“What’s your price?” Andi asked. Damian looked to her and could see her pride flash across her face—hot and wild—her dark eyes brimming with tears.
“Andi, no,” Damian warned.
“Your price. Name it,” she said, stepping forward.
Rax appraised her, the corners of his mouth folding up into a wicked smile. “My darling, no matter how lovely your dress is, you can’t afford me.”
Damian prepared to swoop her away and leave, but as he turned to grab her, it was as if someone was pouring her a spine made of steel. He watched her stand straighter and savagely wipe her tears away with the back of one hand, before raising her chin to focus on Rax. “You were never going to help me, were you?” she accused him and looked around the room, unperturbed by the armed men surrounding them. “You don’t give a shit about my brother or Julian or anyone else who works for you. You just thought that maybe you could leverage me against him,” she said, glancing meaningfully at Damian, before staring Rax down again. “You just wanted to play a game.”
“Is that so?” Rax’s glittering eyes watched her, and Damian’s hands clenched of their own accord at seeing another dragon look at her like that.
“Of course, it is,” Andi scoffed. “You have to play games with people for true entertainment because all the ones you have here are rigged.”
What is she getting at? his dragon wondered quietly.
Damian kept his eyes on her. I can’t claim to know.
“Am I supposed to take some great offense to that and act rashly on it?” Rax’s brow lifted in bemusement.
“That depends,” Andi said.
“On?” Rax asked archly.
“On whether you want me to think that you’re a coward or not.”
At that, Rax laughed outright. “And why on earth should I care what you think?”
“You probably shouldn’t. But, all of your men are watching you taunt a girl half your size. Plus, Damian’s crew—and Damian,” she said with a simple shrug.
Rax glanced at him, and Damian saw something in him seethe. He braced himself to finally meet Rax’s dragon, as the other man returned his attention to Andi and steepled his fingers. “Please, do go on, this is the most ‘entertainment’ I’ve had all week.”
“I want you to play me a real game. You said you admired skill. I can show you some.”
His eyes narrowed mercenarily. “Can you now?”
She whirled and looked around at what was still standing, and Damian saw her spot a pool table in a protected alcove in the back. “Pool. If I win, you tell me everything for free.”
Rax considered her terms for a moment and then loomed. “And what happens if I win, little girl?” he asked. Damian felt his dragon lurch inside him, ready to tear Rax’s tongue out for being so familiar, as the other dragon chuckled and went on. “You still have nothing of value to trade me.”
Andi inhaled, but Damian knew that there was nothing she possessed that could entice Rax into playing. He stepped forward. “A slightly used but nicely maintained Pagani,” he said, swinging out the Pagani’s distinctive USB key in front of Rax.
Andi twisted to look at him, jaw dropped. “Damian, I’m not—”
“It’s okay, princess,” he told her quietly, his eyes flickering to Rax, and then back at her again. “I trust you.”
She turned to look at Rax again, who looked at her and Damian, eyes narrowing. “Ahh. I see how things are,” he said slowly. “You sure you want to let her do this?”
“She’s not mine,” said Damian, looking at Andi. “She belongs to herself.”
Rax laughed delightedly and clapped his hands. “Done! I’ll rack.”
* * *
She was out of practice, and it’d been a long time since she’d played anyone for money—much less a two-million-dollar car—but if the only way this asshole was going to give her information about her brother was to win this game, then fuck him, she was going to win it.
Andi whirled her hair up into a practical bun and stepped over to the rack of cue sticks, pulling three of them out, weighing them in her hand, wishing she had the one in the case from under her bed.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d assume you knew what you’re doing,” Rax said, standing confidently beside the table.
“Why?” she asked him, full of sarcastically fake innocence. “I’m only picking the one that matches my outfit the best,” she said, blinking her eyes at him like a newborn kitten, wishing she had her fake glasses on.
Rax’s jaw clenched, perhaps beginning to have the vaguest suspicion that he was being played, and he glanced at Damian, but Damian didn’t see.
Because he was watching her. With the same quiet attention he always had, that when she realized it made her feel like she was going to spontaneously combust. He didn’t even look nervous, despite the fact that he’d fronted his car. He was just intently interested in everything about her, and he was waiting to see what she did next.
Andi tore her gaze away and fought down a flush. She couldn’t afford to be distracted now. This wasn’t about him or his car or his money. This was for Danny. Playing pool for it—for Danny—made sense. She screwed the chalk on the end of the cue, dusted her fingertips with the chalk on the wall, and faced the felt.
An entire childhood’s worth of memories swelled up in her as she broke the rack. The white cue ball hit the grouped balls hard, and they cracked as they sailed away—and the solid green six flew into the corner pocket.
“Solids it is,” Andi said, staring down the felt contemplatively, holding the cue stick beside herself like an Amazon’s spear. She focused on lining up her next shot, to pick the one that’d give her the shot after that, and the shot after that one. If you were truly playing pool, it was like playing chess, only with the addition of physical dexterity and a small amount of luck.
She’d never gambled with this much money before, but she knew all about playing with her pride on the line.
“Yellow one, side pocket,” she said.
“You realize you only have to announce the eight-ball?” Rax asked the second she made her shot. A cheap trick, trying to distract her. She faced him with a smile; she didn’t have to watch the ball to know it was going in.
“I hustled in the Ngo family basement for years before we ever went on the road. You think there’s a trick out there my brother didn’t try on me?” She rolled her eyes at him and turned back to the table. “Orange five, left side pocket. Besides, is it so bad if I want to flex a little?” she asked, stalking around the table to line up her next shot as the five teetered and then fell in.
“It’s tacky,” Rax complained, frowning.
She laughed. “Would you still say that if you were going to get your ass kicked in pool in front of everyone you know by a guy?” She leaned over the table, then paused, looking up at him. “No, what’s tacky is trying to charge someone who needs help. Oh, wait, no, that actually just makes you an asshole. Maroon seven, corner,” she said, pointing with the cue before sending it reeling in.
“You still have four balls to go,” Rax said, sounding threatening.
“Not for long. Red three, side,” she said, finishing the last of her easy shots. She surveyed the table, licked her lips, and heard Rax’s satisfied grunt that assumed she was in trouble now. She took a moment away from her calculations to glance at Damian, who was watching her wide-eyed with a mixture of pride and admiration on his face. She got the impression he wasn’t worried in the least about his car. Neither was she, now that she thought about it.
First off, because he could definitely afford another.
But secondly, because she wasn’t playing this for him.
All her childhood, she and her brother had played each other for months in the summer when it was too hot to go outside and months in the winter when the cold was just as bad. Always waiting for their dad to come back to play them and be proud of them, sharpening their skills against each other like knives.
As angry as Danny mad
e her, as much as she hated that she felt responsible for him now, as scary as whatever it was that she’d seen him become, he was still her only brother. Her only living family. And he was the only one who remembered, like she did, what it was like to feel like that, hoping that the next time the basement door opened it’d let in a rush of cigarette smoke and stale beer and the gruff voice of a man who’d say, “Give me that,” before taking the pool cue and pretending he was Jackie Chan with it, fighting a shadow, then kicking both their asses no matter how many times they’d practiced in the interim.
She needed not to be the only one who remembered.
Even if he wasn’t himself anymore.
“Blue two, side,” she said, lining the double bank shot up. The white ball careened against one wall, then the other, then sailed past the striped nine to sink the blue two in. The cue ball stopped just where she’d planned, at a place where she could pop it out and off the far side hard to knock the navy four in. “My four, corner,” she announced, lacing the stick through her fingers again. The cue ball hit the far felted wall with a solid smack and came rolling back to hit the navy four at speed, sending it plummeting into the corner she’d called.
“And now the eight ball. Side. Get ready to talk, asshole,” she announced and took her shot.
Chapter 18
Damian watched Andi line up her shot. The black ball was boxed in by two stripes, and she did some kind of underhanded ricochet on the white one so that all of its energy was transferred to the black ball that went in, without taking either of the striped ones down with it. If he hadn’t known that she couldn’t do magic, he would’ve assumed that she could.
Rax clearly couldn’t believe it either. He was pacing, just out of reach, looking stunned, and when she’d gotten the eight ball in, he outright gawked at her. She stood up when she was finished, setting the butt of her cue stick down on the ground with a thump.
“Beginner’s luck,” she told him.
“Hmm. Two out of three?” he offered.
Damian snorted, moving to stand by her side. “Deal’s a deal.” Behind them, he heard Mills clapping unreservedly, whistling too, and he fought not to crack a smile.
“Get everyone else out of here, and take the body,” Rax growled, waving his hands at all of his men who lined the walls. “Your people too. Just the three of us. Go.”
Damian hesitated, but then gestured to Austin, and his crew trailed Rax’s men out the door.
* * *
Andi righted a chair in the center of the room and sat in it defiantly.
“Fine,” Rax said, the second the three of them were alone. He turned to Damian first. “You knew Hunter activity in the area was increasing, and you know what they are and what they do.”
“They’re a bunch of humans wearing trinkets,” Damian said. He’d moved to retrace the path that he’d fought with his feet. “They’re cunning and numerous, but they’re not like us,” he said with emphasis.
“No, but that’s what they’re becoming, Damian,” Rax said, over her head. “That’s where all this has been leading—for centuries—all this time. They’ve been taking our bones, wearing our skins, even eating us!” He threw his hands up in the air in disgust. “I’ve been watching the humans for a lot longer than you have.”
“Which is why you’ve been giving them objects of power?” Damian accused him while waving the bundle of dragon skin he held in Rax’s face. “And making an already bad problem worse?”
Rax pulled himself up to his full height. “I had my business interests to protect. Besides, they don’t know about me,” he hissed, with an odd inflection on the word. Andi’s lips parted, looking at Rax and Damian side by side. They weren’t all that alike…except for how they were. Their eyes. Rax was definitely a dragon, too. Damian was a dragon in a castle, Rax was a dragon in a casino-cave full of gold.
Of course.
“Oh, so as long as they’re not hurting you personally, it’s been fine to help arm them to do that?” Damian went on, flinging his arms out at where the green-stained corpse had been.
“Stop fighting already!” Andi shouted, and they stopped to look at her. “I want to know about my brother,” she demanded. “I won my game.”
Rax inhaled deeply and refocused on her. “Your brother was kidnapped roughly three weeks ago by the Hunters. I saw it on my security cameras.”
“And you didn’t tell anyone?” she asked sharply.
“A lot of my men here have ‘personal problems’ outside of here, shall we say. It didn’t occur to me to get involved. And you knew Danny…you knew he was always just this close to breaking the law.” He pinched his fingers in front of her to illustrate just how bad off Danny was.
“Still, though,” Andi whispered.
“How did you know it was Hunters who got him?” Damian asked.
“Well, it’d have to be, for one. A biker gang didn’t nab him and turn him into that,” Rax said, jerking a thumb at where he and David had fought.
Andi bit her lips and swallowed. “Hunters?” she asked slowly, tasting the possible betrayal in the word, feeling horrified parts of her begin to shut down.
Damian seemed to sense her change and returned to her side instantly, eyeing her with concern. She watched him move to put his arms around her, then hold himself back. “Like the men who were after Julian in the hospital,” he explained. “They’re humans who chase down Unearthly creatures—or distantly related ones—and try to use their essence for magic.”
“But…like…actual hunters, you say?” She needed to hear one of them say the words.
Hunters…just like her uncle.
Damian nodded, still watching her reactions closely. “Yes. Like poachers who kill rhinos for their horns. Only because of their magic, it actually works.” He twisted to look at Rax. “So, they kidnapped him to, what, torture? Experiment on? And who the fuck was that other man?”
“That was David,” she said softly. “He told me he works in biotech, but now I don’t know what to believe.”
Rax grunted. “David Argento. Rolled into town three months ago and started threatening my livelihood with his people. The only reason the Hunters haven’t hit here yet is because I’ve been giving him magical objects from the Realms.”
“So, whose skin was that on David?” Andi started wringing the silk of her skirt, one hand to each thigh, nervously glancing at the thing Damian held. “If you two both have yours?” Was it some pelt that her uncle had picked up half a century ago and five thousand miles away? “And where did Danny’s come from?”
Damian slowly reached out and pressed her nearest hand still. “Andi,” he began, as Rax’s eyes flicked over to him. “I don’t know how to tell you this, really.”
“So, just say it, then.” She bit her lips. She’d seen her brother’s blood, but she wanted to hear one of them say it, first.
“Danny’s looked—” Damian began gently.
“Homegrown, shall we say,” Rax finished for him.
Andi inhaled. “You mean to tell me,” she said slowly, building up steam, “that my brother really is a freaking dragon?” She couldn’t ignore it anymore or hope or pray that she’d been wrong. It didn’t make sense, and it couldn’t be true—only it was.
She stood still, the world spinning beneath her feet, feeling more panicked and fearful then she’d ever been—even counting all the recent times she’d almost died. Just like Damian had told her, death was death. But death was manageable because it was inevitable. She knew that; she saw it at work all the time. What wasn’t manageable, what was making her bile rise in her throat and her body break out in a thin sheen of sweat, was discovering that her twin brother wasn’t who she thought he was anymore and that her uncle likely wasn’t either. That the two people who were supposed to be closest to her in the world after her mother’d died—the two people she’d always assumed that she could count on, no matter what—had fundamentally changed forever.
She got off her chair so quickly, it fell back, a
nd she looked between them. “Has that always been the case? Did he know? Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t he tell me?”
“If you didn’t know, Andi, I doubt he did,” Damian said.
“And actually, given what they’ve been trafficking in, I don’t know. Maybe they’ve just gotten powerful enough to do things like that now,” Rax said, putting his hands helplessly in front of him and spreading his fingers wide. He leaned forward to breathe her in. “Because you don’t smell like magic at all. Pool-hustling-skills aside, you’re plain human.”
Damian growled at the other dragon’s proximity, which brought her stunned self back to life. She started pawing through her purse to find her phone.
* * *
“Andi?” Damian asked, watching her with concern. He could taste her raw panic in the air, see her pulse pounding at her throat. “Are you all right?” he asked gently. He wanted to catch her hands in his own and stop her from whatever it was she was doing now, but he didn’t dare.
“I need a ride,” she muttered, more to herself than him.
“To where?” he inquired.
Does…she not like dragons? his dragon wondered.
She’s going through a lot right now. Shush.
“Your phone won’t work here, girl. I’ve turned this place into a well-armed faraday cage,” Rax told her.
“And whatever you’re going to do, you shouldn’t be doing it alone,” Damian said quietly, hoping she would listen. She looked up at him, her eyes wide and tearful and lost. Frightened. His girl who had stood up to shimmer-tigers and lurkers and even other dragons was almost shaking now.
“Drive me?” she asked him, her voice small.
“Of course. Anywhere,” he promised, before turning to Rax. “We’re not through, by the way.”
“I didn’t expect we’d be,” Rax said with a snort and a dismissive wave.
Damian offered his free hand to Andi, and to his surprise, she took it. He pulled her out of the casino back the way they’d come, through a throng of armed men waiting on Rax’s signal, and out the back door of the Lynx where the tour bus was idling. At seeing them, someone opened the rear door of the vehicle, and Andi looked inside.
Dragon Destined: Billionaire Dragon Shifter Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds) Page 20
