by Amelia Jade
When Dominick had been told he was assigned to Cadia proper, he’d been buoyed. True, it wasn’t the border, which was the most exciting of the assignments, which had gone to Asher. Thankfully, however, it wasn’t one of the uninhabited areas between the border and the center of town, as had been assigned to Zeke.
So far though, he’d been bored out of his mind, and had begun to regret that. The buildings were fascinating, yet there was nothing unusual about them. His focus was wavering. Or had been.
A dim trail of smoke and the crowd of people surrounding it right downtown drew his attention. Frowning, Dominick dropped lower, abandoning the thermal he had been riding as he came in for a closer look. It wasn’t a particularly cool day; in fact it was rather oppressively humid, making it terrible weather for a fire.
As the situation resolved itself, he realized that the smoke was listlessly drifting upward from the ruined remains of a building. There wasn’t much left to identify it with. Dominick dropped to the ground.
The crowd heard him coming and parted to allow him to land. He looked around. This wasn’t a part of town he frequented often, and thus he didn’t know all of the buildings by heart, including the cinders of the one in front of him.
“What is going on here?” he asked politely to the giant elk standing nearby, who, like some of the others, had declined to shift into human form.
At the question, the other shifter shuddered and assumed his human form, a tall, gangly ginger-haired boy of perhaps seventeen.
“Not sure,” he said, his voice cracking. The young man cleared his throat, clearly embarrassed to have done that in front of one of the dragon shifters. “Rumor is that some dragons burnt it down though,” he said, ducking his head automatically as if fearing reprisal.
Dominick’s long neck snapped around as his eyes focused on the young shifter. “A dragon did this?” he hissed in angry surprise.
“Dragons, sir,” the elk shifter said nervously. “Plural.”
“Three of them!” a woman said from nearby, bearing the thick bulk in her arms and hips of a bear shifter. “I saw them from my window.” She turned and pointed across the street to a three-story building, with shops on the ground floor and what appeared to be apartments on the upper levels.
“What is this place?” Dominick asked, trying to keep the anger from his deep voice, but only partially succeeding.
“It was my shop,” a thickset man replied, pushing his way through the crowd. “Now it’s a pile of ash,” he said, working his jaw to try and keep his emotions calm.
Dominick frowned. “Who are you?”
“My name is Morrte,” he replied. “I ran a sandwich shop.”
“A damn good one too,” someone in the crowd muttered, receiving noises in agreement from the others gathered around.
Morrte. The name sounded familiar to Dom, but he couldn’t quite come up with why. It would come to him though, he was sure.
“Any ideas on who might have done this to you, Morrte?” he asked, moving forward to more closely inspect the wreckage.
“Not at all,” he said with a shrug, his body language that of someone still in shock.
“No enemies, people that hate you, rivals, anyone you pissed off recently?”
Morrte shook his head, wringing his hands slightly in despair. “No. I actually thought I was a pretty well-liked guy,” he said with a sad smile. “But apparently I was wrong.”
“Nonsense, Morrte!” the elk shifter said, coming forward. “You are well-liked. Nobody knows who would have done this to you.”
The general consensus from the assembled bystanders seemed to agree with that statement, which made the destruction of his shop all the more unusual.
Two figures made their way through the group from his right, and Dominick turned to look at them. They both wore the golden G, indicating they were official Guardians of Cadia. They weren’t two that he was familiar with, besides a general recognition, but Dominick nodded respectfully toward the both of them.
“Did I hear you say that you witnessed three dragons doing this?” the one said, looking in Dominick’s direction.
He noticed that the Guardians did not return his nod of greeting. In fact, Dom realized with surprise, he was being looked at as if he were under suspicion.
“Is there a problem?’ he asked warily, shrugging aside the insult of not being greeted.
The crowd around them seemed to sense something, and a lane appeared almost instantly between him and the two newcomers as the gathered residents backed away.
“Well, there is a burned-down building,” the first Guardian replied. He was tall, not overly broad, with long hair that he kept pulled back up and over his head, where it hung down to his neck.
A closer look at his badge revealed no great surprise. He was a Pegasus.
That explains the hostility.
Every race committed members to the Guardians. That was the rule. Each species of shifters had their own version of Top Scale Academy, where ungainly shifters were transformed into highly trained versions of themselves, becoming one with their animal and learning to use all of its abilities.
That didn’t mean, however, that a shifter who joined the Guardians was as exempt from inter-species politics as perhaps they should be. Dragons were the lords of the sky, and the other flighty races, the Pegasus and gryphons, were jealous of them for it. To the point they actively worked to try and remove the dragons from power.
That enmity was boiling over now as the Guardian in front of him all but accused Dominick of having something to do with it.
“I did happen to notice the burnt building. Saw it while I was flying overhead,” Dom said, emphasizing the fact that he was both a better flier, and had been there first.
The other shifter’s eyes roamed the crowd as he spoke. “And three dragons were involved. A trio, working together.” He paused for effect, his eyes now focusing on Dominick. “May I ask what you and your fellow cadets were up to last night?”
Dom hissed in anger, his wings spreading threateningly. So that was his ploy, to try and blame the destruction on him and his friends? Dom snorted and prepared a scathing reply, but before he could get it out, Morrte stepped in front of him, holding up a hand.
“Who are you?” the Pegasus asked distractedly.
“I’m the owner of this place,” Morrte said bluntly. “And I can tell you that it wasn’t him and his friends.”
The Guardian arched an eyebrow questioningly, inviting Morrte to continue.
“Asher is one of my best, and closest friends,” he said simply.
The Pegasus continued to eye Dominick unsettlingly.
“Is there something wrong with Morrte’s statement?” he asked, his voice a thundercloud prepared to unleash lightning.
The street began to empty as many sensed the impending confrontation.
So far the second Guardian had remained neutral, neither supporting nor stopping his comrade. His attention had been focused on the burned-out husk of a building, and so Dominick had not yet seen the badge close enough to notice what type of shifter it was.
“Are you threatening a Guardian?” the first, still-unnamed shifter asked in reply.
Dom’s temper flared. “Of course not,” he said in clipped tones. “I’m simply asking if you, as a Guardian, believe the story offered by one of the residents of Cadia or not?”
Ire flashed through his opponent’s eyes, but he’d been neatly mousetrapped by Dominick, and the Pegasus knew it. If he continued to call out Dominick as a liar, then he was also therefore calling Morrte a liar, and he had no basis on which to do that.
“Of course not,” he replied, his eyes promising that he wouldn’t forget it. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an investigation to conduct.”
“Oh, you’re excused all right,” Dominick said with a cheerful smile.
The Pegasus seemed ready to trade barbs—or blows—but his partner called him over to the wreckage, ostensibly to point something out, though Domini
ck recognized a distraction technique when he saw one.
“You’re unharmed though?” he asked, turning to Morrte, who nodded.
“Yes, though it will be ages before I can get this fixed and be back in business.” He shook his head and allowed himself to be guided away by others as the tension calmed.
Dominick watched him go for a long moment before he cleared the area around him and returned to the skies, letting the Guardians handle the official part of the business, even if he didn’t think much of the one in particular.
He was grateful, however, for the distraction the incident had provided.
It interrupted the constant stream of thoughts he’d been having about Rhynne. Particularly the ones where she’d been telling the truth, and there was more to the story of her kissing Garviel than he’d known.
Those disturbed him most.
***
He opened the door to his dorm room without caution, his brain fully distracted by Rhynne, the child she was carrying, and how convoluted everything was. Thus it was that his brain took several long seconds before it realized that he was not, in fact, hallucinating.
“You’re in my room,” he said dumbly.
“How very astute,” Rhynne Nova said as she uncurled herself from his bed in a way that, if he wasn’t still angry from his treatment the night before, might have awoken some other thoughts within him.
The room was small, and it felt utterly claustrophobic with the pair of them in there along with the massive ball of tension that seemed to wrap its seedy tendrils into every cubic inch of open space between them. The room was rectangular, with the door in the middle of a long side. His bed rested against the wall to the right, with a nightstand to the right and a wardrobe to the left. A thick oaken bookshelf rested against the far wall, and to his left lay a desk and chair for reading or doing work. That was it, not even a window, as his room was on the interior of the building.
Very, very tight confines for the two of them, when right now he wanted to have as much space as possible.
“Why are you here?” he asked, trying to remain civil. After all, she was here on official Academy business—although highly unlikely given her position on the bed when he arrived.
“Because we need to talk.”
He shrugged. “Not sure I’m interested.”
Rhynne looked at him with what amounted to contempt, her stare so powerful he suddenly felt self-conscious.
She pointed at the chair. “Sit down, and shut up.”
He obeyed rather meekly as she shut the door, and reassumed her perch on the bed, although it was a rather substantially less inviting pose this time when he added in the fire raging in her eyes.
“Better,” she said as he looked at her without speaking. “Now, let’s get some facts out of the way. One,” she said, holding up a finger, “I am carrying your child. Our child. However you want to think about it. Two,” another finger, “that child is both of our responsibilities.”
He nodded, though she hadn’t invited him to do anything yet.
“I have no intention of abandoning our child,” he said firmly, holding up a hand as she made to continue to talk. “Whatever may go on between us, I will be there for them,” he said with a fierce protectiveness he hadn’t even known he possessed. “Understood?”
Rhynne looked at him strangely, but her head moved up and down swiftly. “Three,” she said, continuing as if he hadn’t said anything, “I am not interested in Garviel. Get that through your damn thick skull. And four, he kissed me, uninvited. I was so shocked that I admittedly did not fight him off right away, which is my fault, and I accept that blame. But you will know that I did not want it, and that later that night, I delivered that message as forcefully as I could.”
Dominick noted the way she rubbed her knuckles at that, and wondered just what she had done. Still, so far it was all words, besides accepting a bit of fault about letting herself be kissed. He wasn’t sure what to think of it all.
“Fifth, I shouldn’t have been so cold to you after we got together. Nor been afraid to let you be close to me in public.”
He considered her words as she lapsed into silence, seemingly having said her piece.
“So what did your parents have to say about the baby?” he asked softly.
Rhynne stiffened, but she didn’t say anything, and Dominick had his answer.
“This is the problem, Rhynne. You are afraid of them, and therefore you’re unwilling to tell them the truth, which by the way, they are going to figure out on their own sooner rather than later. Then you’ll be in an even worse jam.”
She looked down, avoiding his piercing gaze, and he desperately wanted to reach out and move her reddish-brown hair out of her face as it fell across it now, but he couldn’t. Nor could he kiss her plump lips or caress her cheeks. There was this object between them that was preventing both of them from truly acting on their feelings.
Dominick wasn’t stupid. He could see that she cared for him, but until the issue hanging between them could be dealt with, their feelings for each other would never be truly allowed to blossom. He regretted that fact, but he wasn’t going to enter into some sort of secret relationship. Rhynne would have to deal with her own inner demons. He would support her however he could of course, but she was the one who would have to do so.
And as he stared across at her, the distance felt much farther than it truly was, as if a gulf yawned between them.
“It’s not that easy,” she said heavily. “I know it should be. Believe me Dominick, intellectually I understand it.”
“Perhaps,” he said gently, trying a different tactic for a change, “you need to re-examine why you’re even doing it.”
She frowned. “Doing what? Telling my parents about you? I’m doing it because I care for you, and because you care for me. But I care for them as well. They are my parents, Dominick, and I can’t hurt them.”
He nodded. “And they won’t like it, because they assume it would be bad for you to be with me, correct? That I would not be a good fit, and thus you would not be as happy?”
Rhynne shrugged. “Essentially.”
“A mother will do that, you know,” he said. “Perhaps that’s what you need to start thinking of. Don’t do it for me,” he urged. “Do it for our child. For our daughter, or our son. You owe it to them to ensure they grow up with parents who can be there, involved, and unencumbered by exterior factors.”
Rhynne jerked back, her face full of pain as he spoke, and he could see the blood draining from her face as she realized the truth of what he was saying. Tears formed in her eyes, and this time Dominick did go to her, wiping them away with his thumbs as he squatted down at the edge of the bed to be on her level.
“Okay,” she whispered, terrified. “I’ll do it.”
The tension in the room lifted measurably, and Dominick sighed in relief as he pulled her head to his chest. He wanted to do more, to lift her chin and press his lips to hers. His entire body was aflame with desire, which, combined with the more nurturing aspect of it all, made his refusal to do so torture.
He’d gotten through to her, giving her not one, but two powerful reasons to confront her parents, who seemed to be such scary figures to her. It had worked, and perhaps now they could begin to press forward with their relationship and see what was truly there between them. Dominick relished that more than just about anything else in this world.
“But I need you with me when I do,” she whispered from within his embrace.
Oh.
Shit.
Chapter Ten
Rhynne
“I would have been with you from the beginning, if you’d let me.”
She looked up at him. “Really?”
He nodded, eyebrows raised in surprise. “Yes, of course. I’m pretty sure that night I made the first move. It wasn’t just because you’re beautiful, Rhynne.” Dom smiled. “I’ve been crazy about you for a while.”
Her heart caught in her throat. “I didn’t rea
lize you cared that strongly. Not at first, at least. I thought you just wanted something physical.” She looked down, ashamed. “That’s why I was so standoffish, you know. I had to keep you at a distance, because I couldn’t provide that sort of unattached, uncaring agreement.”
Dominick sat down heavily from his squatting position in front of her. “That’s why you did it?” he asked in disbelief.
Turning her head so that he couldn’t see the guilt written on her face, Rhynne nodded, pursing her lips as she tried not to cry.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said helplessly as the tears came back, clouding her eyes over with a watery cover. “Clearly I’m no good at this part of life, am I?” she said with a sarcastic laugh. “I could do the whole Guardian and soldier bit. Always was good at that. Executing missions, obeying orders, the whole lot. Driving myself to do better was just natural. But emotions? Relationships and social interaction?” She shook her head. “Hopelessly inept.”
Dominick didn’t say anything as he got up and sat on the edge of the bed next to her. Rhynne immediately tensed up at his closeness, unsure of what to do next.
“Welcome to the club,” he said. “I’ve been terrified of you, and so refrained from saying anything.”
Despite the tears, Rhynne managed an actual laugh. “Of me? What?”
He joined her in a laugh. “Yes, you. Think about it. I’m just a cadet, trying to learn my way. And here you come along, this super-hot badass Guardian, who also happens to be one of my instructors. What guy thinks he’s good enough for a woman like that?”
“I think you’re overstating things a bit,” she protested.
“How I feel about you, or how small you made me feel?” he teased, then whispered in her ear. “I’ll deny it if you tell anyone, but you make me weak in the knees.”
