by Riley Storm
“What’s life like in the big city?”
“I’m not sure I would call Kennewick Falls the ‘big city’,” she said. “It’s barely classified as a city instead of a town. If it even is. I don’t know.”
“It’s big compared to Five Peaks,” Braz pointed out.
“I guess. But I’ve been to the coast, to bigger cities. It’s still tiny.”
“Not my point,” he countered, pointing out that she was avoiding answering the question.
Grace knew it.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I have a job that I mostly like.”
“Mostly? What do you do?” Braz seemed to perk up now that they were talking about her.
Or was that just her imagination?
“I work with underprivileged youth,” she said. “Those who have had a rough go, experienced trauma, that sort of thing.”
“Wow. Good for you,” Braz said. “That’s really admirable Grace.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I just want to give them some semblance of hope, a person in their life they can come to if things are tough. Something I didn’t have.”
Braz nodded. She’d told him long ago about her being an orphan, that her parents had been killed when she was young. Her aunt had raised her, but out of necessity, not desire. When she was eighteen Grace had left, and never gone back.
Now she was trying to provide something that she’d wished had been present in her life. An adult who cared. For her those issues were, thankfully, long in the past and she’d worked through them with her own therapist in her early twenties.
But that didn’t stop her from wanting to help others like her. Those who deserved a chance, who with a little guidance and caring, might be able to turn their lives around.
“What parts of it don’t you enjoy?” Braz asked.
“The corporate part of it,” she said dully. “You would think that the term ‘non-profit’ meant, you know, non-profit, right?”
Braz blinked slowly.
“Anyway, they work to wrangle every damn dollar they can out of anything and everyone. It’s kind of despicable. But they actually provide the services they claim to, so nobody seems to care.” She sighed unhappily. “But they could be doing so much more if they tried.”
“Sounds like you should be running the place.”
“I wish,” she joked. “But I prefer keeping my feet on the ground, working with the kids themselves. I feel as if I’m best at that.”
“I’m sorry that you have to put up with the corporate nonsense,” Braz told her.
“Yeah,” she said, thinking about it all.
The dragon shifted slightly. “I’m sorry about a lot of things,” he added in a softer tone.
Grace waved a hand at him. “It’s fine. This whole situation is messed up. We’ll go back in a few hours, it’s okay. Don’t sweat it. I agreed to come along after all.”
“Huh?” The sole dragon eye partially closed in what she assumed was an approximation of a frown.
Grace froze. Braz hadn’t been talking about their current predicament she realized. Instead he’d been talking about something else. Their past.
“Can we not talk about that? I would really rather not relive that whole thing, if at all possible,” she said tightly into the silence that followed, wishing she’d just ignored his words. This wasn’t a topic she wanted to bring up, and out here, trapped in the forest, she couldn’t exactly come up with a reason to avoid it either.
“Um. Of course, yeah, sure,” Braz said, looking away. “Sorry, shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“Thanks.”
“What do you want to talk about then?” he asked, putting the ball in her court.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just not that, okay? It’s embarrassing.”
The dragon head came up off the floor, his eye focusing on her intently.
It is so weird to stare at only one eye. Jeeze. This whole situation is weird though. I should never have come back to this godforsaken town!
“Why is it embarrassing?” Braz asked.
“What? Why wouldn’t it be?” she said, all but gaping at him in shock. “Do you even remember what happened?”
“Of course. I was there,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, but you were you, Braz. Not me. Did you ever think about it from my side, from my point of view?”
The dragon was silent.
“I didn’t think so. But then, why should you?” she said with a shrug. “Braz, you told me, in front of a lot of people, that Jack was cheating on me, his fiancée. I know you were trying to help me, but do you have any idea how embarrassing that was?”
“Um.” Braz wisely shut his mouth, not saying anything more as she glared at him.
“But I didn’t believe you. I told everyone you were lying, because I thought you were trying to break us up. That you wanted me for yourself,” she said. “I took Jack’s side. I went ahead and married him. Then what happens? I catch the bastard cheating on me anyway! After I’d denied it in front of everyone.”
“Grace, it’s not your fault,” Braz tried to interject, but she silenced him with a single upraised index finger.
“You warned me, Braz. Others sided with you, though they weren’t open about it. Everyone knew that I’d been warned. So when I left him and divorced him, I became the idiot for having stayed.”
“I’m sure you had your reasons,” Braz said, trying to stick up for her. “I don’t blame you for it.”
“You should!” she snapped, old emotions boiling over. “I stayed because I was a coward, Braz. That’s the only reason. I was too scared of leaving him.”
“Why?” he asked quietly.
“Because, Braz, I was twenty-nine. Starting over again at that age? I was terrified at the prospect. I didn’t want to do it. I was scared that nobody would ever want me. That I’d never get the chance to have a family, to have children.”
Braz looked down. He was quiet for a long time after that, letting Grace wrestle with her own inner demons.
“That’s not true at all,” he said, speaking up at last.
She focused on him, sensing he wasn’t done speaking.
“Someone would always want you.”
The dragon eye met hers once more, and Grace realized he wasn’t talking in generalities.
He meant himself.
Chapter Ten
Grace
“Braz,” she said softly, trailing off, not even sure where to begin.
Until this point she’d been sitting on the ground staring across at the dragon. Now she got to her feet, feeling the urge to move, to do something instead of just sit still. The topic was making her most uncomfortable.
“That was a long time ago,” she finally finished.
“Not that long,” Braz countered. “Things haven’t changed Grace.”
“That’s just not true,” she told him, crossing her arms. “I’ve moved on. I left Five Peaks and my life here behind. I have a new one now. In Kennewick Falls. With a job, and an apartment. I was even looking at getting a cat.”
Braz’s head lifted high on the long, sinuous neck. He still kept one eye on her, but it was obvious the reaction was one that signified unhappiness.
“So what?” he challenged gently. “And?”
Grace licked her lips. How could she explain this to him? That they couldn’t just…just, whatever he was suggesting. It didn’t work that way!
Why not?
It just didn’t, she told herself. There was no way.
“People change, Braz. They move on, they find other people.” She gave him a pointed look, suggesting she knew full well that someone as attractive as him didn’t remain single for long.
The dragon face stared back, unblinking,
“Whatever,” she said, hoping she was reading it properly. “Are you telling me that you stayed single for five years? This whole time you’ve just held yourself, hoping that I might come back, and that you could have a…a, I don’t even know what to say?”<
br />
Braz was completely still. Quiet.
“I don’t believe that. There’s no way. Braz we weren’t ever actually anything! Why would you do that?”
“My choices are my choices,” he said quietly. “I just…felt it.”
Grace scratched at her forehead, trying to figure out what the heck to say to that. It was so confident, so profound. So insane!
“Five years, Braz. That’s a long time.”
“Not for the right thing.”
“I can’t do this,” she said abruptly, throwing her hands in the air. “It’s too much, Braz. Too much, too soon. I come back to this place, and not even two days later, I find out you’re a dragon, men are chasing after me, and now... No. I can’t.”
Braz was silent. She could sense that her words, again, had hurt him. What else was she supposed to say? Grace wasn’t about to start lying, or concealing how she felt. That wasn’t beneficial to anyone in any way.
“It hurts, Braz. I haven’t been here since the day I left Jack. Not set foot in this town once. Now you tell me you’ve had what, feelings for me, this entire time?”
“You knew how I felt back then.”
“I knew you were interested,” she said. “We were friends. It was…I don’t know. Maybe for a bit there I was a little interested. But I chose Jack.” She snorted. “It was a terrible choice, Braz, but I haven’t spent the past five years pining away over you, I’m sorry.”
The dragon grinned. “I wouldn’t expect you to! Not in the slightest.”
Grace blinked. “Wait. You wouldn’t?”
“No of course not. That’s silly. You had to move on past Jack. Then there was the whole new life you were working on there. Lots going on for you.” The dragon snorted.
Was that smoke that came out his nostrils? No, that would be far too cartoonish. She must have been imagining it…
“I didn’t spend every day staring at a picture of you, thinking of you nonstop,” he said. “I’m an adult, I can carry on, Grace. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t still feel a pull toward you.”
“I…oh man Braz. I couldn’t do this even if I wanted to. If I moved back to Five Peaks. Started seeing you, trying to figure out…whatever this is between us, it would be a nightmare. Everyone would see me as the girl who should have listened to you years ago but didn’t.”
The dragon head tilted to the side. “The best time to plant a tree was a decade ago,” he said sagely. “The second best time is today.”
“Okay there mister philosopher. That’s some heavy dragon advice that I don’t need.”
Little booms of thunder sounded as Braz laughed. “Not mine. That’s an ancient Chinese proverb, I’ll have you know.”
“Oh. Well. Whatever, doesn’t matter.” She sighed, too overwhelmed by everything going on. “I’m not interested Braz.”
She wasn’t. That would open a can of worms she had closed tightly many years earlier. Back when she’d first met Braz, and had felt a pull toward him. Grace had made her choice, and it wasn’t Braz.
Then. It wasn’t Braz then.
That didn’t mean she hadn’t felt anything. There was a definite connection, but she’d already been engaged to Jack. To follow it would have been inappropriate, so she’d suppressed it.
But Jack wasn’t in the picture now. Nobody was preventing her from seeing if maybe there was something there or not…
“Grace—”
“Is this what you wanted to talk about over lunch?” she asked, interrupting whatever he was going to say.
“Well, I mean, I wasn’t planning on being quite so up front and abrupt about it,” he said. “I was hoping to just sort of reconnect with you. Have a fun time. Maybe talk about seeing you again before you left. Or coming up to visit you.”
Grace nodded slowly, as the questions piled up. “If that’s how you felt, Braz, if you’ve carried this flame all this time, then why didn’t you ever call me? Come see how I was. Reach out to me?”
“You asked me to step away,” he said, staring at her, not blinking. “You made your choice, that you were going to stay with Jack, and you asked me to not come around. I respected that.”
“And after?”
“Afterward you were hurting, and badly, I would imagine. You left town, a clear sign you wanted to start over again, go somewhere new. I assumed you wouldn’t want your past following you there. So I respected your desire for distance, to be alone in Kennewick Falls.”
Grace bit her lip. That all sounded exactly like Braz. Respectful almost to a fault.
“When you came back,” he continued. “I just couldn’t. I knew I should have stayed away, kept my distance, but I just couldn’t not be any closer to you. I had to see you, to talk to you.”
“So you crashed a funeral for it?”
Braz frowned. “I wasn’t really crashing it. My family footed the bill for the entire thing.”
Grace frowned. “That was a generous thing for you to do. But you hated Jack. Why would you do something like that? After so long, and after what he did to me?”
“It only seemed right,” Braz said quietly. “We’re here to protect humanity you know. Well, most of us.”
Something was missing here. A key piece of information.
“Braz, just, hold on. I don’t understand. What does you protecting humanity have to do with Jack?”
“We wanted to show that even though we have bad apples too, we’re mostly good. The Cado—that’s our mob, or mafia, I guess—don’t represent us all.”
Grace threw both her hands up in the air, palms to Braz. “Just hold on. Stop. What are you talking about Braz? Why do these Cado matter? What is it?”
“Your ex died because he was involved with us,” Braz said quietly. “It was one of the Cado who killed him.”
Grace’s jaw dropped open. “Jack was what?!”
Chapter Eleven
Braz
He was cursing himself. Of course Grace wouldn’t know any of this! Why would she?
Braz had made a terrible assumption, thinking that for some reason Grace already knew the reasons for Jack’s demise.
“Yes,” he told her. “On the side Jack did questionable computer work.”
“He was a hacker, you mean,” she said dryly. “I know, I was pretty sure before I left that he was doing that sort of thing.”
“Yes,” Braz said, forging ahead. The bandage had already been ripped off. He may as well lay everything out for her now. No point in holding back.
“I still can’t believe he went so far down that he got involved with bad dragons. The—who did you call them?”
“The Cado,” Braz said. “That’s our name for them. There is an official group, though I don’t think this one was part of it. It’s also a generic term we use for any dragon who does harm to humans on purpose. He—Brolle—I believe he was the latter, not the former. But yes, Jack had dealing with my kind.”
“I’m so glad I got out of there when I did,” Grace said, distracted by the revelation of just how far her ex had sunk before he died.
“Whatever Jack did, he didn’t deserve death,” Braz said. Though he hated that one of his kind had been responsible for it, the events were now leading to his reconnection with Grace. He was torn over how to feel about it all, feeling guilty about the fact he was happy that a man’s death was giving him an opportunity to tell her how he felt.
His mind was a right mess.
“I see.” Grace was quiet, thinking.
“Yeah. I’m sorry, I don’t really know much about what happened before he tried to rob us.”
Grace’s jaw dropped open. “He tried to rob you?”
Braz could only nod in confirmation. “Yes. He was hired, as far as we can tell, by the dragon that killed him. It was probably fitting to him, that he would get revenge on me by proxy. I’m sure he blamed me for your leaving.”
Grace lifted a hand, index finger upraised. “Just give me a moment,” she said, walking away across the clearing.
; Braz could hear her mutterings to herself if he focused, but he gave her the privacy she deserved. This was a lot to handle for someone so new to the world of dragons. Braz should have been taking it slower, introducing it to her bit by bit, but what was he supposed to do when she was in danger?
He could only hope that she was up for it, that Grace could handle all the added weight he was dumping on her, and still maintain her calm.
Across the clearing she screamed.
So much for staying calm.
Watching her intently, Braz didn’t detect any signs of a breakdown occurring. Grace was still talking to herself, likely working it all out, convincing herself that yes, this really was happening, and trying to absorb all the new information.
Finally, after nearly ten minutes, she pulled herself upright, chest rising and falling slowly with a deep breath. Then Grace walked back across the clearing. She strode right up to his front shoulder where his head lay on the ground and reached out.
“Real,” she said softly to herself. “Still real. And warm, really warm. Not unpleasant to touch, but not cold. Cause this isn’t fake. I climbed up on top of you and was flying. We flew. Magic tricks couldn’t do all this. Okay.”
Braz let her talk herself through everything.
“My ex-husband was a hacker for hire. A rogue dragon. You call rogue dragons Cado. Yes?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “It means to drop or fall.”
“The Fallen,” Grace said quietly, making the connection immediately.
Braz didn’t reply, she had it right.
“One of the Cado killed him, after that same dragon hired him to do work for him. Yes?”
“Correct,” he said. “We thought he was just trying to tie up loose ends. To prevent anyone from knowing who he was—at the time, we had no idea who it was.”
“But now you think differently?” she asked, perking up.
“Yes,” Braz said. He too had been thinking.
“Why?”
“Because of the men looking for you,” Braz said. “The only reason they would be after you is if you know something, or have something that they want, that relates to Jack.”
“I don’t have anything,” Grace said. “I haven’t talked to him in years. Long before he really went off the deep end of the hacker life.”
