The woman stopped and whirled on her. “My name is Stella…and you’re fucking insane. People think I’m crazy? Compared to you, I’m Mr. Rogers.”
Somehow, getting roughhoused hadn’t done a thing to budge the woman’s makeup—Andi could clearly see Stella’s perfect cat-eye eyeliner by the streetlights. “Answer my other questions,” Andi demanded.
Stella inhaled and exhaled deeply as they kept walking together just slower than a jog. “I’ve been tracking them—your uncle’s group back there, including the asshole Australians who captured me—for revenge reasons, for a while now. I knew they were interested in you, but I didn’t know why.”
“Was he right?” Andi asked her. She couldn’t fully claim why she wanted to know, but she needed to hear it from this woman’s mouth. “Did you kill his friends?”
“Yes, but, he slaughtered most of my family. So I guess you could say he started it, but who the fuck knows. The ladder down into the cesspool is pretty fucking long.”
“Are you going to turn around and try to kill him?”
“Your uncle?” Stella asked, her voice rising. “Yeah. Lady, thanks, but I don’t owe you…. And if I meet your uncle in a dark alley, only one of us is coming out alive. If that makes you want to spit me back—”
Andi waved her hands. “No…just don’t tell me anymore.”
“I don’t know what world you live in where everything’s safe and shit, but that place is not here.” Stella’s eyes narrowed on hers. “But you do know Damian, don’t you.”
“If you tell them he’s a dragon,” Andi warned, feeling a wave of proprietary protectiveness. “Do you work for him?”
“No…but don’t worry. I would never sell out one of my own. Especially not someone who could pick me up and throw me to the moon,” Stella snorted.
Andi relaxed, fractionally. “All right, then. The less we know about each other, the better, I think.”
“Agreed,” Stella said, then paused. “You know it doesn’t stop with tonight, right?”
Andi rocked up onto her toes and then back again. “What do you mean?” she asked, even though she was afraid she could guess.
“Those people back there…they’d do anything to get ahold of a dragon. There’s only so much your uncle, no matter how ‘esteemed’,” she said, clearly mocking Uncle Lee’s vocabulary, “can do.”
“How do you know?” Andi asked, hugging herself, trapped between wanting to know everything and wanting to run away and hide.
“Uh, other than him or people like him killing my brother? And being willing to eat me tonight?” Stella snapped her fingers aggressively in front of Andi’s face. “Get with the program.”
“I am!” Andi said defensively. “It’s just…hard.”
Stella pretended to weigh things, an imaginary object in each hand. “Yeah, I can guess it would be. My dead family, versus your alive and wanting to kill me family. Tough decisions,” she said, and then threw both her hands up to flip Andi off.
Andi took a step back. She knew Stella’s anger was righteous, but getting hit with it still burned. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t know.”
Stella looked her up and down and snorted. “I believe you.”
“Good, because—” Andi began.
“Because no one else could’ve sold them that naive line of bullshit that got me free if they’d had even an inkling of what the fuck had been happening all this time,” Stella cut in. “But I’m still not offering you absolution, lady. So, you did the right thing tonight, this one time. So fucking what? You want an award? You want me to clap for you? Where the fuck were you five years ago?”
Andi stood there and took the brunt of the other woman’s anger. “I…I’m sorry.” She felt foolish the second the words were out of her mouth.
Stella inhaled and it felt to Andi like she was going to yell a lot more, then she deflated. “Yeah. Me too.” The street they were on ended at a streetlight where it intersected another and Stella jerked her chin over Andi’s shoulder. “You go your way, and I’ll go mine.”
Andi nodded helplessly as the other woman turned around.
It was an extremely long way back to civilization and Andi didn’t even know what kind of state she was going to be in by midnight tonight, when she knew Damian would be waiting to talk to her, just like she’d promised him. She walked down four more long blocks of the “walk in the center of the street because cars are less scary than shadows” variety until she got to a bus stop with a run that was still working this late. She sat down inside it, still not feeling very safe, remembering the last time something like this had happened to her—when she’d been at the bus stop waiting for David—and how Damian had been there for her, trying to protect her. She couldn’t believe she’d tried to do something like this without him. But she also couldn’t believe she’d just saved Stella from being an appetizer buffet, either.
Or that, given the choice, her uncle would gladly turn Damian into a main course.
Andi wanted to put her head in her hands and cry until it all went away, but one of her hands was still bloodstained. Tears wouldn’t help, and it wouldn’t be safe to not be situationally aware. So she curled into a ball instead, hugging her knees to her chest, praying that the schedule on the bus stop wasn’t wrong.
It wasn’t. It just took forever. And then the bus almost drove by her without stopping, probably because she looked like a small black shadow since that’s the only color she was wearing. She felt infinitely relieved to be under the dim lights aboard, even if some of the other late-night passengers smelled of piss-on-their-shoes funk. She found a seat to herself and it stayed that way for three stops, her mind whirling fast enough to pull in two. Half of her was dying to see Damian. The other half knew that dying could be literal and she didn’t know what to do about that. She stumbled off the bus, looking like any other drunk aboard, heading straight for her apartment, but before she could go inside, a car she didn’t recognize drove up and stopped ahead of her. A stranger stepped out in driver’s livery, and he held up a sign like he was meeting someone at the airport. It said PRINCESS on it in all capital letters.
She walked over to him slowly, remembering the first time she’d met Damian, when he’d been pretending to be his own driver so he could meet her before he could trust her to care for Zach. Back when things had been simple and good.
Back when a relationship between a dragon and an unfortunately-well-connected-to-hunters-human had been easy.
“Are you Princess?” the man inquired. He was a hundred pounds too light to be Damian, plus two-to-six inches too small in all directions.
She gave the stranger a half-hearted smile. “Depends. Does Princess have a last name?”
The man checked his notes. “Doesn’t seem so.”
“Then yeah. You’re here for me,” Andi said. She beat him to the back door of his car and opened it for herself before pausing. “Hey, do you have any towels?”
Andi used one of the complimentary bottles of water to wash off her bloodstained hand as best she could with one of the blue car paper towels he’d offered her, well aware she was making a mess and not caring. Damian could definitely compensate this poor man for his upholstery. She glanced up to see where they were going and for a horrible moment she thought he might be taking her to work. They were definitely headed the right direction, but then the car drove past her hospital’s exit and headed to the center of the city, where Blackwood Industries’ skyscraper jostled others for position, winning out by the five floors that made it taller than the rest.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” she asked, looking out.
“Absolutely,” the man declared, weaving through streets as empty as the ones she’d just been walking on, until they reached the front of the glass-wrapped building that bore Damian’s last name.
Andi made to get out, then stopped. “So what now?”
The driver twisted. “I was told to give you this.” He handed her a gold key card.
Andi
groaned. This was fifty shades of bullshit. She didn’t want a magically romantic reconciliation—or whatever the hell else Damian had spent the last forty-eight hours planning.
She just wanted to see him. She needed to touch him again and have him touch her and have him tell her everything was going to be all right, even if it was a lie.
Andi took the card with a sigh, hopped out, and walked for the building’s front door, which the card unsurprisingly opened.
“You feel confident that you can follow them all at once?” Damian asked Jamison, his hand already on the door handle.
“Totally,” Jamison promised him. “It’s just fifteen bogeys. And if anyone tries to fly out tonight, I’ll hack the airport to stop them.”
“Think about it…if we can get them checking into fancy hotels, security cameras will log them and their people’s faces, and we can branch out from there,” Mills said breathily, already lusting over the potential data.
“So when I want to do this, I’m an asshole, but when you all want to do it…” Damian began.
“We’re at war, now. We get that,” Zach said.
“And we weren’t a few days ago?” Damian muttered.
“Go take your angst out on your girlfriend,” Austin said, reaching over Damian to open his door for him.
Damian got out of the SUV and shot his werewolf friend a dark look. “Ryana’s warned you. If you misbehave and she hurts you, I’ll have no choice but to take her side. She’s a lot more cunning than you’re ready for.”
“You truly know me, brother,” Ryana said, grinning wildly at him. “Go kill the human quickly and then come back.”
“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen,” Damian overheard Austin tell her as the door closed and Max pulled the SUV away with a wave.
Damian faced the empty street alone, prepared to run after Andi. She and Stella had turned the corner, and it would’ve been an easy enough thing to follow them. He was upwind, there was no way that Stella could scent him. And it would’ve been even easier to catch up to them like he wanted to, grab Andi, shake her and ask her, what the fuck? He made to do just that, then caught himself.
She told you herself the streets are not safe for her! His dragon’s concern surged inside him, intimately worried about Andi’s well-being. Andi had said as much to him the other night, and his dragon had been listening. How ironic that his cold-blooded half was apparently doing all the feeling for both of them right now.
But technically, nothing was safe—not the buses she used for transportation or the job that she had or actually, come to think of it, her personally. She’d chosen to do this alone, without him. Was it traitorous? Yes. Could she possibly be in danger right now? Also yes.
Go after her! his dragon pressed him, unwavering in its commitment, and everything in his being wanted to go with it.
But his mind knew better.
Whatever had happened tonight, this was what she’d wanted and how she’d wanted it, too. Solo, without him. Andi had known the risks. And somehow, she’d navigated a room full of Hunters so that both she and Stella had survived. She was nothing short of magnificent.
She’d also somehow lied to him easily, apparently without compunction, for days, and he was right to be hurt by that. It was a betrayal. But the reason it stung wasn’t just that she’d been a liar. No, it hurt more than that because he knew she was his mate.
He knew they didn’t have to face challenges alone anymore, so why would she do something like this without him?
Couldn’t she feel it too?
He prepared to blow up about it again when he remembered an inconvenient fact…that he’d never, ever, told her. And as she was human, she didn’t know.
Maybe Ryana was right. Maybe he was repeating his father’s mistakes, by being mated with a human. But now that it had happened, what choice did he have? It was his destiny to be with her.
Even if she was a liar.
Even if he’d been lying to her, too, all along.
He stood there, incandescently angry, both at her and himself. His emotions ground inside of him like rough stones, chipping away at one another, as he hauled out his phone to summon an Uber, and came up with a plan.
Damian was in the skyscraper named after him so infrequently that he forgot that he owned it sometimes. But there was a penthouse floor that well-paid maids kept up for him and Zach, despite neither of them hardly ever using it. He let himself in and took a cold, fast shower, trying to calm himself to think. After that, he discovered that the closet only had suits inside. He dressed himself in one, carefully removing the necklace he’d created for Andi from one pocket and putting it in the next, then took the elevator up to the helipad.
His mood was as dark as the clouds overhead when the elevator opened up. Andi had lied to him. Outright. If she could do that, what end to it was there? There’d been gaps in the conversation they’d overheard. Had she sold him out? Had she considered it, even briefly? Her uncle was offering her eternal life. Eternal beauty. He couldn’t imagine those things mattering to Andi, but what human wouldn’t be tempted?
Especially when it was him against her entire family. Her brother, her uncle, her mother, and a lineage that went back for centuries. Could he blame her if she ran to them instead? Even if it broke him?
What haunted him the most, though, was what her uncle’d said. He’d asked her what she knew of the beast inside of him. He hadn’t heard her answer, but he knew the truth—not much. She’d asked questions of his dragon through him, but her uncle wasn’t wrong. His dragon wasn’t him. And with the Heart of the Dragon on earth now—thanks to his sister—and with his curse of eventually becoming his dragon clearly back in play, Damian stood at the edge of the roof looking out at the city below, his hands tight on the railing.
He knew they were meant to be together. It wasn’t something he could verbally express, so much as it was something he felt, all the time, in his soul. Their destiny was an immutable, physical thing, as real for him as the sun in the daytime or the moon and stars at night.
But…she didn’t really know him.
Not all of him.
And if he was going to tell her that they were mates, he had to be honest with her from here on out. Never any secrets again. No matter how much it scared him, and even if she’d cut him, first.
He kicked off his shoes quickly, unbuttoned his shirt to take it off, and stripped off his pants, folding them carefully on top, knowing the precious jewelry his pocket still held. Inside him, his dragon watched, bewildered.
What are you doing?
What I probably should’ve done a long time ago. He dropped the control internally, setting his dragon free, but it didn’t rise to possess him. What? he demanded of it.
This makes no sense.
It doesn’t have to, Damian thought at it, willing himself to relax. I shouldn’t have to hide you…not now that we want the same thing.
But…each time we do, my time grows closer…and with the Heart near—
I would rather risk losing myself to you than her thinking she doesn’t know all of me. That she can’t trust all of me. And I include you. Whether I like it or not.
He stood naked on the tallest building in the city, and once more, he let go.
His dragon hesitated and then emerged, in a liquid-feeling rush, like Damian had jumped into a hot spring. Once again he was suspended in the nothingness inside the beast. Only this time, it didn’t hurt.
He’d taken the pain of being trapped inside his dragon for granted for so long now, almost all of his life, that he never thought to mention it anymore. It was just part and parcel of losing control, of letting the dragon make his humanity disappear, the equal and opposite sensation to his dragon’s “chains.” But now…. Damian tried to push his hands out, searching for the walls his dragon so often built around him, he found nothing but a welcoming, enveloping warmth.
Was that a good thing? Or was this what it would be like when his time had come? He couldn’t wonder for any longe
r. The elevator doors were opening.
“I am not going on a helicopter,” Andi began sternly, then at seeing the dragon, finished much more quietly, “ride.”
Damian was his dragon now.
She hadn’t seen it since it’d rescued her from the demon thing by his fountain weeks ago. Ever since then her brain had tried to trick her, whittling what she thought she’d seen down from a mind-breaking experience into a cheesy carnival freak show, convincing herself that instead of a shiny sixty-foot dragon she’d seen a sack full of boa constrictors all tied together and spray-painted gold.
But now, here it was, sitting on all fours like a sphinx, wings folded tight so as not to catch the cold night air—or more likely not to scare her.
Too late.
She gave it a low wave, before holding herself against the chill. “Hi.”
The creature’s massive head tilted in acknowledgement in return. All of its teeth were the length of her arm. She could’ve fit her entire head inside of one of its nostrils.
But the eyes…the eyes were still familiar. The same color as Damian’s. Dark gold like the last flash of sun at sunset. She felt stricken by his presence, and it wasn’t so much the dragon anymore, as it was being with him again. She put a hand over her mouth. Two days without him had been a long time.
She walked toward him and then she spotted a gouge on his chest, like a dent on a golden breastplate. She’d seen green blood in the photo he’d sent her. Was that why? It hadn’t been there when she’d last seen his dragon, she was sure. She finished the distance between them at a jog. “What hurt you?”
The dragon ducked its head down to meet her, eyes nearly going crossed to look at her, as he gently nudged her away. She danced back, not letting it touch her, though she was close enough to feel the heat of its breath.
Dragon Mated: Sexy Urban Fantasy Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds Book 4) Page 3
