by Ophelia Bell
Or maybe this was how Ked had felt ever since being forced to kill the Elite female he’d once loved. To be so close to true happiness and have it ripped away within moments must leave anyone feeling this hollow.
Gavra’s warm presence moved closer, his hand coming to rest upon her shoulder. In a quieter voice, he said, “We need you whole and happy, Aurum. We will do whatever we can to find him for you, but you must not neglect your needs. Let me bring you one of the Unbound to fill your well.”
Aurum turned to face her brother, registering the deep circles beneath his eyes that betrayed his anguish. This was her doing, she knew, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Not when the mate she had dreamed of for so long was within her grasp, and then lost to her within a matter of moments.
“No. We released all the Unbound from their shackles. I refuse to use them the way we used to. Only the true lawbreakers need to be punished that way. I won’t be party to our continued abuse of dragon offspring whose only sin is that they were born to parents who broke our laws. Laws that we’ve abolished, I might add.”
Gavra let out an exasperated sigh and raked his fingers through his coppery hair. “Then Kris …”
“Kris has done enough for us,” she said, cutting him off. “I am fine. When we find Calder, I’ll replenish, but not before then.”
Gavra’s impatience flooded his aura with crackling orange lightning. “We can’t even get to the Source until Midwinter when the Sanctuary’s portals are accessible. Do you have any idea what your fucking mood is going to do to the rest of us until then?”
The first bright red jolt of anger tore through her and she turned on him. “My mood? Is that all you care about? You can never be too happy when I am, but the second I can’t find the will to muster a positive thought, it’s my mood that matters, not the reason for it? My mate was there today, Gavra. He was close enough for our auras to blend and I could feel that draw to him stronger than any I’d felt in my entire lifetime. Don’t tell me you didn’t feel my joy as potently as this despair I have now. If I had your amazing self-restraint and could give all of you peace from knowing my heart, I would, but I can’t and you know it. So just give me some fucking space, all right? Just let me … be …”
The tears came in a flood then, and she was no longer angry but infinitely grateful for her brother’s strong arms when he wrapped her up in his embrace as she cried.
“I know,” he said, stroking her hair and rocking her. “I ache to meet the mates from my dreams. But I know they will come, just as surely as I know we will find Calder. Nicholas has promised to take us to the Source as soon as it’s possible. In the meantime, we all need you to try to take care of yourself. Find joy somehow. If it isn’t through sex, find another way.”
Her hitching breaths grew steady again and she let out a soft sigh. “How is Nicholas?” The strange, young ursa male had been standoffish to her since they’d arrived at the monastery, and yet he had made her that promise while filled with the same profound longing that Aurum felt. She would have believed it was only her own emotion being absorbed by the others, except she could recognize the difference.
Right now, her brother’s state was purely due to her inability to suppress her own emotions, and so he was feeding on that despondency. This was both her greatest gift and her most abominable curse as a Gold as powerful as she was. Not even her own siblings were immune.
But Nicholas’s emotional state was not a reflection of Aurum’s … no, the longing he had buried in his soul was wholly his own. It made no sense to her, but it did distract her enough from her own wallowing to make her curious.
Gavra squeezed her and let go. “That’s much better. Do you think you can keep that up for a few weeks?”
Aurum sniffled and forced a smile. “Probably not, but I’ll give it a shot. Can you tell me where Nicholas is? I’d like to talk to him.”
“He’s getting cleaned up. Zak and Darius are getting him set up with a bungalow, but I get the sense he’s having some issues adjusting to all the space. Poor kid’s been living his entire life in a cell barely big enough to stand in.”
Aurum moved toward the door, but Gavra held her back. His brow was creased with concern.
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry, I’ll do my best to control my mood with him, I promise. I just need to talk to him. I need to hear what he knows about Calder. Besides, you clearly need a break from me. Go find Aodh and the others and fly. I’ll be fine.”
“Go easy on him, all right? He’s been the Ultiori’s prisoner his entire life. We have no idea what they did to him. I don’t care how much he says Nikhil treated him like a son—you don’t leave your kids locked in a cell.”
“That was the old Nikhil,” she reminded her brother, though her sister’s former lover still had some work to do to prove he was truly on their side. Releasing all the prisoners from the Ultiori’s Canadian facility was a good start, even if Calder and Nicholas had stayed behind as bait and wound up locked in and left to die when their plan failed—at least that was the story Nicholas had shared, and they had no reason to doubt him.
Gavra nodded. “Belah trusts him, and she’s the happiest she’s been in ages. We are all due, sister. Go talk to Nicholas, but remember to be patient.”
Aurum left her brother behind and headed up the foliage-lined path among the structures of the Monastery that served as their home away from the Glade. She found the young ursa in the bath house, immersed in the steaming pool of fragrant water. He reclined slightly with his head back on a cushion and his arms stretched out, resting on the tiled edge above the water. The two former Unbound, Darius and Zak, were attending him, one trimming his long white hair while the other trimmed his beard.
Nicholas seemed to be absorbing the attention passively, his eyes closed, though he wasn’t relaxed.
If Aurum didn’t know better, she might have mistook him for her brother, Aodh, with his pale hair and skin. Only Aodh had no body hair while Nicholas sported a full, thick beard and a luxurious carpet of white fur across the broad expanse of his chest. It was one of the trademarks of ursa males that she’d enjoyed the few times she’d bedded one, which hadn’t been for eons.
Her palms tingled at the thought of running her hands over those textured contours, threading her fingers through his hair. The idle craving was a relief after hours of sadness and abandonment. Her brother’s affection had been nice, but it didn’t come close to the kind of physical intimacy most dragons needed.
And here was a man who had known her fated mate in some capacity. Aurum needed to know why Calder hadn’t stayed, and she was sure Nicholas had the answer.
She walked silently to the edge of the pool and gestured for the other two men to leave. Sitting on the low cushion behind Nicholas’s head, she picked up the comb and scissors Darius had been using and gently raked her fingers through Nicholas’s damp hair. She ran the comb through a lock and snipped the ends.
“You should keep it long,” she said.
Nicholas opened his eyes, but didn’t move. He stared up at her, his irises an odd shade of silver with tiny emerald flecks. Even his eyelashes were white, she realized.
He frowned. “I was never given a razor in my entire life. If my captors thought I needed a trim, it was done to me while I was chained. It’s time for a change. If I don’t like it, it will grow back and I’ll keep it.” He reached back toward her hand and grabbed at the scissors.
Aurum held them out of his reach. “If that’s your wish, let me. While I cut, tell me about him.”
Nicholas stiffened, his aura pulsing darkly from the emotions that arose from even that casual mention of Calder.
“What do you wish to know?” he asked, voice low and tight.
Aurum ran the comb through his hair and snipped, this time cutting more length. She couldn’t bring herself to cut too close to his scalp, however. A strange urge gripped her to see what he would look like with hair the length of one of her dream lovers. The two men from her dreams h
ad been dark-haired. The satyr with sleek, straight hair, the ursa with curls. From the slight wave already threatening to crimp in Nicholas’s tresses, she knew his would quickly curl once it dried.
“How long were you a captive with Calder?” she asked.
His expression was guarded as he pressed his lips together, looking up at her. Finally, he lowered his eyelids, his gaze wandering to the water.
“My entire life. We have no other friends, Calder and I.”
“No other prisoners? Did they not allow you to mix with the others?”
He started to shake his head, but Aurum gripped his temples and tutted at him, brandishing the scissors in his field of vision before snipping another long lock of hair and letting it fall into the water at his shoulders.
Nicholas pursed his lips. “We were too valuable to mix with the others, and the only other prisoners on our floor were female. I guess they didn’t trust us with the females. They didn’t always put me and Calder together. Not until I was …” He trailed off, clamping his lips shut tightly.
“Not until you were what?”
“Older,” he said in a clipped tone. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. He was kind to me. He taught me all the things a young ursa needs to know. Things the enemy never even knew. Secrets.”
Aurum caught the slight tension flex in his jaw as his gaze flicked over the backs of his clenched fists that he’d lifted to the water’s surface in front of him. His aura was wild with emotion now, anger, desire, sadness. Things she should be feeling, if it weren’t for this aching emptiness and despondency. On a whim, she opened herself up to him, breathed out just enough of her power for him to taste, to give her a connection, and took those emotions into herself. It was unfair of her to eavesdrop this way. If she were Belah, she could have influenced him to tell her the truth, but all she could do with her own power was feel and try to understand—and perhaps if she found a way to improve her own mood, try to help.
“What were the secrets?” she asked, even as she began to sense they ran much deeper than he was willing to share. The emotions she absorbed through her power were conflicted, but she wasn’t able to read his mind to understand their basis. All she knew was that he harbored a deep hurt born of an even deeper love. Love for the man who was meant for her.
She suppressed her rising resentment and was instead glad for some emotion other than the utter disinterest that had plagued her since she’d watched Calder dive into the river, where she lost him to its current.
“They wouldn’t be secrets if I told you, would they?” Nicholas said icily.
Aurum grabbed a chunk of his hair and cut into it with the scissors hard. The strands parted cleanly with a satisfying snip, the ends falling in a luxurious cascade across her lap.
She cut again and Nicholas closed his eyes, somehow not caring what she did to him any more than she did. He wanted his hair short? She’d give him short hair. She’d shave him clean and screw any desire she might have to replicate the appearance of an imaginary male who probably didn’t even exist.
Her tears were flowing freely again when she ceased cutting his hair and picked up the razor and cream and lathered up his beard. Nicholas grabbed her wrist just as she was setting the blade of the straight razor against his cheek.
“I’d rather you weren’t blind with sorrow when you did that,” he said.
“Why do you care how I feel? You can’t stand that he’s mine now.”
“Who said I cared how you feel? All I care is that you don’t fucking cut me when you shave me. And he’s not yours any more than he is mine. If he were, he would be here now instead of wherever he is.”
Aurum angrily wiped her tears away and bent back to her task, determined now to see the end of his beard. Something about the destruction of a part of this man seemed oddly satisfying to her.
“Why do you think he left, then?” she spat. “You obviously love him, so if you were so important to him, then why did he abandon you too?”
A haunted look passed fleetingly through Nicholas’s gaze before disappearing. In a grudging tone, he said, “He had no choice. He made a vow to find the enemy before he took a mate.”
Aurum closed her eyes and groaned in despair. “Sweet Mother, am I so like my sister that I am destined to love a man who’s made it his mission to save the world before he can let himself be happy?” It certainly seemed that way if, like Nikhil, Calder had left the side of his fated mate to go after their common enemy.
Nicholas snorted. “I offered to help, but he’s a stubborn son of a bitch.”
“Is this why you agreed to take me to the Source?” she asked. She shifted the razor to the other side of his face, taking a stripe of his beard off in one smooth, clean stroke.
“I have my reasons,” he said.
Aurum pressed the blade beneath his chin and paused before shaving more. “Your reasons had best be more transparent than that.”
Again, his fingers encircled her wrist in a painful grip that kept her from pressing the blade tighter.
“They are my reasons, Goldilocks. Now shave my damn face or give me the goddamn razor and get out.”
She pulled against his hand but found he held her too tightly for her to extract herself. Her strength should have been more than a match for his, yet somehow she failed to make him budge.
He smirked at her futile effort to move, taking glee in her confusion. “Don’t like losing control, do you?”
Aurum yanked hard at her hand, the blade digging into his neck enough that she worried she would accidentally cut him, but his grip was like steel.
“Let me go,” she said through clenched teeth.
He pulled her hand away and squeezed tighter, forcing her to drop the razor. It landed with a splash in the water and sank down to the stone bench he sat on.
With a sudden surge of water and huge, wet man, he hauled himself out of the pool. Aurum scrambled back, eyes wide with surprise as Nicholas loomed over her, dripping and half-shaved.
He made her feel small in comparison to his massive chest and thighs the size of tree trunks. With his grooming only partway complete, he looked like a crazed mutation of the humans’ idol, Santa Claus. She recovered her wits and stood, staring him down.
Nicholas raised an eyebrow. “I always thought you immortals were a stronger bunch. Why are you so weak, Goldilocks?” He advanced on her until she was backed up against the wall with his hard, dripping body inches from hers. “I was the one locked up for my entire life.”
“I was locked up, too. I guess not having a lover for three thousand years will do that to a dragon.”
Nicholas studied her intently. He wasn’t holding her—wasn’t even touching her—but his gaze had her pinned as if he had his entire weight pressed against her body. She warmed from head to toe. She wanted to believe it was only his proximity and her need for energy that made her respond, except that ever since the dreams had begun, the prospect of partnering with anyone but her dream partners held little appeal for her. There was no good reason for her to feel this way with this man whose appearance and aura were all wrong.
Nicholas pressed both his hands on the wall on either side of her head, looking down at her.
“Which do you think would be worse, then? Three thousand years with no prospects but dreams, or almost two hundred with the man you want on the other side of a door you can’t break through?”
She stared up at him, confused by his words as much as by her body’s awakening. Their auras curled around each other like cautious cats, his feelings of abandonment as strong as her own.
“Nothing to say, Goldilocks?”
“I’ve dreamed of him for that long, at least,” she said, needing to get a word out to break this awful paralysis he’d inflicted on her.
“Dreams, huh? For the first hundred years, I only got to hear his voice through a little grate in the wall between our cells. Once they upgraded our amenities, I got to look at him through two thick glass doors. The only reason they put us tog
ether during that time was when my pheronesis became too advanced from solitary confinement, and the only way to keep me from destroying myself was to be with him.”
“I … I’m sorry,” she said, uncertain what kind of response Nicholas was after by sharing that detail about the ursa male rite of maturity. Did he want or pity, or was he trying to hurt her by taunting her?
“Then, just when we thought they might have forgotten us and would leave us locked in together, they’d tear us apart again. We were always close enough to talk … just not close enough to touch.”
“At least you had that,” she said, finally reaching for the anger that bubbled up with welcome heat within her. “You had him. You know him. I only know what Fate has told me, or what you have told me, and that is precious little. I only know this ache inside where my love for him wants to grow, but can’t because I have nothing of him to help it. You had him, Nicholas. You fucking had him.”
“Had is the operative word, Goldilocks. When we find him, you’re the one Fate’s promised him, not me.” He pulled away from her with a bitter final glance. At the edge of the pool, he bent and stretched his long arm out, easily reaching the submerged razor and fishing it from the water.
Without turning back to her, he said, “I can finish without you. I’d like to be alone for a while.”
Chapter 3
Nicholas
Nicholas stared at the silvery glint of the razor’s edge while he waited for Aurum to leave. After several moments of stunned silence, she finally turned and walked out the door.
The entire bath house seemed to grow dull and dreary in her absence, the dark, lonely ache in his soul intensifying now that she was gone.
He swallowed the lump in his throat and looked around, then rose when he spotted what he was searching for. Grabbing the shaving cream and a damp towel Aurum had left behind, he went to one of several small basins occupying a partitioned corner of the bath house. Each one had a mirror above it. Looking at the fixtures, he realized these were proper sinks with both hot and cold running water. It was an odd contrast to the rustic setting of the place, including how the baths themselves were carved into the mountain, the tiles only added as an afterthought.
