by Amelia Jade
He was right; she certainly didn’t feel claustrophobic up here. The helipad was open on all sides and provided wonderful views. There was a little bit of fear at being on an essentially unsecured rooftop. There were no barriers on any side, three of which plunged straight down to the ground. The fourth led back to the elevator and various other rooftop apparatus.
It felt strange to be up there on her own. So much of the past few days had been spent with Caine at her side, that Annalise had come to just sort of expect him to be there. She had, she realized with a start, grown accustomed to his presence. To having him nearby.
A strange feeling accompanied that realization. Annalise was forced to review it in detail, not used to the sensation.
“Holy shit,” she exclaimed.
She missed him.
He’d been gone for five minutes at best. How was it that she missed having him around already? Annalise didn’t miss anybody or anything. She was a lone wolf, moving through life by herself. It was safer that way. There was nobody to control her, and nobody to betray her. Just the way she wanted it.
So how was it that Caine had already wormed his way into her life to the point that she wanted to chase after him, to ask him not to leave? What did that mean? Lots of questions were being raised lately, and all of them had their root in the same place: Caine. He was making her question her place in the world, her decisions, everything, all without actually telling her she should. He simply did what he felt was right, and so much of that was at odds with how she knew the world to be. Annalise couldn’t reconcile the two.
Her troubling thoughts were interrupted by the sound of an approaching helicopter.
Curious, she followed the sound as the black object in the sky grew closer, until it was hovering nearby. Someone in it was waving at her, and it took Annalise an embarrassingly long time to realize that they wanted her to move her ass out of the way so that they could land. Waving a hand in apology, she trotted down the stairs. The helicopter dropped out of the sky onto the pad and she held a hand over her face to cover it from the gusts of wind the blades stirred up.
Doors rolled open and a tall man with long, black hair like hers emerged. He had it tied back in a braid behind his head. His eyes scanned the platform, and then he nodded. A second man emerged. He was verifiably huge. A giant amongst giants, he probably outweighed even Caine by ten or twenty pounds. His ash-blond hair and bright blue eyes surveyed the landing platform before he turned back and gave his hand to another occupant.
The brunette who exited was short, her hair cut back as well, and she was the only one of the trio who wore a military uniform. The black-haired man wore an outfit that had military lines, though the dark black décor wasn’t the usual green or blue she might associate with the military. Plus there were no badges, rank, decorations, or anything else to identify him.
The woman strode across the platform, the blond-haired beast sticking to her side as if they were attached. Behind them the chopper lifted back into the sky. She came to a halt at the top of the stairs, giving Annalise a long, evaluating look.
“Colonel Mara?”
The woman smiled, a gentle, friendly thing designed to put her at ease.
Annalise was instantly on guard. She recognized those smiles.
“You must be Annalise. These are my friends. Kallore,” she indicated the blond, “and Vanek.” The dark-haired man.
“Nice to meet you,” she said, backing away warily as the trio descended. “Caine told me he called you, though he didn’t really say why or who you were besides your name.”
The woman smiled. “Well, I sort of run the building. And everyone who occupies it works for me. Does that help?”
She frowned. “Works for you? They’re in the military?”
Colonel Mara smiled again. “Sort of. It’s kind of complicated. Want to come in and we can talk some more?”
“Talk about what?”
The smile became genuine now.
“About how we’re going to help you deal with your past. For good.”
Chapter Fifteen
Caine
He scratched at his scar, idly tracing it from his neck down across his chest. Fucking dragon claws.
It always started to itch in tension-filled situations. As a dragon shifter those were often few and far between. But unguarded talks involving emotions and serious topics almost always qualified. Caine just wasn’t mentally suited toward those sorts of things. Give him a bad guy to fight or an evil king to ransack, and he was much happier.
It was a sort of combination of the two that brought them together today, and he was just going to tack his own personal thoughts onto the end of it. Probably.
Maybe.
To his brothers the subject of his own dark thoughts was something they had forgiven him for long ago. He wondered if it even crossed their minds anymore. Did they still dwell on it and secretly harbor resentment toward him for it, like he suspected? Or had they since moved on in the intervening centuries, forgiving and forgetting, as they’d said they would shortly after it had all occurred? Caine simply did not know, and he was mildly nervous about finding out.
Thankfully there was another topic at hand that needed discussing, one they had sort of let slip on the back burner due to the wedding preparations and Ivore and Violet realizing they were mates and wanting to spend some time together without outside drama interfering.
Caine hadn’t wanted to put their investigation on hold, but he knew that things were different now. His two brothers had mates, and they would need to proceed carefully to ensure that the physically vulnerable human women weren’t put in danger by their actions.
“I still say we should go to Colonel Mara with it,” Cowl said. He was the youngest of the trio, and for the longest time his voice hadn’t truly spoken with meaning. But ever since he’d found Andria, Cowl had come into his own, and now their councils of war listened and respected his opinions. It was a most welcome change, and Caine knew his brother would only grow stronger and wiser with Andria at his side.
“I don’t think any of us disagree,” he mused. “That’s the best choice of person to bring it to. The problem is, we don’t know how she’s going to react. Just because it’s the best of the options we have doesn’t mean it’s actually a good option. What if she goes straight after Knefferson and blows any chance of proving he’s guilty?”
Ivore scoffed, then picked up his beer glass and took a sip, holding up a finger on his other hand to forestall any words from his brothers. Smacking his lips together, he set the drink down and looked at both of them. “Knefferson is good,” he said slowly. “We know that. If Colonel Mara did do something like that, odds are he’d be able to cover his tracks before we could dig up any dirt on him. But we also know that he was responsible for distributing the drugs. Who else could have gotten their hands on them and given them to Malkin?”
Caine nodded thoughtfully. It was a royally fucked-up situation. The brothers had been awakened and told they were needed to fight the alien beings known as Outsiders. This race of lifeforce-draining creatures came through a portal deep in the mountains to the west of Barton City, and only dragons so far had shown the strength and ability to fight them toe-to-toe.
The drugs Ivore was referring to were pills synthesized from Outsider…essence? Blood? Nobody really knew what the purple goo found under the chitinous black armor worn by the Outsiders was. At this point, it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that when a shifter took these drugs, they slowly become more Outsider and less shifter. It was surmised that at some point the likeness became close enough that communication could actually occur between the two races.
Shortly after being awakened, Cowl had actually gone up against a dragon shifter infected with the Outsider drug. The infected dragon had put up a hell of a fight, and had nearly beaten two fully grown dragon shifters all on his own. In the end it hadn’t been enough, but it had been close.
The drugs had continued to be distributed, an
d eventually the brothers had discovered, quite by accident, that it was a local mob boss by the name of Richard Malkin behind it all. In the process of discovering this, both of Malkin’s sons, and then Malkin himself, had been killed. It turned out that they were a family of wolf shifters. Things hadn’t gone so well for them.
“Thank the gods it was only a test batch of drugs,” he muttered, his thoughts becoming words. “If they had put them into mass production, we could be looking at the extinction of all other shifter species from it.”
Malkin’s sons had been killed by the very drugs their father was selling, not by the dragons themselves.
“We still don’t know why Knefferson is doing this,” Cowl pointed out. “Or who his shifter contact is. He must have one to have known to give it to Malkin, another shifter.”
Caine nodded. There was so much they just didn’t know. The trail felt cold, now, after sitting on it for a couple of weeks while they got adjusted to the idea of having mates in their lives. Now they were trying to dig it up again.
“The memo we found in Malkin’s office is the best lead,” he reiterated. “It quite literally confirms a monetary transaction between Knefferon’s Central Defense Command office and Malkin himself. I don’t think we could conclusively prove that they were in cahoots more than that. What we need is to find out why, what the end game was, and who else is involved. All without alerting Knefferson.”
“Sounds easy,” Ivore said, laughing sarcastically.
“Not a problem,” Cowl echoed.
They fell silent. This was it, he realized. This was the moment where he could speak up. Caine sucked in a deep breath, bracing himself.
“I think after we deal with Knefferson, I’m going to leave,” he said, staring straight ahead, ignoring the stunned glances from his younger brothers.
“Leave…what?” Ivore didn’t understand.
“Here.”
Cowl caught on first. “You mean us.”
“I mean everything. The military. Barton City. Leave it all behind. It would be for the best.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Caine? How would it be for the best?”
He looked at Cowl, somehow not surprised that these days it would be his youngest brother that understood. “Because you don’t need me anymore,” he said heavily. “Because I don’t belong.”
Cowl started to protest, but he shook his head, quieting both of the other dragons. “You two don’t need me anymore. Look at yourselves. You’ve gone and found mates, the both of you. You’re ready to settle down, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you started having babies soon too.” He clenched his fist tightly. “They don’t need to be at risk with me around. You have a home here. I can’t risk ruining it for you and for them. Don’t you see?”
“No, Caine, we don’t,” Ivore said softly. “And neither do you. You’re blinded about something that both of us have long since stopped caring or thinking about.”
He shot his brother a surprised glance, but Ivore just rolled his eyes.
“Do you think we don’t notice? We’re your brothers, you ice-brained moron. We know when you’re down on yourself. We can see the way you look at us when we’re with Violet and Andria. The way you sometimes walk around the apartment like you’re afraid to touch anything because you might destroy it.”
Caine looked down. Of course his brothers would realize. How could he have been so arrogant to think otherwise? It didn’t change anything; it just meant he was dumber than he thought.
“So you understand then why I should leave. You’ve got it all here.” He waved a hand in the air around them. “The last thing you need is me screwing that up and getting us all booted. Again.”
“You both know I was really too young to remember,” Cowl said. “But Ivore’s told me what happened. We don’t blame you. It wasn’t your damn fault, Caine. Besides, I think you’re romanticizing the life we had simply because we can no longer experience it. From what Ivore tells me though, it wasn’t that good.”
Ivore nodded. “He’s right you know, Caine. Yes, you theoretically got us banished from the enclave because you kissed the dragonlord’s daughter.”
He winced. It hadn’t quite gone down like that. She had kissed him. He hadn’t wanted it, but her father had walked in, and well…if you thought human fathers were insanely jealous and protective, you’ve never dealt with one who could transform into a sixty-foot-long dragon and breathe lightning at you.
Cowl was the one he felt worst for. Only nine at the time, he’d been banished with the rest, though Caine had argued hard for him to be allowed to stay. The outside world would be hard on him, especially as he learned to control his dragon powers during puberty. The brothers had stuck together, however, and in the end, he had to admit they’d thrived.
Until once again their homes had been taken from them, and it was his fault. They had been engaging in their semi-regular feats of strength, showcasing just what they could do with the ice and snow at their command. The more they practiced and the further they pushed themselves, the stronger they could become. Until one day Caine hadn’t supervised his brother closely enough. Drained of his own strength, he’d only been able to watch helplessly as an avalanche buried them.
It was his fault. He should have been the last to go, so that he could have prevented a situation like that from happening. But he’d been cocky. Arrogant. Believed nothing could go wrong. And in the end they’d slept for six hundred years, awakening in the distant future, totally unprepared for what was waiting for them.
“Hey. Caine!” Ivore elbowed him. “Come back to us, Caine.”
He shook his head, images of a mountainside full of snow heading right for him playing behind his eyes. “I’m here.”
“Stop moping around,” Cowl said, stabbing a finger into the bar to get his attention. “Neither of us is upset about what happened.”
“Maybe not. Maybe you forgive me. But that doesn’t change the fact that twice now you’ve been ripped from your homes because I did something wrong. When it was the three of us, I could handle it. But if I did that to Andria or Violet, I could never forgive myself.”
“Fuck you,” Cowl snapped.
Caine shot upright at the anger in his brother’s tone. “Excuse me?”
“You fucking heard me, you arrogant closed-minded fuck. Don’t you dare try and play the guilt game like that.”
Caine’s icy temper flowed through him. “Start making sense, Cowl.”
“I should say the same fucking thing to you. How dare you try to pretend like you’re the one that buried us in an avalanche? That was my fault, and I am the one who has to live with that. You are not going to come along and pretend like it’s somehow your fault because you didn’t wait until the end, you conceited asshole.”
By this point Caine’s mouth was open, and both his hands clenched tightly into fists. He’d never heard Cowl speak like this, with such strength or conviction.
“I am insulted by that attitude,” he snarled. “Because if you think the avalanche was your fault, then that means you have never had any faith in me.”
“That’s not true,” he protested.
“Bullshit,” Cowl snarled. “I was over two hundred years old when that happened, Caine. There is exactly no reason for you to have thought I couldn’t handle my own powers. I fucked that up. Not you. Or did you secretly never respect me even that much, that you felt you still needed to babysit me?”
“Cowl, that’s not what I meant.”
“Sure it isn’t. You just wanted the attention for yourself.”
Caine fell silent. That’s not what it was all about…was it? He looked deep inside himself, trying to identify the source of his distaste for the current situation. Why was he so intent on leaving, and what did that say about him? Was he truly worried about ruining their lives again, or was there something more?
He thought again of the lives his brothers had made here, and how they were perfect, how happy they were with their mates. He wish
ed them nothing but the best in that regard. Didn’t he? That was his entire reason behind leaving. So he didn’t have to worry about destroying what they were building.
“What’s really going on with you, Caine?” Ivore asked softly. “What aren’t you telling us? What are you running away from?”
He wasn’t running away.
Was he?
“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said softly. “The perfect mate. Husband. Father.” He felt awkward, sharing such personal thoughts with his brothers, but who else was he going to share them with? Annalise certainly wasn’t ready to deal with his emotional bullshit. Not until she’d dealt with hers at least, that was for certain.
His brothers were the only ones he trusted.
“What are you talking about?” Cowl asked. Gone was the icy demeanor and hatred. Instead there was nothing but concern. Concern for a family member.
“Annalise is the best thing to ever happen to me besides you loveable losers,” he explained. “I’ve always done my best to lead by example for you two, to be the best older brother I can. You say you forgive me for the mistakes I’ve made, but that doesn’t mean I forgive myself. I robbed you of a proper upbringing and a life among our own kind.”
He frowned. “I can’t stop myself from thinking: what if I do it again? You two are dragons; there’s little that you can’t withstand. But Annalise is human, and I need to be perfect for her.” He grimaced. “I don’t have a great track record of that, regardless of whether or not you two hold grudges.”
Cowl nodded. “I understand. Ever since I laid eyes upon Andria, I’ve wanted to do nothing more than to make her life perfect. To ensure that nothing bad happens to her, no trouble. I want to spoil her and ensure she never wants for anything again.” He shrugged. “But I can’t do that.”
“What do you mean?”
“What he means,” Ivore said, chiming in, “is that we can’t shelter them. Just like you couldn’t shelter us, big brother. We needed to make mistakes. We needed to see you make mistakes. That’s what being human is all about. That’s how we learned about our human side. When we fall down, we have to pick ourselves back up again. It’s called persistence. Perseverance. Dedication.”