Page 14 of Fated to the Grumpy Dragon
“Emma,” Rhyse said with shocking calmness. “I need you to listen to my voice. I need you to indicate you can hear me. Nod your head.”
The world spun up and down. I must have been nodding. All I could think of was pain.
“This will hurt,” he said softly, sincere regret coloring his words.
I wanted to laugh at that but couldn’t. Hurt?Hurt? Was he serious? What more pain could he possibly inflict on me?
In one move, Rhyse snapped the harpoon in half, leaving only the handle sticking out of the back of my shoulder and a few inches protruding from the front. The pain was great but nothing compared to everything else.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered in my ear. “Emma, I’m sorry, but we’re not done. I … I have to do the other side as well. I have to pull it out of the wound. Okay? Do you understand?”
I must have made some sort of motion or noise that indicated agreement because Rhyse’s face grew hard and cold, and then he yanked the harpoon out of me.
That time, I did faint.
“Emma! Wake up Emma!”
“I’m dying,” I whispered, the sounds the only noise I could produce. “Aren’t I? I’m going to die here.”
The blood was soaking the deck, I felt like I was lying in a pool of warm liquid. All of it my blood. There was no surviving that.
Rhyse’s face, hovering over me as I stared up at him, didn’t contain anything like hope.
“Well, that sucks,” I said with a bitter, wet laugh. “Dying without even remembering where I am or why I’m here to do the dying. That’s a cruel joke.”
Rhyse’s face creased in unexpected discomfort. “I can save you,” he said suddenly, features scrunching up like he couldn’t believe he’d said it.
“So, do it?” I said, shoving aside whatever it was I saw on his face. When it came to living or dying, I didn’t care at the moment. I wasn’t ready to go. I started crying.
“There’s a catch,” he said uncomfortably then glanced at my shoulder. “But we don’t have much time.”
“Please,” I was begging through the sobs now. “Oh, god, please. Rhyse,I don’t want to die.I’m not ready. I want to do the things. So much I haven’t done.”
So much. I wanted tolive. To experience all that life had to offer. I wanted to fall wildly in love. Get married. Become a mother.
A hand slid unconsciously to my belly, but all it encountered was hot, sticky, blood-soaked fabric.
“If I do—” Rhyse began, but I cut him off, sharply shaking my head.
“Do it.Please. Save me. Whatever it takes.”
My limbs were growing heavy. Everything was slowing. I had no idea what Rhyse was going to have to do, but I didn’t care. Crushing debt. Amputation of my arm, whatever it meant, I would handle it. Somehow.
“Okay,” he said. “But this is … really going to hurt. Are you su—”
The world was rapidly disappearing into darkness as the edges of my vision grayed out.
“Fuck it,” a voice—Rhyse? I couldn’t tell—snarled. “There’s no time. I’m sorry.”
Then he was gone, his features disappearing behind a mask of scales the color of my eyes.
My jaw fell open. He did something, and the back of my shoulder erupted in a brand-new fire.
I arched upward—and then pressure on the front of my mangled shoulder brought the flame searing across that skin, too.
The heat grew. And grew. It burned. I was burning from the inside out. I screamed, trying to exhale the fire, but it only intensified. I was feeding it with oxygen.
I passed from consciousness into somewhere else. A land of incoherence and dreams. A mixture of moments of my past and things I had only ever dreamed about. All the wasted time. Time I should have been doing more.
