“Intimately concerned with you not being foolish, princess,” he corrected her.
Her eyes narrowed. “There’s a fine line between overprotective and infantilizing, dragon, and you’re riding it.”
He made a wordless sound of frustration, put the car in drive, and yanked it back on the road.
* * *
Damian pulled the car to a stop just inside the Briar’s gates, completely unsure what to do. Everything in him told him that he needed to stop her, to protect her at all costs, her opinion of him be damned, but then he realized that it was a slippery slope from there to what had happened to his mother. Sure, he could use the Forgetting Fire on Andi and wipe even the idea of this from her mind, but who would she be without her fierce though foolish passion and seemingly endless strength?
“I still hate this,” he muttered, but he hit the button that opened her door for her.
Andi turned toward him, lit by the dashboard lights. “I will be as safe as I possibly can, I promise.”
“I don’t believe you, but apparently you don’t care,” he said. She looked wounded, and he realized he didn’t even begin to want those to be his last words to her. “I…take that back,” he said, swallowing down all the bile in his throat at the thought of losing her. “I do believe you.” He inhaled deeply. “I just need you to try your hardest.”
“I will,” she said hesitating.
And then what now? Kiss her like he might never see her again? If he touched her, there was no possible way he would ever let her go. He faced the steering column, holding it tight. “Good luck on your mission.”
She waited, seemingly for something else, and then when he didn’t give it, she leaned forward and brushed his cheek with a kiss before getting out. He watched her walk to the bus stop, cradling a hand to his cheek as if her kiss were a living thing that he could keep there.
If anything happens to her, his dragon began, then didn’t finish; it just assaulted him with images of pain, destruction, and death. If someone hurt her, then the dragon would take out all of its rage on the city—the world, in turn—take out every moment of pain it’d ever had at being trapped in human form, revenge for every day Damian had kept it from the sky.
Yes, Damian agreed as the bus arrived, and Andi got on board. Because without Andi in his life, absolutely nothing else mattered. He wouldn’t be able to—wouldn’t want to—stop his dragon. Jamison would have to shoot him down; it would be their end, no doubt. If anything happens to her, he told it, I will let you.
He watched the bus pull away and whipped his car around, driving back up to his castle at top speed.
“I’ve got her,” Jamison announced the second he’d parked his car. Everyone else was already loaded up, and Damian took a seat in the back, between Max and Zach, most likely so that if they heard anything dangerous, they could stop him from throwing himself out the door. Jamison and Mills were in the front, and Austin was still on nurse duty.
Mills was driving, so from his spot, he could see the computer perched on Jamison’s lap, with its not-comforting-enough beacon on Andi, and his thoughts were interrupted by the squealing sound of brakes and the warning chime that preceded a bus’s stop.
“It’s one-way only,” Jamison said. “Although she knows that we can hear her.”
“Can I sit there?” someone asked her, and his stomach lurched. What if it was a Hunter closing in?
“Of course!” Andi said too brightly, and Damian felt entirely hamstrung, just listening for any sounds of danger.
“She’s going to be okay, Damian,” Zach said.
“For at least the first fifteen minutes here anyways,” Mills added. “That’s the length of the bus ride.”
“Not helping,” Damian muttered aloud and folded in on himself.
They made it to their destination just before the bus did as planned, pulling in to parallel park far enough away to not be seen, but close enough to be able to use binoculars to see Andi’s apartment’s entire parking lot. As Andi walked off of the bus, a tall blonde woman got out of a waiting car and strode over to her. The woman definitely looked like an Elsa, and he momentarily wished that Andi hadn’t told them about the claw she wore on a leather thong around her neck.
“Running plates,” Jamison announced. “Leased to Bright Star Corporation again…same goddamned wall.”
“Andrea,” the blonde must’ve announced because no one else would’ve used Andi’s full name for her.
“Elsa. Again,” Andi said, crossing her arms and sounding perturbed. “What the hell are you doing here? Sammy said you’d been here all day.”
“Waiting for you, obviously.” The blonde’s voice was husky, and Damian wondered when the last time she’d eaten any meat/drank any blood.
“Why?” Andi asked.
“Your uncle would like to talk to you.”
“I bet he would,” Andi said, with just the right amount of snark. It wouldn’t do for her to seem too eager, as they’d priorly discussed. “What makes him think I want to talk to him?”
“She’s good,” murmured Max.
“Agreed,” said Mills.
Elsa took an inhale deep enough to come through over the wire and then sounded like she was talking through gritted teeth. “He would like the chance to talk to you. In person.”
“So, why are you here and not him?” Andi asked her sharply.
“That was not part of the plan,” Damian growled.
Mills looked back at him. “Her pain’s genuine. Let it flow.”
“Your uncle is a very important man,” the strange woman went on.
“Yeah, fuck that,” Andi said, and Damian winced as she went on, worried for her. “My whole life, I’ve been hearing about how Uncle Lee’s sooooo important, but he’s also a fucking liar. So, fuck him and go fuck yourself too.” Damian watched Andi turn on her heel and walk toward her apartment with purpose.
Zach made a thoughtful sound. “Is she blowing this?”
Damian grunted. “I’m not getting my hopes up.”
They heard the sound of heels trotting on concrete through the wire as the woman ran after her. “He wants to apologize to you. For keeping you in the dark all these years. He never meant to hurt you, Andrea, and frankly, all of this would sound better coming from him, not me. I never apologize.”
Andi stopped three stairs up to make a rueful sound. “I believe you. You’re shit at this.”
The woman sighed again. “So, let him talk to you. Indulge an old man.”
“A man who kidnapped my brother, let me think he might be dead, and then somehow turned him into a dragon?”
“One and the same,” she said.
Andi put her hands over her face and rubbed her temples. “I can’t believe I’m even beginning to consider this.”
“You want answers, don’t you? If nothing else?” the woman pressed.
Andi waited for what seemed like a long time even to Damian and then exhaled in a rush. “Yes. Fine. Fuck.”
The woman chuckled, and walked back toward her car, opening up the rear door. “Get in.”
Damian’s stomach twisted in knots as Andi rode quietly in the back of the woman’s car. Jamison endlessly triangulated possible destinations, laying odds on them with Mills, but Andi’s signal was the only sign of life he had from her. He belatedly realized the trackers weren’t attuned to her health. What if she was already dead inside the car they followed? If Hunters had jumped her with chloroform and knives the instant she’d gotten in? Surely, if that’d happened, he would’ve felt it somehow, through their inexplicable yet growing bond, but…. His muscles bunched, turning rock hard, as the dragon inside him readied to fight.
“Damian, don’t,” Max warned, bringing him down.
He regathered control of himself. He and his dragon had been so likeminded, he hadn’t even realized he’d been losing it, and he nodded at the other man. “For now.”
“They’re at the ports,” Jamison said, as Mills slowed the tour bus down to take a turn. His electro
nics put in a code that allowed them access not long after Andi’s car had passed, but they had to fall even farther back—there were no other active cars here and even fewer places to hide. Mills hit the button to take the SUV into electric mode so it could coast silently and traced their way to the water’s edge where the car that had held Andi was tightly parked in between two shipping containers, with no way to see the other side of any of them.
Damian’s dragon growled low at the same time as Damian announced, “Fuck this.” He tore his seat belt and lunged over Zach before the werewolf could react, throwing himself out of the moving vehicle to run for the water’s edge. He jumped for the edge of a shipping container, caught the top of it easily, and hauled himself up to see what was happening to Andi on the other side…just in time to see her at the end of a pier, getting into a boat.
He grabbed hold of the metal beneath him, ready to tear it off and take it into the sky with him as he shifted, gasping out the word, “Boat,” first for his earpiece, so the others would understand, and then, Max and Zach were there tackling him.
He shouted in incoherent rage and shoved them off, standing now to watch the boat as it raced away.
Chase after her! his dragon roared, surging inside of him.
“Jamison still has her!” Zach shouted while Max took the more direct route of punching him across his jaw. Damian’s head snapped with the impact of the bear-shifter’s hit, and he instinctively wheeled on the man.
Max fell to an obedient knee. “Control yourself, prince.”
Damian panted, hands clenching into fists at his side. “Where is she?” he growled.
“I’ll be able to tell you in a second here,” Jamison said from where the SUV was parked below. Damian flung himself down to the ground beside it, as Jamison opened up a box and said, “Fly, my pretties!” Half a dozen drones the size of dinner plates swarmed out, soaring into the air and heading the direction Andi’d gone. Once they were aloft, Jamison glanced at Damian with that half-trance look in his eye he sometimes got when he was communing with his tech. “I can’t keep an eye on them and be thinking about shooting you, too, so, behave.”
Damian growled again, and then Mills was there, taking his hand in hers. He looked to her and knew she couldn’t tell him any bullshit like that ‘it was going to be all right.’ Instead, she told him the truth. “She’s smart, and she’s tough.”
Damian inhaled deeply, regaining himself, despite his tormented dragon’s howls, pushing the beast back. “Where are they going, Jamison? And why isn’t she talking?” He tried not to sound panicked about that—and failed.
Then as one, they all heard the tracking devices on her check-in, as a man’s voice said, “Andrea!” at top volume.
Chapter 7
Andi had not been expecting the boat—more of a small yacht, really—but she could hardly back out now, plus surely Damian’s people would think of some contingency. And she’d meant what she’d said earlier to Elsa. She did want answers, and it seemed like her uncle was the only one who had them. So, she followed Elsa to a nicely appointed room below deck, with a desk and a bed. She knew it was her uncle’s because of two things: it smelled like his pipe smoke, and it had another elephant foot trash can by his desk. She prayed to God that he only had four of them and that all of them were from the same elephant.
The trash can wasn’t the only thing that gave it away. There were other trinkets too: a jade pipe holder on his desk, with a matching ashtray. A sea turtle shell was mounted behind the desk’s chair, and above that was a framed strip of snakeskin, at least ten feet long, before it tapered on both ends.
Andi sat in front of the desk like she assumed she ought to, and shortly thereafter heard a familiar voice boom, “Andrea!”
Andi slowly turned. It was her uncle, the same as always. Short in stature, in a navy-blue silk smoking jacket, beard and mustache impeccably groomed, with a pipe in one hand. “Lee,” she said simply.
“Oh, so now I’m not even an uncle?” he teased as he rounded the room and sat down at the desk in front of her.
“I don’t know who you are, really.” Andi hunched down into herself. It was the truth. So much of her childhood had apparently been built on lies. “I just want to know what happened to Danny and how I can undo it.”
“Andrea…I don’t think that’s possible. Nor do I think that your brother wants to be ‘undone.’” He tapped the plug of his pipe out onto the ashtray on his desk and rummaged in a drawer before lifting out a pouch of Balkan pipe tobacco to send it scooping in. “What do you know of the true nature of the world, Andrea?”
Andi looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, how much do you know? Or rather, do you think you know?”
“I…don’t know. I know there’s science…and apparently, there’s magic. Or whatever the hell you did to Danny that I saw last night.” Just last night. It hadn’t even been that long ago. She bit her lips and wished she’d spent her time on the drive over trying to anticipate questions instead of just burning with righteous indignation. She’d foolishly assumed she’d be the one leading the charge. With a lifetime’s worth of experience dealing with her overbearing uncle, she should’ve known better.
“And just what were you there for?” Lee asked sharply. “At the club?”
“Trying to hunt down Danny like it’s my job because, for my entire life, it has been,” she said, crossing her arms. “His stupid friend Julian told his boss there I wanted to know things, and his boss invited me over. I thought I was helping you out…until I saw Danny and David fighting and realized things were fucked.”
Her uncle made a thoughtful noise. “I’m sorry you had to see that. And sorrier still that David tried to involve you. He always was a bit hotheaded. I don’t think Danny wanted to kill him, but after that, David gave him no choice. Dragons are nothing without their pride, you see.” He struck a match and held it to his pipe, sucking down the flame until he billowed smoke, and Andi coughed. “And Danny’s still discovering himself and his limits. Such a shame we lost the skin, though.”
Andi let her eyes rove over the room at all his trophies before speaking again. “Skin? Whose skin?”
Her uncle gave his pipe another contemplative pull. “Danny’s.”
“You…skinned him? You skinned my brother?” Her hands clenched onto the armrests of her chair till her knuckles went white.
“Only a little bit,” her uncle said, like that made it any better. “And it was freely offered. Don’t worry about him; now that he’s magical, it’ll regrow.”
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Andi muttered, as acid zinged across her tongue.
“Don’t. I mean, you can if you want, but there’s no need, Andrea. Danny knew exactly what he was getting into.”
“In and out of stolen cars. Back and forth to jail,” Andi said. Everyone knew that Danny was a troublemaker since day one. The boy that everyone wanted, who got tacit permission to fuck everything up. “So how long did you wait after my mother died to embroil him in your plans?”
Her uncle took a great inhale and carefully set his pipe down. “Andrea, dear…your mother helped.”
Andi didn’t hear whatever he said next. She could see his lips moving, but she only heard static in her ears, and the acid at the back of her tongue increased like she was chewing on foil. She grabbed hold of the edge of the desk to stay upright.
Uncle Lee finally stopped talking and looked concerned. “Andrea?” he asked.
“You…you’re lying,” she whispered hoarsely, as her stomach churned. “You’re wrong…and you’re lying.”
“Oh, my favorite niece, I am so, so sorry.” He reached out for her.
“Don’t touch me!” she shouted, and he pulled back in alarm. Childhood memories assaulted her. She suddenly remembered every mysterious and strange meal she’d had at his place for the Moon Cake Holiday as a child, all the things she didn’t want to eat…and all the things she’d gone ahead and eaten.
; How one time, when she was six or seven, he’d made them all a vat of soup to share, and when she’d asked what was in it, he’d said shark fin, along with shavings of unicorn liver. Everyone had laughed like it was some kind of joke, but she’d been in a horse phase and was worried he was serious.
“Did you really catch a unicorn, Uncle Lee?” she’d asked him with the kind of lisp kids had when they were missing teeth.
She remembered his response like it was yesterday, him with his beard trimmed in the exact same style, his crinkled eyes pleased with himself, and the same self-satisfied smile, as he laid his hand solemnly on her small shoulder: “Andrea, you can catch anything if you’re patient enough.”
Andi could feel her heartbeat everywhere in her body—in her stomach, in her face, in her throat.
“Andrea…I am sorry. This is not how we, your mother and I, had planned to tell you. But we both made that decision, and I suppose it is now my burden to bear.”
“I’m going to—” she warned him, just a second before she flew out of her chair and ran for the elephant foot trash can, wrapping her arms around it right before she threw up.
“Oh, my darling Andrea,” her uncle crooned sympathetically, moving to stand behind her.
Andi’s stomach lurched again, and she tried to tell herself that it was seasickness—the boat was still running full throttle, hull slapping the waves, although it did feel like it was slightly turning now—and not the knowledge that every single person who’d ever been in her life had betrayed her. She threw up again and again, down until there was only green bile left. She clutched her uncle’s heinous hunting trinket, hating herself for it, trying not to weep, as he moved about the room.
Her mother…knew. And kept it from her? It couldn’t possibly be true!
And yet—seeing as everyone else in her family had walked out on her—it made a certain amount of sick sense. Why not her mother too?
Andi pulled her hair back at her neck and tried to not let fresh tears squeeze from her eyes.
Dragon Fated: A Billionaire Dragon Shifter Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds) Page 13
