Page 48 of Dragon Fight

He paused then, eyes shining, and I saw in his face the conviction of the man who’d slammed his hand against the stone wall, who’d made it clear in a hoarse voice that he wanted me.

“You’re so strong, Pippin, and that’s what’s had me pursuing you. Because you were surrounded by people less than you, who were threatened by your strength, and still you never let it stop you. No matter what was thrown at you, you rose above it and I…” He sighed. “I wanted to be the one who took some of that burden from you, who woke up each day thinking of ways to support you, protect you, so you weren’t forced to be so unrelentingly strong all of the damn time.”

But it wasn’t justmystrength that had drawn his eye. I knew at least a part of me was hurt because the illusion that my husband wanted me and only me had been cruelly ripped away and replaced with…what? That’s what I needed to find out.

“And Draven?” I asked, watching his face closely. “And Ada? Were they strong too? Is that what you were drawn to?”

“Ada…” Brom shook his head slowly. “Ada was just a pretext, I think, something, someone to put between Draven and I to legitimise what was unfolding. We told ourselves we were vying for her attention when really…” He let out a noisy breath. “But she’s not the one you want to know about, not really.”

He moved so that his legs fell either side of the bench as he leaned forward again, and his hazel eyes hardened as he stared into mine.

“You want to know what would have happened between me and Draven if Felix hadn’t died and was still in line to inherit? If Draven was still free to do as he wished? If Beatrice was married off to his brother, not him? If we were still able to fly as a wing, the prince going on routine patrols and dispensing the king’s justice, like any other dragon rider?” Brom shook his head then. “We’d have told ourselves the lies we always had, that the stolen little moments in the dark were just a passing thing, an animal instinct for comfort and satisfaction.”

I didn’t often hear this level of passion, this intensity, in Brom’s voice, but it made my heart hurt to hear it. Because while the way he spoke about me both reassured me and reinstated me as his wife, as someone he cared for immensely, I wasn’t there alone. I shared that place of honour with one other. A man who most often could barely stand to be in the same room as me. The one who’d forced me to shovel dragon shit because he knew exactly what it would do to me. The one who… My negative line of thought faltered as I remembered the way Draven had dealt with my poisoning.

“But it would have been a convenient lie I told myself, because that’s not how it works for me,” Brom said. “Sex is just a… mechanical act, like scratching an itch, meaning less than nothing. Unless I’m with someone I care about. Then it’s fucking everything, just like it is with you.”

I sucked in his hot, hard look, greedily storing all that longing up and into my aching heart, because I knew it was about to be bruised some more.

“And Draven,” I finished for him. “Like it is with me and with Draven.”

“I haven’t touched him since the night the crown prince died,” Brom told me, with complete earnestness. “I haven’t even discussed any of what went on before. I was free to come to you, free to make an offer of marriage.”

“No, you weren’t.” I leaned closer, my eyes stinging as I did so, because I couldn’t hold back from this, and as his arms closed around me and he held me as tight as he could, I knew there was more than just the two of us in this embrace. “You care for me—”

“Desperately, ardently. I promise to make you the happiest of women every day that I’m alive.”

“And you care for Draven just as much.”

I felt his sigh on the back of my neck, my short crop of hair providing little protection and somehow that felt right. In this moment I felt scraped clean and raw, as if I’d washed my skin with coarse sand or something. His grip tightened exponentially as if he was scared I’d pull away from him, but I needed him. I clung to him just as tightly, as if that would be enough to get us through this.

“The truth, Brom. Please.” I turned towards him, pressing my mouth against his and whispered the words, as if they were a spell to force him to do as I asked.

“My mother always said I cared too much, too deeply about everything,” he replied. “That I took the world’s pain on. But this?” He sighed and then pressed his lips to mine in a gentle kiss. “I didn’t know it was possible. Hoped by all the gods that it wasn’t, but…”

I knew the answer to my question before he said anything, yet the words still slammed into me hard when they came.

“No matter what the two of you do, where you go, how far you walk away from me, I’ll love you, Pippin, and Draven, prince of the realm, until my dying day and I wish to all the gods that this was not the case.”

31

Ididn’t jerk away from Brom in that moment, though by the gods, I wanted to. He’d ripped my heart from my chest and then, with tender care, put it right back where it was supposed to be all in the same moment. For several heartbeats, I couldn’t even breathe. Then, it was all I could do to draw breath, to focus on the oxygen going in and out of my lungs, because anything else was beyond me. My mind stuttered, as my thoughts misfired into fragments: short, broken and quickly abandoned, as I tried to make sense of it. In contrast, all my muscles tensed in response, and my heart rate accelerated rapidly. As far as my body was concerned, I faced a threat, and I had to decide whether to fight or flee from it. Problem was that my brain wasn’t up to any decision-making.

So, flee, it was.

I prised Brom’s fingers off me, wresting free of his grip when he was reluctant to let me go. He called my name as I twisted to my feet, the pain in his voice evident. But he didn’t realise that he’d been wrong, so wrong, about me when he said I was strong. I wasn’t strong enough to handle it all—to take on my painandhis—and my instincts pushed me to escape to where I only had to deal with my own. My pulse was racing in my ears as I took great jagged gulps of air, and I shoved the curtains to one side to stagger back into the room to see three solemn faces turn my way.

And none of them was surprised to see the state I was in.

“Pip—” Ged started to say, coming towards me, arms outstretched, but I dodged away from him.

“Did you know?” I asked and I got my answer in the ways his hands fell limp to his sides. I took a deep breath. “You did. Right.” With that settled, I veered away from Ged, then was met by other obstacles.

“Lass, I know this is a terrible shock—” Soren started to say but I shook my head sharply.

“But it shouldn’t have been.” I took another deep breath and held it as I looked around the room, staring at each of them and, with that, my previous hot panic moved towards cold rage. Finally, in that moment, I felt like the queen Glimmer was always prompting me to be. An affronted queen, an angry one, who was going to take her subjects to task. “Should it? I shouldn’t have discovered any of this by accident. I shouldn’t have had Ada rub the truth into my face, or be forced to endure Kay’s well-meaning but sad looks as she imagined…”

My throat closed down for a moment, as though my body was refusing to let me continue, but I forced the words out despite how harsh they sounded.

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