“Austin,” Andi said, recognizing him.
“One and the same.” He put his arm out for her, and she took it, letting him pull her up.
“And Zach?” she guessed, at seeing the dark-haired were. Her voice was tentative but more hopeful than it’d been indoors. Damian marveled at her resiliency then felt a wave of anger. True resiliency was only learned by being crushed. How many times had other people tried to break his Andi—to make her strong enough to handle everything that had happened just now?
“You’re…a person,” she went on to Zach, slowly.
“Thanks to you,” he said, smiling at her kindly.
“Jamison here!” the other man announced, waving from the front seat with his metal arm.
“And I’m Mills,” said the woman in the other seat beside him.
“Just like you told me in the casino,” Andi said.
“Yeah. I can’t lie,” Mills agreed, with a grin and a shrug.
Damian shoved the skin he held beneath the seat and took the liberty of pulling Andi down beside him, handing her the buckle of her seat belt. “Where to, princess?”
She fastened it, swallowing dry, before staring around their group and then again at him. “Crystal Cove, please, thank you.”
Damian wiped the dragon blood off his hands to distract himself from how close she was to him. There was only a millimeter or so gap between their thighs, and he was torn between trying to anticipate the SUV’s every bump to give her room, or praying that they’d be part of a pile-up and she’d fly into his lap. He watched her worrying her lower lip, thinking so hard he could almost taste her thoughts.
“Okay, so,” she began, looking up at him. “If my brother is somehow becoming like you, what can you tell me?”
Damian steeled himself to guard the space between them. “I’ve had all my life and a decade’s worth of training before that to come to grips with the animal inside me. Your brother has had what, three weeks or less?” Damian thought back to all the fights he’d had with his dragon, how terrifying it was to know there was a beast inside of him, how empty he felt each time he pushed it back. He shook his head. “He’s not going to be himself for quite a while.”
Andi searched Zach and Austin’s faces in turns. “What was it like for you two?”
The brothers looked at one another and shrugged. “We’re born this way. Obligate shifters, every full moon,” Austin said.
“And we were born here, not the Realms,” Zach pointed out while gesturing at Damian as an example.
“But Danny wasn’t born in the Realms,” Andi said. “We’re twins. I’ve seen his birth certificate. In fact, I probably have it because he moves a lot, and he’s not very coordinated.” She started impatiently tapping one toe, making her leg closest to him shake, and Damian knew she was pouring her frustration into the movement.
“I don’t know what the Hunters did to him, Andi,” Damian said, only barely resisting the urge to put his hand on top of her knee to quiet it. “But I promise you, I’ll do my best to find out.”
“Crystal Cove!” Jamison announced. “Where to now?”
“Left here, thanks,” Andi said, leaning forward through the seats to see, letting a swish of silk from her dress and a lock of her hair touch him. The sensations of both brought up unbidden memories, his hands clasped in that silk, wound in that hair, and Damian fought not to rock bodily toward her and pull her back to him.
“Where are we going?” he asked neutrally instead.
She looked back at him, her face an expression of infinite sorrow. “We’re going to see my uncle.”
* * *
“So, you have an uncle?” Mills exclaimed from the front seat excitedly. “How? Who?” she asked, twisting back.
Andi wasn’t sure what Mills’s fascination with him was. “He’s not my literal uncle; at least, I think, it’s a cultural thing. He’s just a longtime family friend. Like, since childhood.” Andi couldn’t remember a time she hadn’t known him.
And yet.
Mills slapped a hand on the dashboard. “That’s it, then! Puzzle solved!”
“Except for why we’re going there,” Jamison directed to Andi, looking at her in the rearview.
It pained her to speak poorly of Uncle Lee—to even voice her fears—but she could hardly hold back now. Not after she’d seen Danny. “When you said those people were Hunters, Damian,” she said, looking at him. “There’s only one person in my family—well, one person who I know—who hunts. My uncle.”
“It’s not always a literal thing. There’s tons of people who shoot deer and don’t go wild,” Austin said, as Damian considered her words.
“No, my uncle, you’ll understand. If you see his place.” She squinted out a tinted window. “Turn right?”
Jamison did as he asked her, and as her uncle’s rental mansion appeared at the end of the street, she told them all, “That’s it. The white one, there.”
Austin looked to Damian. “How do you want to play this?”
And he, in turn, looked to her. “What do you want us to do?”
She considered her options for a moment and then reached out to take his hand almost instinctively, stopping just a half-an-inch from doing so, pulling back like she’d been burned. What the hell, Andi, she chastised herself. He wasn’t hers to touch. “Just the two of us,” she said instead.
“All right,” Damian agreed softly, reaching around her for the door.
Three minutes later, they were in front of the heavy wooden door to Uncle Lee’s house. “Uncle? Uncle!” She knocked on it with a closed fist. “Uncle Lee, come out if you’re in there!”
“May I?” Damian asked her when no one responded.
“Please,” she said, stepping back, and he kicked down the door.
The door fell into the house with an echoing thunk, and Andi was first to go inside. “Uncle?” she called and heard her voice reverberate back off the empty walls.
Because almost everything was gone. All the knickknacks, the furniture, and above all else, the majority of the taxidermy was gone. The house looked like no one had lived in it at all—with the exception of the charging polar bear her uncle had left looming in the otherwise empty dining room.
“Whoa,” Damian said, upon seeing it, walking over to its side. “That’s awful.”
“I know,” Andi whispered. “I’ve always known.” She knelt down to trace the carving she’d made on its base and wondered if her uncle left it behind because, in his rush, he didn’t have space—or because it reminded him of her.
She was Danny’s Andi-bear, after all.
Andi clenched both hands to her stomach, where it churned. “But there was more—a lot more—and all of his things.”
“I believe you,” Damian said quickly. “I can smell the scents of old dead things overlapping one another, too numerous to count. But I’d have believed you, even without that. Your word is good enough for me.”
Andi sank back against a wall. She was so tired. It’d been so long since she’d slept well, and now her brother was a monster, and everything her uncle had ever told her was a lie.
“Andi?” Damian asked, his concern for her clear from the tone of his voice and the way he hovered nearby, looking for all the world like he wanted to scoop her up and carry her away from everything—and she was so fucking tempted to just let him.
She put her head in her hands rather than give in. “I’m sorry for wasting your time, Damian.”
“Don’t apologize. You didn’t waste a thing, princess.”
Andi gathered the remains of any strength she had left to fully stand again. “Can you take me home?”
“Of course.” He nodded gently, then let her lead, following her out of the house.
Chapter 19
There was no way to drop off Andi at her apartment without remembering the last time he’d left her there—only this time he was in a lightly disguised assault vehicle and with the majority of his crew. The tour bus jumped the curb because there was no
way for it to make the tight turn into the parking lot, and then it pulled to a rumbling stop at the bottom of her stairs.
“Nice to meet you all,” Andi said, giving everyone a group wave as Damian opened the door again for her to get out. She hopped to the asphalt lightly, and he followed her, closing the door behind himself quickly so no one could make any quips.
“Can I walk you to your door?” he asked her.
She looked over his shoulder at the SUV’s tinted windows and gave him a half-smile. “You do realize they’re like all literally watching us?”
“Let them,” he said, angling around her to take the first step and offer out his hand. She didn’t take it, but she didn’t fight him following her up, either.
Damian watched her as her ass swayed, and the dress’s slit parted, showing glimpses of her tawny thigh, her eyes half-lidded, her clenched jaw jutting strong, and she was such a complicated mix of things to him right now. Fragile, but unbreakable—the one woman he ought to stay away from for her sake, the thing he couldn’t help running toward for his. They reached her blue front door, illuminated only by a stuttering porch light, and he watched her fish around in her small purse for her keys, pleased to have a slightly longer reason to be in her presence, and unable to resist teasing her. “You know, if you forgot them, I know somewhere else you can sleep.”
Her eyebrows rose as her lips fell into a disbelieving pout. “Just sleep, eh?” she said, pulling her keys out to triumphantly dangle between them.
“Yeah. Isn’t there a motel just up the road here?” he said, jerking his chin in an easterly direction. Andi snorted. “What, you don’t think I’d buy a night at a motel for you?”
“Stop trying to make me laugh,” she complained, settling her key in the door, but he caught the corner of her lips quirking up.
“Stop letting it work, then,” he said, smiling down at her. “No, really, I know you do need sleep, Andi,” he went on, more reasonably.
Her hand paused in its turn as she looked over at him. “What I need are answers. And fewer nightmares.”
His golden eyes searched hers. “One I can help with if you let me, the other, I’m not so sure.”
Her fingers flexed on the key but didn’t twist it. “All those times I needed help before, how did you know?”
He took a step back and sighed. “Mills—the woman you met—she’s the one who ran the background check on you. Someone else at the coffee shop put that escapade on the internet. She got a hit, and I came flying. As close to flying as I could without getting into trouble with the FAA, at least.”
“And then you followed me?” She let go of the key entirely and turned toward him, her hair swirling down around her shoulders, the blue streak in it picking up the blue of her front door. “Don’t lie, I saw your car.”
Damian winced. “I hung around afterward. Frankly, I wanted to see who you’d ditched me for.”
“I was just trying to figure out where my brother was, Damian—”
“No, I know, and it was none of my business, besides.” He shook his head strongly. “Although can I just say, if I’d killed him then, I would’ve saved us both a lot of trouble.”
Andi chuckled darkly. “Yeah, well, if I could go back in time, there’s a lot of things I would change.”
“Like what?” he asked, quick with hope.
“Like…I would probably be nicer to my brother, for one. Or meaner…I don’t know, something, somehow,” she said, hugging herself. “I would’ve figured out a way to fix him.”
It was his turn to bite his lips before speaking in the shadows. “I’ve learned the hard way that some things you can’t just fix, Andi. No matter how much you might like to.”
Her dark eyes looked up at him. She was still in that dress, and all of him yearned for her, not just out of lust but from his shared soul. He wanted to hold her, protect her, solve all of her problems, and stop her from ever having more.
And the first problem he needed to solve for her was his presence. He was the one who had hurt her; he would have to wait for her to invite him back in. He took a determined step back, wondering if Andi would ever know how much it cost him. “It’s cold out, princess. You should go inside.”
“I should,” she agreed. She put her hand on the door and pushed it open, stepping fully inside, only to turn back to look at him. “Damian, about those answers….”
If he didn’t know better, he might’ve thought she didn’t want him to leave, and his dragon, which had up until then been lurking quietly, whispered, Then, don’t.
“You need to rest, first,” he commanded quickly, deciding for both of them. He wanted to pull her to him and brush his lips across her forehead, but to do that would unwind the short leash he’d wrapped around both his dragon and him.
“When will I get them, though?” she asked forlornly, safely inside her apartment.
“Whenever you desire, but not tonight,” he told her and reached in to pull her apartment door lightly shut.
Damian clambered back into the tour bus and was met by an unfamiliar silence among his crew. He looked around at his people as he made his way to his seat. “What?”
“I’m just more than a little surprised you’re riding back with us,” Jamison announced the second he sat down.
“Me too,” Mills chimed in, as Jamison pulled away from the apartment complex.
“Thanks,” Damian said ruefully, buckling his seat belt.
“It’s just that—” Mills began, and Damian cut her honesty off quickly.
“It is what it is. And it’s okay.” Damian forced himself to shrug. Austin and Zach gave each other looks across from him. “What?”
“This new you? It’s entirely unlike you. And I don’t know if I like it,” Austin said.
“It’s fine,” Zach said, dismissing his brother’s concerns. “Unusual, I agree, but it’s fine.”
Damian rocked back into his seat and looked around the van. They weren’t wrong. Before last weekend and pre-Andi, if he were in a somehow similar situation with some other girl, he definitely would’ve pressed to stay. But now, he couldn’t, for her sake. If they were to have a relationship of any kind at all, it would have to happen on her schedule, no matter how keenly he wanted her. “Answers aren’t just going to produce themselves. We’ve got an influx of Hunters more powerful than we’ve seen before, who somehow have access to dragon skin and have somehow changed Andi’s brother. Jamison, I want you figuring out how the hell that tracker those two Hunters had worked. Austin and Zach, I want you scouring the ports—that’s where the interloper came from, so maybe there’s a trove or a lab he left behind. Mills, I want you figuring out what the fuck they did to Andi’s brother, figuring out whose skin this is,” he said, shoving the dragon skin on the floorboards with one foot, “and running endless searches on who was renting the place we just left. And I’ll go visit Rax tomorrow night. Whatever else the man thinks, he owes me, and I need to know who from the Realms tried to act against me. He’ll help me with that, or else.”
Austin looked to Zach and grinned. “Never mind, he’s back.”
“Yeah,” Zach agreed, also grinning.
When they got back to the castle, Damian went to the bar in his bedroom, pouring a drink to settle himself. Driving away from Andi affected him. It was the only word to describe it. It made him feel crazily mad, starving, weak—like he’d lived his whole life in the sun then been chained inside a cave where not even a whisper of light could strike him.
I know how that feels, his dragon told him.
Before he could interrogate that further, Grimalkin appeared beside his feet, meowing.
“Not now, Grim, it’s too late for cheese.”
Grim sat back on his hind legs primly. “Not everything is about cheese,” he reprimanded Damian.
“No, just most things,” he said, kneeling down to affectionately knuckle the head of his cat. It felt normal, and he tried to hold onto the feeling. Because if he got too used to being around Andi, ho
w would he ever find his way back? How far inside the cave would he be trapped?
“Well, if you’re done being judgmental,” Grimalkin chided him, in between fits of purrs, “one of your mirrors in your office is on.”
Damian tensed. “Which one?”
“Didn’t look. Since you were here, I figured I’d just tell you.”
Damian grunted, gave Grim’s head one last rough pat, and then turned to the mirror closest to his bed and willed himself to step through it.
Damian’s office was completely separate from the rest of the castle and only accessible via mirror, preventing anyone from Earth ever happening across it. A carved plaque that said Serva me te servabo, the same inscription as was on Michael’s gravestone, hung over a desk full of books he was in different points of reading, a small brazier of the Forgetting Fire in case his larger furnace full of it burned out, an orchid that was somehow still non-magically alive, and an orrery which was probably the most magical thing in the building after Grimalkin.
It wasn’t an orrery in the Earth-sense, because the Realms didn’t move in simple ellipticals around a central point like the solar system’s planets. Instead, the Realms were represented by chiming gems and crystals, attached to a carved marble central base by golden chains that expanded and contracted as they moved in almost no relation to one another, like somewhere in the marble a fidgety child held a handful of strings attached to expensively precious balloons.
He pushed this to the side carefully, listening to the chimes inside the gemstones ring until they settled themselves into their bizarre orbits again, and opened up the drawer full of book-sized mirrors that he used to communicate to the other Unearthly Wardens.
He wasn’t the first person to protect the Earth from the Unearthly. When he’d come to Earth, he’d found other groups already protecting it, scattered geographically. Some of them considered their duty a generational burden; a job they were literally born to do. Others formed a ragtag gang, believing in one or two members with magical sight who announced when Unearthly were at hand. It’d taken him some time to sort through their assorted organizational structures and regions to figure out where he would be of most use, and how he could best support the others like him—with cash and tech—without robbing them of their pride. Many of them still distrusted him and his direct connection with the Realms, which he found irritating but for the best, because if something ever happened to him, they would be alone again. Better to keep them angry, self-reliant, and sharp, and if hating him helped that, all the better.
Dragon Destined: Billionaire Dragon Shifter Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds) Page 21
