“You shouldn't have run, Dana,” Darien said in a voice as soft as velvet. He had a young look to him. His blonde hair was pale and his unmarred skin looked as if it never needed a shave. His grey eyes were big and looked like a puppy’s. He had the most innocent looking face. But he was my monster. “You should have stayed here with me. I bought you. You’re my property. Don’t you know that?”
Darien let me go and looked me up and down, sneering. “I see that Kagen took care of you. What did you do for him, hmm?” He leaned forward and whispered in my ear. “Did you let him fuck you like a good whore? With my baby in your belly?” All at once he backhanded me yet somehow the stinging pain of it made me feel human at least. “Tried to steal my child…” He grabbed my hand and led me through the house. He must have known I had no choice but to follow him wherever he wanted, yet he seemed to want to grab my arm with a grip so hard I thought he would crack the bone, it hurt so badly.
Darien dragged me up a sweeping, red carpeted staircase and even when I fell a couple of times, he pulled at my arm so hard, I thought he would dislocate my shoulder. He screamed at me the whole time. He called me just about every awful thing you could call a woman and I just kept going along, attempting to keep up with him as he roughly dragged me through his mansion.
It was yet more galling that there were a number of witnesses around, silently watching the whole thing. It had always been like that. Darien had a butler and maids, a sizeable staff to keep his place up. He’d entertained and thrown parties, inviting the most desired guests of the magical underbelly of the world. Of course, I never went to these parties myself. I had not been like David, a pet to be brought out and shown off. I wasn’t special enough for that. The child I gave birth to would be the special one. I was just breeding stock. I was no more useful than my womb.
This house wasn’t the same one where I’d been locked up before. But it wasn’t very different. I don’t know why he’d moved. Perhaps he’d been afraid I would come back with a mate to bring him down which was exactly what I would have done. If he hadn’t moved, I couldn’t have told David exactly where to go to find him. But now… I didn’t know if there was anyway David could possibly find me. Darien was pretty good at staying under the radar as far as I knew. You’d have to have contacts with some criminal sorts to get near him.
He took me down one corridor and then another. I had enough experience with Darien to actually be relieved he had at least taken me upstairs and not down. I had not been chained up in a dungeon and tortured for years like David, but I had been left in a damp little cell in Darien’s basement before. It was always too cold and I knew whenever I was left there, that I would not be seeing food for awhile. Now Darien took me to a nicely decorated bedroom. It was a bit dingy and drafty, furnished with old antiques. I was starting to wonder if Darien had actually bought this house or only murdered its previous owners.
“You’re going to have my baby,” Darien snarled as he swung me painfully around by the arm and threw me into the room. “And then you’re going to die.”
He smirked at me, shaking his head as if I were nothing more to him than a misbehaving dog and shut the door, leaving me cowering on the floor. I heard him lock it but I still had an urge to run to the door and pound on it. I wanted to scream and sob. But I still had no control over my body. I found myself calmly getting to my feet and lying down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.
I was left alone for several hours and even alone, trapped inside the cell of my mind, it felt like torture.
Eventually, I did feel the curse or whatever it was wear off. It felt like finally being able to breathe as I sat up of my own volition and looked down at my hands, flexing my fingers experimentally. All at once, I burst into tears. All the pain and torment of the last day came over me and I cried until my eyes were sore, until the lump in my throat went away. I cried so much I thought I would run out of tears. I made my blouse wet for crying and wiped my nose and when I was finally spent I curled up in a ball on my side.
I could think about David now without imagining him the wrong way, those awful intrusive thoughts now gone. I remembered now how wonderful his arms felt around me and how beautiful he was when he looked at me with such adoration.
I thought back to our night out, reliving every moment. I had been here before, trapped under the thumb of Darien. I had escaped through sheer luck and I was smart enough to know, it would likely never happen again. He would keep me prisoner here until I gave birth to his child and then he would kill me.
I couldn’t begin to hope that David would save me. I wanted to have faith but after how I had treated him before I’d run off. He must have thought I truly hated him. I wanted to believe. I wanted it so badly. But all the old lessons of what I was and what I was good for were coming back to haunt me now. Even before I’d been bought by Darien, I had been taught that I was basically breeding stock. I was good for the heir I could produce. That was what made me valuable. I would be treated well, they had assured me. And I shouldn’t be ungrateful. I shouldn’t think I deserved much more than that. It was a reason why I hadn’t bothered to find my parents when I’d run away or when I’d made a home at David’s. I had no interest in seeing the people who had made me believe that.
And now, I was starting to believe it all I again as I curled up on the bed and wept.
Chapter Fourteen: David
“Drink this,” Jessie said, handing me a highball glass half-full of whiskey. “And tell us what happened. Don’t rush. We’ll need all the details.”
I had made it a habit of going out at night to save shifters, yet I couldn’t save my own mate. I’d flown around for ages looking for Dana until finally giving up. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt like such a failure. I’d failed Dana and I failed her baby. I didn’t deserve her. Perhaps she’d been better off leaving. Yet that was the stupidest part of me thinking. Dana was flying off to her doom. There was no way she’d been in her right mind. Something had been controlling her, making her act that way.
I’d only realized that last bit later. First I’d flown home and simply stood in front of my house, on that shady lane lined with narrowly built mansions on the Upper East Side. I’d watched cars zip by, felt the breeze on my face, moved when somebody came bustling down the street. All the time I’d just been frozen, flashing back to what Dana had said to me and then to my own imprisonment.
She had been taken back by her captor. I should’ve tried harder to end him first, to stop this before it had started. But it was too late for that now. I had to figure out where she was and how I would get through to her if she was still bound by mind control.
I turned around to go back in the house and I flashed on myself, chained to the wall, starving and too thin for a dragon and still hurting from the high voltage shocks The Collector had punished me with for not playing along for his guests. I saw Dana there, in my position. I picture her changed to a wall and at the mercy of Darien.
I had a terrible urge to breathe fire. I wanted to destroy everything in my sight just out of pure wrath for what had happened to my mate. But that would do her no good. It was time to get to work.
I called Jessie first, since he had been investigating Darien.
“I meant to call you,” he’d said over the phone. “I’ve narrowed him down to Boston. I don’t have an address but I kept pressuring contacts and I finally tracked down a dragon of that description to Boston.”
I was able to get a hold of all my club friends. There was Jessie and Justin who showed up immediately. Jude was the youngest of us, the wealthy son of two billionaire dragons who seemed to have no direction at all but had a lot of fun. We didn’t exactly have much in common but I rather liked having him around sometimes even though he was so different from myself. He made things lighter when I felt broody. I suppose Dana was able to do the same thing in spades.
I hadn’t expected to get a hold of Rob, who was a movie star. He was always off shooting a movie on location. Then th
ere was Michael, who as far as I knew, was the oldest of us and had also never had a job in his life. He was often traveling the world somewhere, righting the wrongs of shifters. He seemed to do what I liked to do in New York but on a global scale. I texted Rob and Michael all the details and told the others to keep them in the loop on what was happening, but I didn’t expect them to appear. They were always away and I needed to move fast.
“It started this morning,” I said slowly. “Dana usually sleeps in bed with me and I get up first when the AI wakes me. But this morning I woke up and she was gone. That’s fine but then I went down for breakfast and Miles noted that she’d been acting a little odd. We thought it was nothing. But she was very distant and sort of...creepy. We thought it was a hormonal thing, to be honest. But then she pushed me away…”
I explained everything in as much detail as I could remember. It was difficult to relate. A part of me still subjected to that dark voice inside still wondering if I had seen what I wanted to see. But Miles had already spoken to me, assuring me that I wasn’t crazy. He had seen our relationship progress and from everything he had witnessed, Dana truly cared for me. Whatever this was, it wasn’t my fault, he’d said.
“I think it’s a spell,” Justin said, when I was finished.
We were all in the sitting room and I couldn’t help but take the edge off with some smooth whiskey. I was having a little trouble even keeping it together. It had only been an hour since Dana had taken off and then Miles had tried to calm me down and I’d texted the club immediately for help.
“Nobody was close enough to get in a spell,” I muttered. “We never go out.”
“You said you went to the ballet and the restaurant,” Jessie said. “And-”
“Oh…” I rubbed my eyes, a little embarrassed. Of course, that was true. “Yeah, obviously… But I feel like I would’ve sensed a spell? It’s hard to cast a spell very subtly and you have to be standing very close to the person for something like mind control to work.”
“What did she drink?” Justin said. “What did she eat? A potion could work for mind control and it could have been snuck into her food.”
“We went to The Circe,” I said, racking my brain. “And to a bar after. She drank a Shirley Temple...but wouldn’t a potion make things taste funny?”
Jessie squinted and sat back, scratching his head. “It can be difficult to sneak somebody a potion without them noticing the taste is off. Especially poison or anything strong enough for mind control. I know a lot of potions, honestly. I don’t know one that isn’t fairly pungent. Mind control potions often taste strongly of flowers. She would have noticed the difference.”
“How do you know so much about this shit?” Jude raised an eyebrow, warily appraising Jessie. I was curious myself. As distracted as I was in the interest of finding Dana as soon as possible, Jessie made all of us curious sometimes.
A couple of us thought he might be a hitman.
“I get around,” Jessie said mysteriously, and tossed Jude a knowing wink.
“Flowers,” I muttered. Something was bothering me. I felt like the answer was right in front of me and I couldn’t see it. My dragon was so impatient, just that was distracting. He wanted to go and fight Darien. He wanted to breathe fire and melt him just like he’d melted The Collector and all his men.
I wondered where she was right now. Had she already returned to Darien? If she was really under some kind of mind control, was her consciousness locked inside somewhere, trying to get out? It was a horrible thought. Somehow I would have felt slightly better knowing her consciousness was asleep somehow. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking of the way her mouth and eyes had twitched even as she’d tried to insist that she didn’t want me, that she didn’t love me, that she needed to go…
Had those little twitches been a sign of resistance?
Jessie and Justin were discussing floral based potions and I wrinkled my nose when Jude leaned over and I caught a strong whiff of his cologne and all of a sudden, it came to me.
Flowers…
“The perfume,” I whispered.
“Perfume?” Jude said, looking up in interest. “What perfume? It’s cologne, alright. It’s French. It might be a little flower but-”
“No,no, no,” I said, waving a hand. Now Jesse and Justin stopped discussing and sat up, paying attention. “There was an old woman when Dana and I were walking down Fifth…” I pushed my hair back and shook my head. It was all so obvious now. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. “She sprayed perfume right in Dana’s face as she walked by-”
“That’s it,” Jessie said firmly.
“But don’t we need to prove it somehow?” I said.
“Yes, yes,” Justin said, nodding. “Not just for your peace of mind either. If it’s something permanent, we’re going to need to brew an antidote for her.”
“Do you still have what she was wearing?” Jessie said urgently. “It hasn’t been laundered yet, has it?”
“No!” I jumped up from my seat and my friends followed me as I hurried out to the corridor and all but ran to the main staircase, taking them two at a time. Every second felt like another second that Dana could be suffering. “We were wearing our coats as well,” I said. “I think some of it would have gotten on the coat and not the dress.”
“That would be good, if I had a sample,” Jessie said, already right behind me as I barged into Dana’s room. “I can brew but I’m no good at tracing ingredients myself…”
I glanced at Jessie in alarm as I went to the big walk-in closet that for its size was still practically barren. Miles had bought Dana some clothes, but nothing near enough to fill the place up.
The voice that was not dark and tragic insisted that we would save Dana and she would be just fine. Then I would bring her back here. I would bring her wherever she wanted to go. I would buy her all the clothes she could stand and I would spoil her child rotten. And if the day ever came when she truly didn’t want to be with me anymore, not because of some monster’s mind control but because she simply didn’t want to, I would let her go. It would be incredibly painful but the two of us were both former prisoners. We knew too well that freedom was everything. I would never presume to even come close to taking hers away.
I found the coat and tossed it to Jessie, who had just said he had no ability to trace potions. Yet he took it anyway, carefully laying it over one arm. “Now we call over my witch friend. I may not be good at tracing spells, but she’s fantastic.”
“There’s always a witch,” Jude said lightly and he smiled at me so that I actually felt a bit lighter. He did have a sort of contagious cheeriness about him. He was a bit of a rogue, it was rumoured. He was like how Justin had used to be in that way. Yet at the moment, he was just a solid friend as they all were. It made me feel incredibly grateful to have them. When I had first come back from Germany and found that my parents were dead, I’d only had Miles to rely on. Thank God for him. And he had led me to the club and I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
We headed back downstairs and Justin must have been able to tell I was tense because he reached over to squeeze my shoulder. “I know how this feels. Trust me, dude. I’ve been in the throes of that early love. You don’t know whether you’re coming or going. You’re sure she’s your mate and life has just handed you your every happiness and then something comes along to take it away again. It’s terrifying.”
I took a deep breath as we made our way back to the sitting room. I was confident in my friends. They were all smart dragons with a lot of resources between them and double the amount of strength and bravery. Between us, we would find Darien.
As long as I got to be the one to kill him.
“How is Nicole?” I said to Justin. “And Tyler? I’m sorry, I haven’t come to dinner. You keep inviting me and-”
“Don’t worry about it,” Justin said as we entered the sitting room again. “We will get all this sorted out and then I’ll have both you and Dana over to the penthouse for
dinner. From what you’ve told me, Dana and Nicole would get along swimmingly.”
“From what you’ve told me, I agree,” I said, nodding.
I practically had to force myself to take another drink as Jessie texted his witch friend for urgent assistance and then it was just a bunch of waiting for her to arrive. When she finally showed up, I was a bit taken aback. Jessie had spoken of her as if she were an expert. I trusted Jessie implicitly, but Jordan didn’t exactly scream experienced witch. She was young. She hardly looked like she was out of college and she wore thick glasses and arrived on an electric scooter. She wore her hair in a knot on top of her head and dressed in jeggings and an oversized t-shirt that was apparently referencing a famous YouTuber.
Jessie must’ve noticed my reaction because he leaned over and whispered, “Yeah okay, she’s a Gen Z witch. That’s what they’re like. She’s good. Trust me.”
“What have you got?” Jordan said. She was carrying an enormous backpack that made her look a bit like a human camel. Jessie tossed her the coat and she simply nodded and made her way to the kitchen where she unpacked her backpack after putting some annoying type of music on her phone.
She stood staring closely at the coat for so long, I thought she’d fallen into a trance but then she just nodded to herself and laid it out on the counter. She set out little vials and droppers and a few small containers of liquid and at one point stopped and squinted at us after squeezing a few drops of various liquids onto the coat.. “All you guys are billionaires, huh?”
Justin and Jude nodded, looking a little sheepish and she scoffed. “Ugh. Capitalism.”
“I’m not a billionaire,” Jessie said, seeming a little defensive.
“I’m a millionaire,” I said, shrugging.
“You poor thing,” Jordan said dryly.
“My mate is being mind controlled by a psychopath,” I said, practically spitting the words. “Can you save the class warfare?”
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