Page 84 of Destined By Dragonblood
The ancient ritual to bind Dahlia, Joseph, and I together hadn’t worked. Even after they’d drunk my cum and wanted the bond, our hearts and minds hadn’t cemented together. No bursting golden flames had wrapped around us. No mental connection had been born in that moment and given us access to one another’s thoughts. No shared emotions had radiated among the three of us.
Feeling unworthy, I had abandoned them, left my ancestral home for good, and submitted my body to Elijah—and my inner beast’s desire for pain. But what I’d left behind…
Primrose’s slightly crooked nose was all Joseph. The same pointy chin I’d always found so alluring on Dahlia lay beneath Primrose’s full lips. The yellow hair and the glint of gold in her thickly lashed orbs were identical to mine.
“You’re of my blood,” I whispered, realizing I hadn’t failed in producing offspring.
“I am.”
My eyelids slammed shut, and I allowed my sorrow and rage to roar through my inner beast and back out again, rattling the cavern around us.
If only I had the gift of sensing Blood Born as Elijah’s female did, I would have known I’d somehow managed to impregnate a human female. If I had stayed and accepted their comfort, within a matter of weeks, I would have recognized Dahlia miraculously carried Joseph’s and my child.
A Blood Born of Father’s royal line.
I had succeeded in producing longed-for offspring even though doing so with humans was unheard of.
It took three dragonblood to create life, I’d been told by Father.
What else had he been wrong about?
I opened my eyes to find Primrose still watching me, unconcerned and unmoved. “You know who and what I am?” My voice broke as I brought to question my entire damned existence.
“I do.” Primrose moved into the kitchen with grace as though I hadn’t nearly brought the mountain down on our heads with my roar. Her bare feet stepped silently on the stone, but Tiggy’s nails clicked as he followed at her side. Primrose even walked with Dahlia’s gentle sway, her head slightly canted to the side like Joseph’s had always been.
Dahlia had been a girl of the streets, downtrodden and in need of shelter, food, and protection from the john, who thought to abuse her body. Having not seen or heard of another Blood Born in over a century after my parents’ passing, I’d taken Dahlia in and shown her how a human male ought to treat a woman. Only once she had fallen deeply in love with me, did I reveal the truth of my inner beast.
She’d chosen to stay because she had no life to return to. We had discussed a third, my beta, and hoped he would be the missing link I craved. We dreamed of creating a bond between human and Blood Born for the first time in history. Desperate, I’d stolen Joseph, a simple and beautiful man with no family, one who wouldn’t be missed.
“She and Joseph were mere humans. We tried to bond so we might procreate, but they failed me time and again,” I murmured as memories continued to flood my brain.
“Perhaps you failed them.”
“I did no such thing.” I frowned at Primrose’s back as she put her hands into threadbare oven mitts. “I left them, yes, but without knowledge we’d conceived and not without having provided for them—generously.”
“You are hungry.”
I had expected anger on Primrose’s part, annoyance at the very least, but not an abrupt topic change. “What?”
She merely glanced over her shoulder at me from her place by the stove, her face devoid of expression. “You. Are. Hungry.” She enunciated each word as though I were a child.
My spine stiffened, but she opened the oven door.
My dragon salivated at the blast of scents filling the air.
“I baked a chicken and potatoes,” she said, pulling a roasting pan from the oven. “With rosemary and thyme.”
The same way Dahlia had made my favorite meal. “Dahlia taught you to cook?”
“Grandmother taught me everything I know.”
Grandmother…not mother.
“Your mother is my daughter,” I said as my inner beast’s reminder clicked the truth into my brain. I glanced at the dark hallway Primrose had come from but couldn’t sense another female in the cavern.
“She was.”
I jerked my focus toward Primrose.
