Her Dragon Captor (Her Dragon King Duet Book 1): 50 Loving States, North Dakota Pt. 1

by Theodora Taylor

  But as it turns out, documentaries are fun to watch with Damianos, somebody who has lived through all the eras being covered. His side notes and scathing corrections make learning about history way less boring.

  Though our easy couch camaraderie does hit a snag when I ask him why he didn’t help out in World War II as the fourth episode’s credits roll.

  “You asking me that is the equivalent of me asking you why your kind did not help out your primate ancestors. How could you let them carry out their squabbles and sometimes even kill each other to gain dominance?” he answers. “Other than for entertainment purposes, I gave little thought or consideration to what the anthros did to each other, especially after I decreed that we drakkon should purposefully become myth and stop eating humans.”

  “Why did you do that?” I ask, hoping for an even halfway moral reason.

  But that hope dies a quicker than quick death. “For the same reasons you would, if your meat sources not only outnumbered you but had taught themselves to build and wield nuclear weapons. It was a decision both practical and tactical.”

  “Yet, you’re here with me,” I point out. “Expecting a baby with me…what did you call us? Dogs?”

  I like the irritation that ripples over our mate bond from his end. I also like that we’re arguing. It’s a much-needed reminder that I’m absolutely within my rights to do what I’ve got planned.

  But then his expression sobers. “Yes, I did at a time call you that. What a fool I was.”

  He lets out a steaming sigh. “For too long I clung to the old hierarchy and dismissed your kind as idiot animals not deserving of your planet. You see, if I hadn’t done that, I would have been required to make certain admissions to myself.”

  He trails off, but obviously I’m not going to let him stop there. “What didn’t you want to admit to yourself?”

  “That my most reverent father was wrong, and The Royal Geneticist was correct,” he answers, his tone plain and simple. “Our mission to this planet was supposed to be an investigation of his claim, but it was corrupted from the start.”

  He turns his glowing eyes to the distance as if watching a memory play out. “We brought along the then Second Prince of Drakkon to construct more fertility matching devices—what we called fating portals—since The Royal Geneticist had stopped making wolves after breeding just a few dozen test groups in Zone 4. Much of our mission revolved around establishing humans on every continent so that the then drakkon king would be able to hunt in any clime. And it was my job as Royal Huntmaster to train the wolves so that they could assist us in our hunts. The decision to send the prince and me along with the team of surveyors made it clear to everyone, including The Royal Geneticist, that the only way he would be able to save the humans and the wolves he believed would evolve into a worthy species would be by destroying us.”

  Damianos shakes his head, and I can feel his real regret flowing over our mate bond as he tells me, “So, you see, Reverence, giving up my prejudices against humans and wolves would have been admitting that truth. That the Royal Geneticist was right, and that my father was wrong to send back recommendations that your races had no potential at all. Drakkon must honor their parents and show them reverence. But if not for my father’s biased report, the Royal Geneticist wouldn’t have destroyed our planet, setting off the series of events that led to his death.”

  I pause the World War II doc in the middle of its intro. Wow, I thought I was poking at the elephant in the room when I brought this subject up. But here Damianos is, kicking it all the way awake.

  And that makes me want to ask even more direct questions. “I always wondered, why did you show up out of the blue like that in my father’s village?”

  Again, Damianos doesn’t hesitate before answering. It’s almost as if he’s been waiting for the chance to explain himself. “Back then, the Betrayer King you call Xenon, came up with a theory. That if we found Fenrir’s original fating portal and said the code into it, then we would all be transported to our perfect matches—which at the time we believed could certainly only be one of the extinct drakki. However, it would take us much time to find the fating portal since Fenris’s original gates were sculpted on a quantum field only canine can perceive. Also, if the plan worked, there was a good chance we would land in a time period when drakki were much more fertile, and that would be too early for us to save our planet—this time period might even be before our drakkon civilization’s quantum leap. However, after living so long here on this then technology-free world, we decided that was a sacrifice we were willing to make if it meant we would be able to live out the rest of our millennia on the planet your people refer to as Mercury.

  “So the idea was to ransack a bunch of villages, while you were looking for the original gate?” I summarize. “Why didn’t you just get a wolf to lead you to the gate? Hypnotize them like you do everyone else.”

  “It is difficult to control more than two or three thralls at the same time with god speech. Also, even with the aid we presumed we would have from the Betrayer King, it would have taken him some time to configure the fating portal. That is why I have used an intricate system of bribes and god spoken human emissaries to gain access to the fating portals we studied to finally realize the Betrayer King’s broken promise.”

  “So that’s why you bought the Greek wolf kingdom island and the Idaho kingdom gate,” I say. Back in the day, when I was only a few years old, we passed a new law about kingdom towns not being allowed to sell property to humans. This had been in response to an Idaho king, who had lost his entire kingdom town to a Russian oligarch in a high-stakes poker game. The oligarch had gone on to sell it to Damianos Drakkon, a male the Lupine council had thought at the time was a simple billionaire. But who I’m now finding out was really a bitter alien, setting the stage to return to an earlier time on his planet.

  “So why are you still here then?” I ask. “You have your gates. What else do you need to go back?”

  “Alas, there was only one fating portal engineer on our mission, and that was the Betrayer King. Just like it has in your society now, our technology had reached the point that it was very hard for a lay drakkon to fully understand it, much less manipulate it. Without guidance or instruction, it has taken decades of study for us to not only locate potential fating portals but also reconfigure them so that a drakkon could use it to get matched with a fated mate. On our home planet, these fertility portals were used to draw your mate to you, not the other way around. So, it was not only a matter of changing the genetic coding on the gates, but also figuring out how to make it so the fating portal would send a drakkon male to his female match and not the other way around. We have only recently broken the science on it. Unfortunate timing, as this was exactly when my desire for you reached a fever pitch I could no longer ignore.”

  “Okay,” I say, sifting carefully through that huge download of information. “So, you were planning to what, pump a baby into me, so that you could stop the itch, then bounce to your fated mate, who’d probably be a female dragon like you?”

  He makes a sound in his chest, that might or might not be a chuckle. “Yes, Clever Reverence. That was exactly what I planned to do. I am impressed that you so easily figured it out. However, while I understood that it would be a biological imperative to mate with you, I did not give enough consideration to how hard it would be to leave you. I was a fool, and I will spend the rest of my life punishing myself for taking for granted this connection we share. That is why I ordered the project shut down. Nothing will be allowed to disturb the happy life I have planned for us.”

  My heart stutters. He’s planning a whole life together while I’m planning how to escape. But I press on, wanting to make sure I’ve got what he’s trying to tell me right. “So the project’s shut down and you’re not going to go through the fated mate gate?”

  “Why would I?” he asks. “You are my mate, the mother of my progeny. There is no greater point to my existence than paying you the reverence
you are due for the rest of my life. But enough about that, Treasured Mate. It is now getting late. I will give you escort to your room.”

  I follow him in a daze. Not sure how to respond to his latest declaration, or even how to feel.

  But my wolf has some ideas. She flips onto her back, legs spread wide open. Total THOT emoji.

  This doesn’t change anything, I tell that ho-wolf over there. I have no way of knowing if anything he just claimed is true, including the part about wanting a happy ending for us. The dude is still a supervillain. And you know this is part of some ultimate plan. We’re basically carrying the spawn of Thanos here, I remind her.

  But apparently, my wolf has nothing against civilization destroying monsters. She whines and complains about no longer wanting to go through with the plan. It makes me want to scream and call her a basic bitch.

  But now is nowhere near the time to get into it with my wolf.

  Instead, I focus on projecting happiness and calm over my side of the mating bond as I turn to say, “Okay, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow for my bath.”

  “There is no reason to guess at such things. I will, of course, appear to pay you reverence at the appointed hour.”

  Yeah, definitely need to apologize to mom in real life about complaining so much about the meditation requirement when I return to my kingdom house. It takes every single ounce of my childhood training to keep my wolf from vomiting up all her guilt over our mate bond.

  No lingering at the door like 20th-century teenagers tonight.

  “Good night,” I say quickly before disappearing into the room and crawling straight into bed. There I concentrate on falling asleep, but I’m not going to lie, it takes a while.

  The next morning, I set a plate of steak piled high, and a carton’s worth of eggs in front of him. Just like I planned.

  His delighted smile makes my wolf whinny inside of me, as I sit down across from him with a steak of my own.

  Stop it. Bad girl, I say as I make a big show of trying to cut up my steak with a butter knife.

  “That looks impossible,” Damianos says after a few seconds of watching me, just like I was hoping he would.

  “I mean, I’m going to have to make do. I couldn’t find anything sharper in the silverware drawer.”

  Damianos frowns. Tilts his head, then rises from his seat.

  I watch him pull open a few cabinets. Then he disappears from eyesight and the next sounds I hear are of the doors beneath the island being pulled open.

  When he rises again, it’s too plunk a butcher block filled with knives down on the island counter. “Colby did not do a very good job of following my instructions to hide these.”

  I seize on Colby to keep my mate bond from relaying my excitement. “He probably didn’t think you’d ever let me out of my room,” I say, trying as hard as I can to sound like myself. Not somebody plotting something.

  He pulls two small steak knives from the butcher block’s lower slots. Then he comes to sit down across from me with them. There’s a tension in the air between us, and I can’t tell if it’s coming from me or him.

  Probably me. Stay cool, you’ve got to stay cool, I warn my wolf.

  He holds up the steak knife, blade down. But instead of extending it to me, he says, “That chapter of our story is over now. You understand that I only wish to revere you for my remaining days upon this planet, and you have no plans to ruin this peace between us, correct?”

  I almost quickly lie and agree yes. Tell him we’re all kumbaya now, no harm, no foul, just to get him to trust me. But the real Ola would never do that, and I can’t go too far with the Uncle Kyle act. I’m pretending I’ve warmed up to him, not gotten a total lobotomy. So I take the risk…

  “It’s kind of hard to feel revered with this collar around my neck,” I answer, holding his glowing gaze. “You say you no longer think of me as a dog, that you want some kind of future together for us, but here I am, still your prisoner.”

  He holds my eyes for a second or two, but then dips his huge head, looking away from me.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I say into his silence.

  Then I reach across the table and pluck the knife out of his hand. “C’mon, let’s just eat before the food turns cold.”

  I don’t try to stab him. Not that week. Or the next. I still don’t have access to my internal bioclock, but time…I’m definitely biding it.

  I act like I believe he’s a changed dragon. I laugh and talk with him over meals like I totally don’t see that butcher block of knives he left out on the island counter. And I pretend that I’m perfectly happy with the new routine he’s established.

  Bath in the morning, breakfast made by me, several laps around the house, followed by a series of squat exercises that Damianos says I’ll need for when it comes time to “lay our hatchling.” (I know from watching Fensa’s C-section that there won’t be any actual eggshells involved, but it still skeeves me out every time he refers to it that way).

  After exercising, we have lunch, followed by a nap for me. Then comes an early dinner. Tons of meat for Damianos and a little meat and whatever carbs I want for me. And lastly, we end the evening with either an action film or a historical documentary.

  You’d think I’d be going out of my mind after a month of this. My days as a Queen-in-training used to be non-stop, and the first week the feeling that I should be working hangs over me. But a few weeks into the short pregnancy, making breakfast, lunch, and dinner, really begins to take it out of me. Even with my afternoon nap, Damianos often has to wake me because I’ve fallen asleep in front of the television and it’s time to go upstairs.

  “You must allow me to god speak another manservant,” he says when we stop outside my door, one such night. “Much of your energy will go to growing the baby over the next two moons, and I do not wish for you to overtire yourself.”

  Funny, I’ve become totally used to having his voice inside my head, but I still haven’t been able to wrap my mind around it being less than two months until I’ll be expected to squat and squeeze out this baby.

  But it’s definitely happening. Now that I’m in the fourth week of my unintended stay, my stomach has gone from a soft and fluffy belly roll to a firm little ball, filled with my half-dragon baby.

  Yet another reason, I’ve got to get out of here, back to my own kind and a doctor who can cut this winged bowling ball out of me if the dragon king’s extended squat labor plan doesn’t work.

  “Nah, I’ve got this,” I answer. Yeah, it would be nice to rest a little more, but I can’t let him take away the few freedoms I have. So I push all sorts of easy breezy totally no prob down our mate bond as I tell him, “And it’s not like I’m cooking anything hard. Just eggs and sandwiches and stews.”

  My tone is reassuring, but his worry continues to resonate over our mate bond. “Would you…would you mind sleeping in my room with me tonight? I assure you, this is not an attempt to gain VIP access to your pants party. But as the pregnancy progresses, I find it harder to be apart from you at night. Everything in my drakkon being yearns to stay close to you. To protect you and watch over you, even when I sleep.”

  God, why does he always sound so sincere when he says stuff like that to me? My wolf rolls over inside of me, wanting to give in to the delusion that he’s a protective papa and I’m the center of his universe.

  But…

  It’s just a trick, I remind my wolf. I don’t know what his endgame is, but there’s no possible way he went from the asshole who humiliated and derided me to this anxious father-to-be overnight.

  “Why don’t you sleep in your own bed tonight,” I suggest. “Prove to me that you trust me like you want me to trust you.”

  A hesitation, then another downward dip of his head.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I say. And with that, I retire to my room, leaving him outside in the hallway.

  A few more days slip by. More biding time.

  Then one day while we’re watching
an Egyptian Kings documentary I realize it’s time. I’ve just gotten done listening intently to a story from Damianos about the Royal Geneticist’s Canis lupaster program. A lupaster is smaller than a wolf, bigger than a jackal, and apparently harder to manage than both. The program got out of hand so quickly, that he shuttered operations on the African continent, and rebooted with the much less clever European wolves. However, the ancestors of these lupasters went on to become some of Egypt’s most infamous kings and queens.

  “Okay, we definitely have to watch a Cleopatra documentary next,” I say, queuing one up as I come to my feet. Hopefully, the show will be enough to distract him from noticing that I’m—

  “Where are you going?” he asks inside my head before I can even finish that thought.

  “To the bathroom. Then to make some popcorn,” I answer as I scamper to the little bathroom located under the stairs.

  I take my time using the toilet. Maybe if I stay in here long enough, he’ll be so wrapped up in the doc, he won’t notice when I slip back through the living room and into the kitchen.

  But, of course not. He’s waiting in the kitchen for me when I enter. With a bag of microwave popcorn in his hands.

  “I’ve been ruminating…if you refuse to let me god speak a new servant, then you should teach me how to do the things you do as you will soon be too tired to honor me with your meals. First, you will teach me how to make this popcorn you like so much.”

  Normally it would be hard not to laugh at the way he says popcorn, like it’s a foreign word. But a memory hits me. The first time I’d laughed at one of his many, many alternate versions of history.

  He’d stilled mid-sentence.