his mouth. He gave the smallest nod.
He meant it.
She threaded her fingers through his, leaning against him as they left the room.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“I’m never parting with you again,” he stated, kissing her hard on the temple.
She felt her entire body relax; every last tension held over years of not knowing where she belonged unspooling within her.
Because she belonged with him.
