She picks up the steamer and tucks it under her arm. “We’ll try this again tomorrow.”
And with those words, she departs the room. Leaving me chained up with the mess I’ve created on my stomach.
Chapter Three
OLA
I exit the room where we’re keeping Real Damianos on a sad-but-righteous note. But stop short after closing the door behind me. Uncle Kyle and Uncle Clyde are standing in the hallway, and they’ve both got their arms crossed.
“Did we just hear you giving that boy a handjob?” Uncle Clyde whispers. He grabs me by the arm and pulls me further down the hallway to stand in front of my bedroom.
“Like two minutes after he woke up?” Uncle Kyle adds. His hand is clutching at his chest like he just wishes he had some pearls to hold on to.
Usually, I enjoy the hell out of my uncles’ Thug Beta-Dainty King routine. But after my first super disappointing interaction with my now awake mate, I’m way too tired and sad to have this conversation with them.
“I can’t believe you were listening in on my private conversation!” I answer, hoping my offended tone will make them back off.
But I should have known taking offense wouldn’t have worked.
“Really, you don’t though?” Uncle Clyde asks, screwing up his face. “So you figured you were just going to swear us to secrecy about you being back—”
“And squeezing out a half-dragon baby!” Kyle adds.
“And chaining up a huge fucking dragon shifter in our master bedroom,” Clyde continues on. “And you thought when we walked past the door and heard you two talking, we’d just be like…”
“Oh, let’s not listen in!” Kyle says, waving both hands.
“Wouldn’t want to deprive our insane niece of her fucking privacy!” Clyde finishes with a roll of his eyes and snap of his fingers.
“It’s like you don’t know us at all!” Kyle says with a dramatic huff. But then he resets with an eager grin. “Also, we thought we heard our new grandbaby calling for his poppas!” he says in a singsong voice, holding up the custom King Poppa tote bag he’d had made, like two-seconds after Bazzi and I arrived at the kingdom house.
“No, you didn’t,” I answer, folding my arms. It’s so nice to catch them in one lie I can actually clapback on. “The baby can’t even talk. How is he going to be calling for his great-uncles.”
Kyle gasps, his head drawing all the way back.
And Clyde says, “Oh, no you didn’t.” He takes a step toward me, one hand fisted at his gun side like he’s regretting agreeing not to carry the Mossberg when he’s visiting with the baby.
“We are his poppas!” Kyle reminds me, barring an arm across Uncle Clyde’s chest to hold him back. “Big Poppa and King Poppa—that’s what you promised when we agreed to help you keep this secret.”
“I should call both your daddies right now,” Clyde threatens.
At least I think it’s a threat until he shifts his eyes to the side in the universal sign for accessing his biosystem.
“Don’t!” I say, holding up both hands. “Please don’t! Lesson learned, I promise. I’ll only be calling you both Poppa from now on.”
Clyde tentatively unshifts his eyes. “You promise?”
“Yes, I promise.” I reach out and pat his shoulder. “And you’re right, Big Poppa, we should go check on the baby. It’s his feeding time.”
I walk into my room where I’m keeping the baby’s crib, hoping that’s enough to throw them off the subject of calling my parents. And to my relief, Kyle and Clyde follow.
“See, I told you he needed us,” Kyle says to Clyde behind me. “It’s that King Poppa intuition.”
I roll my eyes. You know you two just wanted a baby hit.
It takes everything I have not to call bullshit on them coming up here after they promised to stay in the kingdom house’s first-floor guest suite, where it’s way safer.
I think about how calling people out on their BS had been one of the things I’d been surprised to discover Other Damianos and I had in common. He derived great joy out of countering the “facts” documentary historians put forth. And I derived even more joy out of hearing why so many of them were full of shit, or as Other Damianos put it, “Guessers who err on the sides of the upright primates who look the most like them.”
A sad wave of bittersweet remembrance washes over me as we walk into the room. Luckily, it’s erased by the sight of the baby, still fast asleep in the crib where I left him. Large and pale brown with copper-colored hair, he lies curled up in a tight child’s pose, with his huge golden wings folded up tightly against his back.
My heart swells with a love, unlike anything I’ve ever known before. Along with gratitude that pushing this kid out of my hoo-hah had been all kinds of dramatic, but surprisingly not at all painful.
Maybe there really was something to Xenon’s theory. The baby had come down the tube hard and fast after I made it back up the stairs and turned my biosystem back on just long enough to call my Uncle Clyde to come get me.
Thank goodness, I didn’t try to lay back when I felt my son squirming to get out. Remembering what Other Damianos had told me, I pulled a bunch of blankets and pillows from the couch and copped a wide squat in the living room. The baby was so heavy, he and gravity pretty much did the rest. By the time Uncle Clyde and Uncle Kyle came through the kitchen door, they found me holding a baby covered in newborn goo.
“Oh my God, what’s going on?” Kyle demanded upon seeing me. Followed by, “Wait, does that baby have wings?”
The hardest part had been getting my newborn separated from the placenta sack that had fallen out right along with the baby and then getting us both cleaned up. And the most dramatic part had been all the negotiating to get my uncles not only to agree to take the prisoner in the basement home with us but also to keep the fact that they’d found me from my parents and the rest of our family.
Kyle was an easy sell. But Clyde’s been threatening to call the Michigan Three ever since we arrived back at the kingdom house a few days ago.
However, both of them light up when they see Basileios sleeping soundly with his huge golden wings folded into his back.
“Hey, Little Bazzi-Baz, it’s King Poppa and Big Poppa!” Kyle croons as Clyde leans down over the crib to pick him up.
With a dramatic lugging sound, Clyde pulls what looks like a huge, but sexless baby with only scaled skin for a stomach and pelvis out of his crib. And Kyle coos as the baby hybrid sucks the first bottle down like it’s little more than a shot. “Look at that, you were starving. I told your mommy right.”
Then they both laugh when the baby’s face crumples with abject sadness when he realizes the bottle is all gone.
“Don’t worry,” Kyle says, reaching into the King Poppa tote bag he had the fabricator spit out along with a bunch of T-shirts as soon as we reached home with his new grandbaby.
“We got you always, grandson,” Clyde promises.
The baby makes a sound between a baby gurgle, a dragon screech, and a happy wolf growl when Kyle produces a second bottle.
Perhaps realizing his mistake with the first bottle, and not being able to guess that his overindulgent poppas also have three more bottles on hand, the baby goes a little slower on his second liquid meal. And for a few contented moments, we all watch him happily drink.
But Clyde’s expression goes from tender love to anxious when the baby starts fussing and stretching its arms toward me. “Your real grandfathers are going to kill us when they find out what we’re keeping from them,” he says. And he and Kyle exchange worried looks.
I can’t say I don’t understand what brought this topic back to Clyde’s mind. Basileios—or Bazzi as we’ve all been calling him—was only born a week ago, but in terms of development, he seems much older than that. He smiles and coos like a three-month-old. And somehow it feels like no time and months have passed since he arrived.
I bend my knees and take the baby with a slight oof. Bazzi was thirty
pounds at last check and is only getting heavier by the day. Luckily, I got plenty of practice lugging around Fensa’s twins for the short few months they were here in the states before we found Xenon and they all went into hiding.
From the dragon I’m currently holding captive down the hall.
“It’s been three months since I disappeared.”
“Got straight snatched,” Uncle Clyde automatically edits
“A few more weeks won’t matter,” I press on, squelching all my uneasy feelings. “And if I manage to get their mortal enemy to stand down, they’ll see why I did it.”
My words are meant to reassure, but Kyle’s and Clyde’s expressions turn even more fretful.
“It don’t sound like he’s going to be agreeing to anything other than burning this house down with all us inside if he manages to get free,” Clyde answers.
Damn our amazing wolf hearing. This would be so much easier if I could lie to Kyle and Clyde and pretend our first conversation had gone anything but terrible. “I know that sounded…” I struggle for an appropriate word but can only come up with… “bad.”
“Understatement,” Kyle shoots back.
“He threatened to kill everybody but you and Baby Clyde.”
I hold up a hand, stopping my uncle right there. Again. “I’m not changing his name to Clyde, so please get that dream out your head.”
“Really?” Kyle gives Bazzi a finger to wrap his chubby fist around as he points out, “Clyde is light and really rolls off the tongue.”
“Yeah, Clyde has a nice ring to it,” Clyde agrees with no irony whatsoever in his voice. “Basileios is some kind of tongue twister, and almost as heavy as not-so-little Bazzi-Baz himself.”
“Okay, well…” I quickly return to the previous topic before Clyde decides to threaten to call my parents if I don’t give in to his unreasonable request. “I just need some time with Damianos before my dads descend on this house and make this a huge thing.”
“Maybe because it is a huge thing?” Kyle points out. “You’ve mated and imprisoned their mortal enemy. Keeping it a secret…”
“Is the only way to keep us all safe,” I finish before he can.
“How is keeping a maniac who wants to kill all of us the safe choice?” Clyde demands. “You said it yourself, he’s been digging around inside my, Akwasi’s, and who knows who all else’s head. For all I know, he’s going to call me in there tonight to let him out of those cuffs.”
“I don’t think he will. I’m sure that mental connection was broken,” I answer, keeping my reassurance short. I still haven’t shared with them the full story about there being not one but two Damianoses. “And even if he does, that’s why I put the lock with the code only I know on the door. As long as you don’t look at the piece of paper with the code, we should be fine.”
Kyle shakes his head. “I want to be a King Poppa more than anything, but this feels dangerous. What if you’re wrong about him and everybody pays the price?”
Kyle has no idea how many times I’ve gone into hose food down my mate’s throat and wondered the same thing. But I keep my face stoic as I reply, “I’m not wrong. The dragon I fell in love with is in there. I know he is. And I promise you, everything’s going to be okay. I just need some more time.”
Kyle and Clyde exchange a look. Then Kyle decrees, “One more week. That’s all we can give you.”
“Thank you,” I say, even as I note he still speaks like a king. Possibly because instead of taking early retirement as planned, he’s been sitting in for the queen who disappeared on the night of her coronation.
I hold the baby whose full name I’m still having a hard time pronouncing close, seeking as much comfort as I’m giving. By the Fenrir wolf, what a mess. And I’m still not sure how I’m going to solve it.
But I’ve got to solve it. I made a promise, and I never break my promises.
Also, I believe every word of what I said to my uncles. Other Damianos and the one lying in the kingdom house’s master suite…they don’t act like the same person, and they for damn sure don’t treat me the same.
But the dragon who treasured me like solid gold is inside the one who was practically spitting venom when he finally woke up for real. He has to be. And I’ve got to find him.
For Bazzi’s sake and that of everybody I love.
Chapter Four
FENRIS
“I have brought a gift, just for you!”
Fenris held up the little yellow she-wolf, still sleeping as she had been for much of their trip from the village to the woods. Then he waited for his mate’s delighted reaction.
But it never came.
“Fenris, what is that?” she asked.
“Why it is a pup…” he furrowed his brow. Wasn’t that obvious? Also, why was she not rushing to his gift and cooing as she so often had over their subject’s newborns back when they lived in the kingdom village?
“She was brought to our village by a childless ever maid who had decided to take on a young pregnant girl as her servant,” he told Chloe. “The servant died in childbirth. And the ever maid was too old to take care of herself, much less a baby—which is why she had been desperate enough to take a pregnant servant into her home. But then the ever maid remembered the program you had announced across the land when you were queen of the North Wolves, and she brought the baby to our kingdom village to be adopted. Thus, is she ours now.”
This should be the place where Chloe jumped up and down with delight.
But she neither jumped nor danced. Only continued to stare at him.
“Ours?” she repeated in her heavily accented North Wolves tongue. “Would no one else take her?”
“Oh no, that is not the case at all,” Fenris answered, realizing she must believe the newborn to have some defect. “She is a kind little pup. Very docile and gentle. Many of the heatless she-wolves vied to take her in as their own daughter. Randulfsson thanked me mightily when I insisted she should be ours, as this was the first orphan he had received as fenrir of the North Wolves, and he had no idea how to make such a decision…”
Fenris stopped talking when he saw Chloe’s expression. It was no longer one of confusion, but there was still no joy to be found in it. Only rage. The kind he hadn’t seen upon his dark beauty’s face since the very early months of their union.
“Why?” she demanded, this time over their mate bond, where everything was made clear without accent or need for translating each other’s tongues. “Why would you do that?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” he answered, as baffled as she was angry. “Do you think I have not gleaned over the past winters how sad you are, even though you try to hide it? And I know you and Myrna were never a true mother-daughter match. What was it you called her? A daddy’s girl?”
Chloe’s eyes widened. “So you think just because I was upset that Myrna liked swords more than she liked the kitchen that I would just want to replace her with some random white girl?”
Fenris shook his head, not understanding. “Her fur is not white but yellow.”
“I’m talking about her skin! Her human skin!”
“What does her skin have to do with it?”
“Everything!” she yelled back at him in his own tongue.
“But you know I do not care about such things…” he began to tell her.
Only to stop when she threw up both her hands and her head, as if bidding for patience from the single sky god she convinced him and the rest of their kingdom village to take into their hearts. “Okay, I’m not sure how we got to our 60s without you realizing this, but my skin color is important to me. Our mixed brown babies were important to me. Myrna and I had our issues, but she was my daughter and she was important to me. She’s still important to me, even if there’s a good chance she’ll never know that because of the way I left things. You think she can just be replaced? She can’t be. And you’re right, it’s not about skin color. It’s about her. Who she was. Half of you and half of me. She’ll never be replaced. No
ne of them will—oh God….”
Chloe screamed all of this across their mate bond. Then instead of thanking him prettily as he thought she would during his trek through the woods, she dissolved into tears. Ugly, wrenching sobs that racked her entire body.
“Beauty…” he tucked the still sleeping pup under his arm and took a step toward her.
He only wished to comfort her. But when he touched her shoulder, she jerked away as if his hand were a fiery brand. “No, don’t touch me,” she screamed. “Just get her out of here. Please just take her out of my sight. I can’t even stand to look at her.”
Not knowing what else to say, Fenris did exactly as Chloe asked.
The trip back to the village took half a day, and by the end, the formerly docile pup was wailing. Most likely because instead of the porridge Fenris had promised her when they had first set out, the only reward she’d received for her long trip with him was a screaming she-wolf who refused to so much as look at her. Much less receive her as a daughter.
Fenrit, the new fenrir formerly known as Randulfsson, took the little yellow pup back with easy aplomb. After handing her off to his wife to feed, he told Fenris, “In truth, you might have saved me from the ire of the childless she-wolves who would have had her for daughter. I received an ear blistering after I allowed you to leave with the pup.”
His words were reassuring and well-chosen. Fenrit was just as Fenris suspected when he appointed the son of his former beta as his replacement, the best candidate to rule over the North Wolves.
Fenris very much regretted coercing his successor into giving him the pup after he’d heard the call of the elkhorn while hunting. Fenris had gifted Fenrit the elkhorn before departing with Chloe to build their cabin in the woods.
“This is the horn of guidance I wish I’d had when I was a king, but alas, my throne was inherited, not handed down,” he had told the then-new fenrir, “If you blow upon it, I will return to the village and advise you on any matter for which you might need counsel.”
Her Dragon King (Her Dragon King Duet Book 2): 50 Loving States, North Dakota Pt. 2 Page 3
