Her Dragon King (Her Dragon King Duet Book 2): 50 Loving States, North Dakota Pt. 2

by Theodora Taylor

  “No, it’s obvious, you love me. Believe me, I get that after the whole time-traveling grandpa reveal. And I love you, too. But what made you decide to give in to that love so fully? I mean, it took me weeks just to get you to open up your side of the mate bond. And suddenly you were all in, to the point of possibly getting stuck in the past? What made you risk everything to keep a promise you yourself said another dragon made?”

  He stills. But he doesn’t close the bond. So I can feel the secret he’s keeping from me, even if he doesn’t speak it out loud.

  “Let’s not do that,” I whisper across the pillow. “Let’s not start off our marriage this way. No more secrets.”

  He considers my words. And after a long moment, he says, “The me from the alternative timeline left me a message on my voicemail. And that message made it easy to choose our love over my revenge.”

  “Wow, that must’ve been some message…” I sit up in bed and regard him with a scrunched-up face. “Can I hear it?”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Damianos vowed at our ceremony to grant my every wish, even the ones I hadn’t made yet. But now he hesitates.

  “My ceremony vows were true,” he tells me. “Never again will I deny you. However, I fear you will think less of me if I allow you to listen to what Other Me, as you call him, said.”

  Fear is an understatement. I can feel his terror at the prospect over our mate bond, full-on palpitating like a heartbeat.

  “Oh, baby…” I take his hand, surer than I’ve ever been of anything, “It’s you and me for as long as I live. Nothing’s ever going to change that.”

  Damianos looks at me, his golden eyes glowing a little brighter in the dim morning light. Then he climbs out of bed and comes back with an old-timey smart phone.

  “He speaks to me in the old language, so I will translate what he says for you,” Damianos tells me after settling back down into bed with me. Then he pushes play on the only message listed in the voicemail section.

  A bunch of screeches and hisses emit from the phone. Jarring at first, but over the course of the message they begin to take on an almost musical undertone as Damianos translates.

  “If you are listening to this, my worst fear has come true. I am gone, and she has found you in the basement. If this is the case, there are things you must know…

  “But there is something you must know. As you most likely have guessed by now, I am a version of you from a future that has not yet happened…from a future I hope will never happen. I am the version of you who god spoke the former Beta King of North Dakota to the gatehouse, then had him kill himself in front of Ola so that she would understand what would and could happen to any of her family members if she displeased me, even the ones who weren’t on my ultimate revenge list. To my relief, the tactic worked. Our mate went quiet and no longer offered angry retorts or challenged me in anyway. Indeed, after a few weeks spent shackled in her room, she became so docile, I was able to unchain her from the bed.

  “She whiled away most of her days in the backyard, and she did not attempt to escape. However, it did worry me that she spent so much time walking back and forth, like a tiger caged. I worried for her mental health, knowing how easy is was for the minds of her much weaker species to break.

  “However, it was not her mental health I should have been worried about. I discovered why she made this action eighty-four days into her pregnancy when I came downstairs to find her making breakfast instead of the current Colby. She told me she had more energy than usual and offered to make me food as well.

  “Prior to that moment, I had never known the sunshine of her good graces, and I found myself helplessly drawn to the honor of having her make me a meal. We shared the food she cooked, and afterwards, she made a pretty speech about how she’d thought about our situation. Her fathers would never accept me, and the way we had met had been unfortunate, but we were having a baby together. She said that we should try to, as she put it, ‘make this work.’

  “I agreed with her and she gazed at me in such a way that I suddenly understood the meaning of the cliché of looking deep into another’s eyes. It felt as if I were being seen, truly seen for the first time. Oh, how my flame burned. With fear, with reverence, and with a strange shame I had never known before for having treated her so irreverently.

  “Then she did the most extraordinary thing. She placed herself upon my lap and pressed her mouth into mine. As you hopefully know by now, this was another mating habit of the anthros I didn’t quite understand before our first kiss. But the feel of her lips against mine, the scent of her—even the slight weight of her arms around my shoulders. There was no question of whether I would return her primitive act of affection. My male works instantly descended, and I consumed her kiss as hungrily as I would receive food after a long journey.

  “For those moments, all thoughts of revenge fell away. I was no longer a drakkon mated to an inferior wolf mutation. And I understood then what I hadn’t before. She was the mother of my child. Deserving of all my reverence. Someone I wished to be with for the entirety of my life. But then she slashed my throat.”

  I gasp out loud at the turn in the story. Covering my mouth with both hands. However, Damianos presses on, before I can fully process that I stabbed Other Damianos in the neck, not once but twice.

  “As it turned out she had found a bit of flint in the front yard. That was why she walked back and forth so frantically. She had guessed correctly that the only way to escape me was by killing me, and had bided her time, sharpening the thin rock to a knife’s sharpness. Her betrayal was…incredibly painful.

  “I fell to the floor and the last sight I had before my shell shut my mind down for repairs was of her running out the door. I woke up two hours later with a healed throat. Fortunately, she did not realize that our most vital arteries are in our belly, not our throat. Unfortunately, by the time I found her it was too late.

  “Soon after I departed from the cabin, I came upon a most gruesome sight, even for one as unflinching as me. I discovered her lying in a strange position on her back with her legs splayed and the lower torso of a male wolf sticking out of her core. Later I figured out with the Betrayer King’s help that this is something newborn wolf mutations are designed to do when they’re in too much distress, shift to their much more durable wolf, so as to survive the birth. That instinct often killed she-wolf mothers before the current age of technology-assisted births.

  “Perhaps if our mate had known to squat instead of positioning herself on her back, she might have survived the birth of our son. But she did not, and thus died alone in a wooded glen, attempting to escape me. The rage I felt upon finding her body cannot be described.

  “Ola’s death left me free to go through with our original plan to unleash my ultimate revenge before using the fating gates to find a drakki with whom I could procreate. Indeed, I spent the next few months massacring wolves. Her fathers, her mother, the entire Nightwolf clan. Slaughtered. Then I swam to the distant island upon which the Betrayer King thought he would be safe. I lay in wait until he came downstairs with his mate and ambushed him. Then I put him back in chains and proceeded to slaughter his family. First the mate who had arrived downstairs with him, then the son who had come charging at the sound of all the commotion.

  “The Betrayer King baited me after his wife’s and son’s murders. Told me that I was neither a worthy king nor a worthy mate. And that was why the universe hadn’t allowed my mate or my progeny to survive. My bloodthirst knew no bounds. And I’d raised my dagger to slaughter him as well when I felt two tiny fires upon my back.

  “I turned to find two little drakkon hovering in the air. More progeny and most likely the reason the Betrayer King had tried to bait me into delivering him the final blow. They must have been told to remain hidden by their brother but could not keep themselves from flying to their father’s defense. They were twins from the look of them. And then I spotted the distinct female markings upon their scaled stomachs.


  “Drakki young! I had not seen such a sight since my young drakkon days on our home planet. And of course, I could not kill such rare and beautiful miracles. Quite the opposite. I fell to my knees in front of them, suddenly overcome with the most abject of grief.

  “My mind became crazed. Despite the unexpected obstacle of mating with Ola, I had carried out my ultimate revenge. I had paid my father his due reverence. And now I was free to enact the original plan of going back to the past and making sure that our civilization’s destruction never came to pass. But at the sight of those drakki all I could do was screech. Screech for all I had lost. Screech for my lost son and the other progeny I might have had if my mate, like the Betrayer King’s, had lived long enough to go into heat again.

  “And then I fell into what I can only describe as a catatonic state. While my body remained in this world, my mind suffered an endless loop of my time with Ola. Our first meeting. All the cruel things I did to her in the name of preserving my revenge…our mating…the kiss she delivered upon me…finding her dead.

  “I’m not sure how much time I passed in this state. But what I can only assume to be a few days later I woke up to find the Betrayer King tending to me, in what used to be the bed he shared with his mate.

  “‘But why…’ I asked him. ‘Why would you tend to me after what I have wrought upon you?’

  “‘It was the only way for me to stave off Widower’s Madness,’ he answered.

  “I still did not understand. ‘But how would nursing me back to consciousness keep you from Widower’s Madness?’ I asked him.

  “‘Now you understand truly what the loss of a mate is,’ he replied. ‘And now that you understand that loss, you can fix what you have wrought.’

  “You see, as the Royal Fate Maker, he understood something I did not. Widower’s Madness was considered a gate disease. Widower’s Madness only happened to drakkon who had been fated to their mates, not to drakkon who found mates without the use of this technology. And I was very obviously in the early stages of Widower’s Madness.

  “He would soon fall back into it, too, he told me, which would render him unable to care for the miraculous drakki I had gazed upon. Our cousin knew this because he had been raised by caretakers after his father descended into it. If he could not care for them, he could not protect them. And his drakki would most certainly need his protection as the only females of our kind.

  “There was no other choice but to do what he had only pretended he would do before: help me go through one of the fating portals. If he was right about my being not merely match but fated to My Departed Mate, then I could in theory erase what I had done. Including losing my possibly fated mate in childbirth and the slaughter I wrought in the aftermath of that loss.

  “We were both desperate drakkon. Willing to do anything.

  “I traveled through the fated gate and ended up outside the North Dakota gatehouse. I recognized this eve as soon as I saw the three-quarters moon. For it was the last night of our mating, the night I came up with the plan to exert complete control over My Fated Mate by having her uncle kill himself in front of her.

  “The incoming moon was an important detail because knowing I wouldn’t have access to the North Dakota beta the next day caused me to act swiftly with no chance to calm down from my current mood. And I remembered how after my first full night of sleep in days, I had woken up feeling as though perhaps this punishment had been too harsh. The rage in my flame hadn’t burned nearly as bright as the previous night. But by then Clyde was already on his way. My pride would not let me reverse the decision, especially in front of my stubborn she-wolf.

  “So I’d gone through with it and made it so that My Fated Mate would never burn yellow for me as did the flame of the Betrayer King’s mate before I extinguished it. And I understood immediately what appearing here on this night meant. This was the night, the moment when Ola stopped being my fated mate. And this was my chance, my very last chance to make her mine. So after subduing you and sending her uncle and the new Colby away, I met my fated mate anew with a kiss.

  “What has followed has been the most blissful time of my life.

  “I know you are most likely still thinking upon revenge. I remember how that need burned inside of me, an ember that never went out. But I am leaving you this message to tell you what I wish I had known before I set forth with the actions that would render it so that my fated mate could never forgive me. Revenge is an illusion. The satisfaction you believe it will bring never arrives. And after all the killing is done, you are left with nothing but the memory of their pleas and screams and the sight of her dead body upon the forest floor.

  “That kiss she pressed upon you, false and meant to distract, was the best moment of your life. Better than any revenge. Indeed, I feel sorry for drakkon like you and even my mate. For you will never know this absolute certainty I now have. That this love, this yellow flame burning inside of you, is worth more than pride, more than whatever reverence we owe our father. More than anything.

  “I have thought so often of killing you. There is a chance that without our fated mate’s death and the knowledge of the Betrayer King’s drakki, you will never be able to understand as I do now. But our cousin warned me against killing you before our hatchling was born. He said that we were not dealing with an area of quantum physics he could fully understand. There is a chance, he told me, that I will not be able to stay once a new timeline is established.

  “And so I must keep you alive in case I cannot stay. But if you are the fortunate one who gets to spend the rest of our mate’s life with her and not me, you must pay me back for the work I have done to grant you this opportunity. Consume yourself no longer with thoughts of vengeance, for I have already taken it. That deed is done. And now your only duty is to pay our fated mate her due reverence. You must grant her every wish. And in return, she will shower you with a love you do not deserve. A love so much better than pride or revenge.”

  The message ends abruptly, without a goodbye.

  Yet it feels like a goodbye.

  Did I say I wasn’t a crying-ass bitch at the beginning of this story?

  Well, I was wrong. So, so wrong.

  Y’all are going to have to act like I never even said that, because here I go again.

  “You were right,” I say to Damianos with tears running down my face.

  His body stiffens at my words, like he’s bracing for my rejection. And I can feel his fear like my own.

  But then I tell him, “He wasn’t you. And I’m so glad he gave you the chance, gave both of us the chance to be better than our history.”

  Damianos rocks backward as if a great wave had crashed into him. Then he says, “You honor me with your forgiveness. Thank you, Reverence. Thank you.”

  I look back up at him, my eyes just as soft and sincere as all the emotions rushing over our mate bond. “Nah, Triple D, you need to be thanking Other You. Because now you know your mate will not hesitate to cut a dragon bitch if you don’t treat her right.”

  He rumble laughs, holding nothing back. Then he vows, “I will show you now, Queen of Drakkon, just how right I will treat you…for the rest of your life.”

  I guess neither of us were as tired as we thought.

  We stay up all night sealing our vows with kisses, orgasms, and promises for the future to come.

  Epilogue

  FENRIS

  Many winters later

  “I don’t understand why Willie would choose to let that serpent walk her down the aisle when either Olafr or I could have given her an arm,” Fenris’ eldest son, FJ groused right before the sound of a Chinese bridal march signaled them all to rise.

  Today’s wedding was taking place in the gardens of the groom’s palace in a land called China. But this was a tradition Fenris had come to know in many forms over the thirty winters since Chloe and he had arrived in this time period, whether it took place under the roof of a church or a pagoda.

  There had been many weddings since he and
his Chloe had gone from having only each other to finding themselves in possession of a family larger than either of them could have ever imagined—even back when they lived with all of Fenris’ kin in one longhouse.

  That longhouse was gone now. It had been torn down and replaced with a thriving Norwegian kingdom village hundreds of winters ago. And those villagers had greeted Chloe and Fenris with great celebration when they traveled to his land of old in a magical flying device called a drone. They also threw them a parade.

  However, the Northlands were no longer ruled by an alpha king, Fenris had discovered. The fenrir monarchy had been replaced with a system called democracy upon which every citizen voted for the fenrirs of their cities and towns. They also elected an overall fenrir for the land they called Norway. Indeed, the main fenrir of Norway was a she-wolf with no need to defend her thrones.

  “If I displease the people, they will simply vote me out when I run for re-election,” the female fenrir explained to Fenris in a language which only bore a passing resemblance to the one he had spoken when he ruled over the Northlands. “Greece and the North American territories are one of the only developed wolf societies that still have Kings and Queens with powers and rights that can be ceded to a challenger.”

  It was a delightful visit. But Fenris never returned. For it had not felt like a homecoming. Home…that place was truly gone. Occasionally that realization made his heart ache.

  But then he had only to look upon his dark beauty and his ever-growing family and his soul would calm. Their happy life in the land of Michigan was worth more than anything he had ever given up.

  Where was he?

  Oh, yea, the bridal march was playing. That meant it was time to stand up.

  It was not as easy as it used to be for Fenris to make such an action. And even though Olafr helped him to his feet, his bones ached terribly with the movement. The wolf healers of this time had told him he had something called arthritis. This disease of bone rendered it hard for wolves of his age to move about.