“Because you both agree. On me.” She bit her lips and thought a moment. “What did he think when you were with all those other women?”
“We were passing the time. Who doesn’t want to feel some pleasure? And I had more opportunities than most.” Damian shrugged. “He’s a predator. We both were, I suppose. We enjoyed the chase. So, you could say he—we—appreciated those women in the way a wolf appreciates a rabbit. Without thought, out of habit.”
“And now?” Andi asked.
He looked past her, his eyes unfocused as he saw or spoke to something deep inside. “We like you wolf to wolf.” His eyes brightened again on her. “As much as you infuriate me sometimes, Andi, and as human as you are…there’s something fierce and sharp in you, princess.” He inhaled deeply, studying her. “You make me feel like a little boy playing with a pretty knife. I don’t even care if you cut me. The risk is worth the reward.”
She flushed again, only this time with shame. He was in too deep. Her going to see her uncle without telling him was definitely going to cut him. But she had to, no matter what it was they were to each other. How could she secure her future if she didn’t understand her past? And if she found out anything she could use to protect Damian….
She reached up and brushed a lock of hair off his forehead, before twisting to regain her former position at his side. “Thank you, I think.”
“It’s a compliment. Knives are sexy,” he said, pulling her close.
“Says the man who doesn’t cook,” she teased.
“I don’t use them in the kitchen.” He leaned over to kiss the crown of her head and tugged her blindfold down for her.
Chapter 10
Damian held onto her as she drifted off to sleep, intoxicated by her presence but utterly unable to sleep himself. His mind wouldn’t stop wandering, and his dragon didn’t help.
She is happy…yes? it asked him.
It seems so, Damian said, stroking one of his hands against her hip. He could feel his dragon trying to parse human emotions and struggling with concepts and words.
What is a boyfriend? Is it a mate?
No. Yes…well…it can be. Maybe. It’s closer than we were, in any case. His dragon made a frustrated sound and settled inside him in the particularly vigilant way it’d begun to when he was around her. Perhaps distant and unobtrusive, but always watching. You really do care about her, don’t you?
His dragon struggled again with the distance between their experiences. I wish to fly by her side.
But she can’t fly, Damian told it, bemused.
If we were in the Realms, I would take her flying, his dragon told him, one hundred percent sincerely.
Damian shook his head. The only person he’d ever given a ride to was his sister. Austin had sent him a message a few hours ago that Ryana was unchanged. It can’t happen. We’re never going back there, remember?
I know, his dragon agreed. Still. You have your dreams; I have mine.
It was one of the few times that Damian wished he could interact with his dragon outside of his body, instead of being a part of it. It would be nice to give the thing a head pat now and then when it wasn’t trying to impose its will on him or claw its way out of his mortal shell.
He arched his back, stretching a little, and looked around at Andi’s small room. It was just like her—tiny, chaotic, with splashes of vibrant colors and emotions. The red rug beneath the bed looked a bit like a bloodstain in the room’s dim light, and he wondered if that was intentional, considering her interest in violent TV. He scanned the book titles on her small bookshelf and didn’t recognize any of the authors—except for her Stephen King—but he knew what the covers promised from their fonts and colors: fantasy, romance, adventure. Even before she met him, she wished for someone like him, and he found that charming.
On her desk was a scattering of paperwork—a framed photo of her as a child with another child and a woman, brother and mother, presumably—and the photo album her brother’d given her this morning, which he’d brought back through the mirror for her. He wondered if she’d ever look at it.
He wondered if she’d mind if he did.
He scooped her to himself tightly, thinking. He wanted to know everything about her. It felt like a moral imperative to discover who she’d spent her whole life being, now that he was so certain of their future. Once she began breathing softly, just this side of a light snore, curiosity got the best of him. He kissed her dark hair again and extricated himself gently so that he could reach the album and return with it.
She stirred in his absence, and he liked that—the moment of her running her hand across the sheet searching for him in her sleep almost meant more to him than her calling him boyfriend. One was a decision she’d made, but her reaching out over the space he’d just been was instinctual.
“Shh,” he whispered, sliding himself back into bed carefully so that she could find him. A smile flitted across her lips, and she relaxed again.
He bent his knee beneath the sheets and propped the album up against it. Now that he was back, Andi turned to curl opposite him, tucking her back and bottom against his side, freeing his hands. He slowly opened the album, listening to it crack arthritically as though no one had opened it in years, and chunks of pages at the front were stuck together, so he started with the ones in the back.
The sepia-toned woman on the tombstone he’d seen in the cemetery was now here in color. Smiling, in a swimsuit, spraying a hose over two kids running back and forth outside—Andi and Danny—so full of life in the photo, he could almost hear their laughter. Other photos included Andi as a child with cake all over her face, she and her brother dressed up for Halloween. Andi was a princess—a fact that now he knew he would never let her live down—while her brother was some sort of Army man. School graduations, portraits taken professionally, Andi playing tennis, her brother standing proudly beside of what Damian assumed was his first legally-obtained car.
He grinned at the album, certain he’d made the right call. He just wondered where Andi’s father was. After he’d left, had their mother snipped all his photos out? He knew what his own angry father looked like. Even after he’d died, their palace had had seemingly infinite painted portraits of the man. He went for the clump of pages up at the front of the album, caught his fingernails on their edge, tugged, and pulled.
The cellophane there protested opening, crinkling softly, all the while Damian monitored Andi for signs of waking up, but when she didn’t, he felt empowered, looking at images that no one had seen for years.
Andi’s mother, staring challengingly into the camera, sometime in the seventies, before Andi and Danny were born. He could tell it was her from her face. It was the same as the one on the tombstone in the cemetery, with the same steady gaze and well-placed birthmark. And he could tell it was the seventies because of the décor of the room around her and the clothing that she wore, but she looked no younger than she’d been when she’d been spraying the hose. Damian risked crinkling open another page, hopping further back, wondering if he’d find Andi’s grandparents, but no, just another portrait of Andi’s mother—same bold gaze, same birthmark location.
But…this photograph’s background was the fifties. The collar of her dress, the apparent diner she was in, and the car he could see parked outside through the window behind her. If it hadn’t actually been taken in the fifties, someone had put a lot of effort into mimicry. He frowned and moved several pages back—into the twenties. Black and white photos, tinted brown by time, all featuring Andi’s mother. She looked like she was on safari. There was a downed rhino behind her, men already working at flaying the hide from the meat. She had a rifle slung casually over her shoulder as she gave the camera the same defiant stare he’d so often seen from Andi.
He flipped back. The same woman, in regalia he couldn’t place with an ornate headdress. She had a fan in one hand, and her other hand rested on an elephant’s skull with ornate claw-pointed jewelry on two fingers. He moved through the rest of
the pages quickly.
It was always the same woman.
The exact same woman.
From the hair to the expression to the birthmark. Sometimes dressed in Western clothing, other times in what he assumed was Asian, looking directly at the camera, proud of the things that surrounded her—which were almost always skulls. The photo album in his lap contained a century and a half of photos, all of Andi’s mother.
Is it possible? his dragon asked although they both knew.
Yes. Damian closed the album slowly.
Andi’s mother had been some flavor of immortal, with additional lifetimes purchased by being a Hunter, in all senses of the word.
His own dragon seethed inside him, confused, chasing itself around in an imitation of his own thoughts. How could the woman he was mated to—the woman he loved—be the offspring of someone so…so hideous?
Clearly, Andi didn’t know…did she? No. There was no way his kind and gentle Andi could’ve had any idea. Her upset stomach at the mere thought of it earlier tonight proved it.
But her brother had known. He’d chosen to take part in their family heritage, and somehow, because of his lineage, and willingness to sacrifice, right down to his own skin, he’d become a dragon.
A dragon. Someone like him, somehow…only, on the Hunter’s side.
Damian tensed at the thought, his own dragon preparing for war, and Andi stirred beside him.
* * *
Andi felt Damian pull away from her in the dark and leave the bed. She supposed he was allowed to go to the bathroom, as long as he came back. She reached out to feel the space he’d left and then felt him return, shushing her fears as he crawled back in alongside her. She heard the sound of a book’s spine crinkle and had to hide a grin. She’d always low-key dreamed of sleeping next to someone reading in her bed, and here it was, finally happening.
Then she felt him stiffen beside her. She pushed herself up on one arm and wiped the blindfold up. “Damian? What’s wrong?”
She could see his brooding expression from the dim light coming from her bathroom. “I need to show you something,” he said, sounding grave.
Andi scrambled to push herself to sitting, suddenly awake. “What?” She reached over to pull her nightstand light’s chain, and then focused slowly on what he was holding. The photo album Danny had given her—the one she’d asked him not to touch.
“Damian,” she said with a frown, already feeling disappointed.
“I looked,” he told her.
“You mean you did literally the one thing I asked you not to?”
Now, he was frowning, too. “Yes. I apologize. But that doesn’t change facts.”
“What facts, Damian? That my whole family’s a disappointment to me? Or…I guess that I am to them?” She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and sighed.
“No, Andi, you need to see this,” he said, tilting a page of the album her way.
She leaned forward with a sigh and saw her mother looking like an Asian Katharine Hepburn in Ye Olden Times safari gear. “So?” Andi protested as the rest of the photo came into focus for her sleep dulled mind, and she spotted the dead rhino in the background. “Oh, God…why would you show me that?”
“That’s your mother, yes?” Damian pressed.
Andi forced herself to look at the image again. “It looks like her,” she said, unwilling to be certain aloud—even though in her gut, she knew she was.
“This whole album, Andi…it’s of her.”
“Well, it’s a photo album; that’s what they’re for,” Andi said, sinking in on herself quietly.
“No…I mean…look at the difference between this picture and the next.” He flipped back and forth between one old black-and-white portrait and the next.
“They’ve been made to look old.”
“No. It is old. And this one too. And then there’re all these,” he said, quickly going from page to page like he was holding a flipbook, showing pictures of her beloved mother, over decades of time, almost always with skulls.
Andi put her hand to her mouth. “What is it that you want me to say?”
“Nothing, I guess. I just thought you should know.”
“So, you’re just showing them to me to hurt me?” She heard her voice rise and then lowered it for Sammy’s sake. “Why did you look? I told you not to!”
Damian’s brow furrowed. “Me looking doesn’t change facts, Andi.”
“No, but it was the one thing I wanted. The one thing!” Andi whispered harshly and then realized this was her only legitimate chance to push him back. “You’ve been my boyfriend for like, what, an hour and a half, and this is what you do?”
“Andi,” he said, his voice low.
“No. I think you should leave, Damian.” After looking at the photos, she needed answers more than ever, and she wasn’t going to get any with him around. He reached to hold her, and she put an arm out to stop him. “I mean it.”
He visibly held himself back. “What? Why?”
“Because,” she said, sniffing back tears, trying not to cry. The tears were real, even if her reasoning was not. “Shit like this, Damian. It’s why I said we should go slow.”
“But you said earlier—”
“Yes, and I was wrong.” Andi closed the album and set it down beside her, folding in on herself.
“Andi,” Damian said, his voice soft. She could tell it was hurting him not to reach for her, and that hurt her too, goddamnit.
“I mean it, Damian. This is all too fast…I need to be alone for a little bit.”
She watched his jaw clench before he asked her, “How long?”
“I don’t know.” She wasn’t going to meet her uncle until two nights from now. She’d have to stay away from him for at least that long, so she apparently wouldn’t reek of dragon. “Just…until my head clears. Two or three days. So I can make sure I’m my own person again.” She raised her chin to look at him. “When I’m with you, I just get swept up and dragged along in your wake.” That part wasn’t a lie. Being with him felt like she was always on the verge of getting pulled out to sea. “I don’t want you to go away, Damian, and I still want there to be an us, but I need a little space. It’s not your fault, even! It’s just who you are. I’m not used to this,” she said, looking around at her brand-new sheets, and the tea things that they’d set across her chair to go to sleep, and him, taking up most of her bed even though she was sure he didn’t mean to. “I’m not even used to having a man here, much less a dragon.”
His golden eyes kept searching hers as he frowned. “Last night you wanted me to promise that I’d never leave you.”
“Was that really just last night?” she asked, her question genuine. It felt like a lifetime ago now, and she shook her head. Everything was moving too quickly. She was messing things up, and she didn’t know what to do. She was trapped between her need to really, truly know who her family even was and how and why they’d lied to her, her need to somehow glean information from her relationship to her very dangerous uncle to help keep her man safe, and trying not to break the pride of that said man—who thought he loved her after two short weeks. There was no way to win. Especially not when being around Damian made her feel like she might be able to love him, too. Andi made herself even smaller on the bed, like that could help her avoid the truth. “I don’t know what to tell you, Damian. Maybe this is some fucked-up test, and maybe I’m an asshole. I just know that when I’m with you, sometimes I want to be yours so bad it scares me. I’m not used to this, okay? I don’t feel like this. Ever.”
He crowded her. “You don’t have to be scared of it, Andi—”
“Please don’t tell me how to feel. Not right now,” she cut him off. “Can you just trust me for forty-eight hours? That I’m not leaving you or going anywhere…that I just need to breathe?”
Damian rocked back and ran his hands through his hair, swallowing. “Probably.”
“And can you honestly stay away from me for forty-eight hours without following me o
r sending people after me or peeking at me through any mirrors?”
He snorted. “Yes, princess.”
“Are you going to hate me after forty-eight hours of waiting?”
“I could never. But I won’t deny that the thought of two days without you hurts.”
“It shouldn’t,” she said, knowing that it was a lie because it would hurt her too.
“But it will. Andi,” he began, and then swallowed whatever else he was going to say, shaking his head. “How will I know if you’re all right?”
“It’s really me who should be worried about you instead, I think.” She pulled the sheets up to her neck, hiding in them. “You can text me.”
He groaned. “If I can text you, then what’s the point?”
“The point is to find out if you can follow instructions,” she snapped. “Jesus Christ, Damian, I’m asking you to do one thing. You want to tie me up and own me. I’m just asking for two fucking days for myself. Where you don’t come through my mirror without asking or go through any of my things.”
He inhaled sharply, clearly ready to unleash a retort, and then restrained himself. She watched his expression go blank, falling into the cruel kind of calm she didn’t want to ever get used to, and a small part of her was panicking, thrashing, worried that this was the beginning of the end, and once again, Andi Ngo was fucking everything up. But either their relationship was real, or it wasn’t. If it was, it’d somehow manage to withstand her bullshit, and if it wasn’t, then she might as well fucking know now. So, she steeled herself to give him the same unforgivingly blank look back and said, “Please, go.”
“As you wish,” he said, getting up out of her bed to pull on his clothes. When he was done, he turned back toward her, and his icy façade had slipped. He looked haunted now and hurt, and her heart missed the smile he’d had with her all evening. “Am I allowed to kiss you before I go?”
Andi bit her lips. She knew if she kissed him, her resolve would break, and everything would be over. “I think that would be unsatisfying for us both, Damian,” she said, which made him look even more wounded somehow, beyond what he could hide from her.
Dragon Fated: A Billionaire Dragon Shifter Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds) Page 17
