by Selena Scott
Amos swooped in and out of the air pockets, letting the currents guide his path. The air was crystal cold and fresh so high up in the sky. He opened his enormous, vicious teeth and let a wisp of a cloud slide over his tongue. Flipping over in the air, he executed a fierce dive, plummeting back toward earth, and it seemed, toward his fate.
What had seemed so confusing to him in his human form became vividly clear to him. But it was hard to look at, almost like opening his eyes to the bright sun after spending years in a dark cave.
On the one side of his life was the King. And on the other was Lucy. In his human form, when he thought of them, he stood in the middle tugged back and forth over his loyalty to them. But in his dragon form, he stood in the middle only to protect Lucy.
The King was his past. Lucy was his future. As short of a future as that might be, he chose her. He’d choose her again and again. He knew what that meant. He knew what Lucy meant to him. If she were a dragon, he’d assume that he meant the same to her. But as she was human, he didn’t know. How did humans fall in love? It seemed like sometimes they didn’t even know if they were or not.
By the time Amos’s wings grew tired and he was ready to shift back to his human form, he wasn’t confused anymore. But he was sad. His whole identity was tied up in loyalty to the King. His father’s identity as well.
As he plummeted back toward the roof of the fortress where Lucy waited for him, he began to transform in mid air. It was something he’d taught himself to do as a kid. He landed gently on his human feet, his wings folding up into nothing and he was full human again. He missed his father. Having the same mission, the same job as he had always connected Amos to the memory of his dad. He suddenly felt naked without it.
Not to mention the fact that he was actually naked on the rooftop. And it was cold. He hurried back over to where he’d lain his clothes. He expected Lucy to make some comment about it, but he realized that she’d fallen asleep, her coat covering her like a blanket.
She amazed him. He’d never met a stronger person in his entire life. How she was reconciling all of this in her mind he’d never know. All he knew was that now that he’d seen her spirit, there was no un-seeing it. There was no turning away from her.
Fully dressed now, Amos bent and picked her up. He carefully padded back through the castle, keeping an eye out for anyone who might see them. A shaft of moonlight splashed in from a window. Amos was so absorbed in the color it turned Lucy’s hair that he didn’t notice Zara peeking at them from behind a red tapestry. A small smile ghosted over her serious face and she sighed as she melted back into her room.
Lucy awoke as Amos lowered her onto the bed. She sat up to gently tug her arms free of the fur coat. Amos tossed it over a chair and pulled back the covers for her to crawl under. She held her arms out to him and he only hesitated for a second before kicking off his shoes and pants, shrugging out of his shirt, and crawling in beside her.
Her head instantly came to rest on his chest.
“Did things become clearer for you in your dragon form?” she asked.
“Yes.” He nodded, not sure how to talk to her about what he’d come to understand. That he was pledging himself to her for as long as he lived. She waited expectantly but he wasn’t quite ready to get into the details. “I’ve never fallen asleep next to a woman before.”
“Really? You’ve never had a girlfriend before?”
“No. The men in my family don’t have girlfriends or wives. We often have partners for occasional…fun. But we only mate for offspring to keep the line going.”
Lucy was quiet for a minute. He could practically feel her absorbing that information. “So your mother…”
He shrugged. It was an old absence that wasn’t nearly as ragged or hungry as when he’d been a boy. “A woman I’ve never met. My father only met her the night she became pregnant with me. My father raised me. That’s common with dragons.”
“They’re raised by their fathers?”
“Yes and no. Dragon shifter children are often raised as apprentices by the parent with the more important, more prestigious, occupation. The other parent gives up rights to that child. It’s… often complicated. But most people respect the cultural rules around it.”
“That’s really weird,” Lucy said. She sat up and looked at him. “There’s nothing wrong with single parent households. My mother raised me by herself. But to have two parents there and capable and for one of them to have absolutely no contact with the kid for no other reason than whose job is more important? I know we’re different species and we have different expectations, but that is really weird.”
He laughed a little, rubbing her back until she laid back down. “It’s not quite as bad as you think. Dragons are compelled by duty. We need jobs and missions. Human children need to play with and be nurtured by their parents. Dragon children need to be trained, taught, and given jobs by their parents. It registers as affection. I swear,” he added when he saw her skeptical expression.
She shrugged. “Okay. I guess I’ll believe it when I see it.”
His heart raced a little bit at that statement and he cleared his throat. He wondered what she meant. Did she mean it figuratively? Or did she mean when she had a dragon child herself? His? Suddenly the dragon custom of single parent raising seemed as weird to him as it did to her. If she were to have a child by him, he couldn’t imagine cutting her out of the equation. It would be one of the greatest joys of his life to see her with their child.
He cleared his throat again. That was utterly ridiculous. First of all, there was no chance of them raising a child together. Either he was going to succeed in getting her back through the portal and then he was going to be executed. Or he was going to fail at getting her through the portal and he’d be executed. Either way, the result was the same.
Second of all, things had become clear for him in dragon form. But that didn’t mean she felt the same way. His dragon heart was much more passionate than a typical human heart. From what he understood humans could date and be intimate with partners they weren’t even really that in to.
Take the absolute dickhead she’d just dumped. By all indications she’d spent a great deal of time with him before deciding he wasn’t her cup of tea.
Amos knew how he felt in his heart. But he didn’t know how Lucy felt. He guessed it was time to clear that up. He opened his mouth but she interrupted him.
“What’s the deal with this?” she asked, running her finger over the diamond stud in his earlobe.
“My earring?” he asked, confused.
“Yeah, it’s pretty nineties.”
“You mean it’s not in style on earth?”
“Not unless you’re a member of a boy band,” she said, grinning.
He hadn’t the slightest idea what a boy band was but he didn’t like the sound of it. “I’m not a boy. Maybe I’m part of man band.”
Lucy burst out laughing and fell backwards. “That’s definitely not a thing. But seriously, why do you and all your security goons wear them? It can’t be just a style choice.”
He ran his finger over it again, suddenly feeling like he had to defend it a little bit. “Most dragon men wear them. It’s not a style choice, it’s a dragon thing.”
She propped her head up on her hand. “Dragon thing?”
“Sure. Try and think about the things you’ve heard about dragons.”
Her eyes went to one side as she tried to remember. “Let’s see. What do I know about dragons. Oh! They really like treasure. Is that it?” she asked, beaming at her discovery.
He met her smile and nodded. “Yeah. Dragons all really have a thing for jewels. Everyone wears them or keeps them close at all times. It’s not an actual source of power for us, but it’s a kind of comfort. We feel naked without it.”
She ran her finger over the stud. He smiled when she impulsively leaned forward and kissed it.
“Ok,” she said. “Then I can live with it. What about other dragon legends. Are they true?”
“Like what?”
“Like, you know.” She opened her mouth and breathed out hard, her fingers waving like a claw in front her mouth.
“What the hell is that?” he asked, totally confused.
“Breathing fire!” she exclaimed, exasperated that she didn’t get her charade.
“Oh. Yeah. We can do that.”
“What? Really?! That is so frickin cool. I wish I could do that.”
“No you don’t,” he said, amused by her enthusiasm.
“Why?”
“We can only do it when our mates are threatened. And apparently it hurts like hell.”
She looked up at him thoughtfully. “You use it to protect your mates? I thought dragons didn’t care about their mates very much.”
“What?” Nothing could be farther from the truth.
“Well, when you explained the whole single parent thing, I just assumed it meant that you didn’t care about-,” she waved her hand in the air to symbolize whatever it was she couldn’t put into words.
“I see how you could have thought that, but trust me. It’s not how I meant to say it. Most of the time a dragon chooses to become pregnant with someone who isn’t important to them. They do it because that other person is the right choice to keep their family line strong and healthy. The way my father did with my biological mother.”
“The way the King wants to do with me.”
Amos nodded tersely and moved on, not wanting to talk about that. “But that’s not what I mean when I say ‘mate’. When dragons take a mate, a true mate, there is nothing more important to them than that other dragon. When dragons take a true mate, they are setting aside all other things. All their duties, all the things they were born to do. It’s all consuming. And inconvenient. And rare. Most dragons choose not to even search for it. Because it disrupts the order so much.”
“How does it disrupt the order?”
Amos searched for the words. “True mates typically raise their offspring together as a family. They don’t choose one parent to apprentice the child. And they become deeply protective of their family unit. The true mates will fight and die for one another and their children. It creates tensions in the community. It’s why most dragons don’t go looking for their true mate. They only take up with them if they happen to meet and have no other choice but to bond and mate.”
“No other choice? You say it like you come under a spell or something.”
“It’s almost like a spell.” Amos traced a hand over her hair. Only a few days ago he would have been speaking hypothetically. But now, feeling her soft weight draped over him, smelling her light, powdery smell, he spoke from experience. “You try to fight it at first, to keep your life the way it was. But every molecule in your body pushes you toward that person.”
He leaned forward and gently kissed her lips.
“You try to take a step away,” he continued. “But you find yourself taking a step closer.”
She let out a slow breath that washed over his face. “You’re talking like you’ve been through it.”
“Actually I kind of wanted to talk to you about that.”
“About what?” She raised her head up off his chest and rested her chin on one fist.
“About what I realized when I was in my dragon form. What came clear for me.” He twisted a lock of her hair around his fingers. Her eyes were light blue pools of light and he felt like she could see right through to his heart.
“Yes…” she prompted, obviously impatient to hear what he was having so much trouble finding the words for.
He reached behind her neck and unhooked the fidelity cuff they’d both forgotten she was wearing. He flipped it over in one hand and ran his finger over the dragon’s eye he’d drawn on. “I was wondering if maybe the cuff could symbolize something more than just my promise to keep you safe.”
“What else?” She reached out to trace the eye as well and their fingers whispered past one another. Her guileless eyes took up her whole face.
“I want it to symbolize your fidelity to me.”
His eyes searched hers for reaction and he was surprised and a little incensed when he saw disappointment there.
She sat up, the covers falling away from her. “Of course I’m going to be faithful to you, Amos. Who the hell else would I sleep with?”
He cocked his head to one side, confused by her anger. “Ok. Why did that make you mad?”
“It didn’t.” She shook her head and pinched the bridge of her nose. “It really didn’t. I just thought, after that whole conversation, that you were gonna tell me something else right there. And I guess I was disappointed when you said the fidelity thing.”
“What did you think I was going to tell you?”
She covered her face with her hands. “It’s too embarrassing.”
He reached forward and pried her hands away. “Lucy. Tell me.”
She looked down at the covers and played with them absentmindedly. “I guess I thought that you were gonna tell me that I was your true mate.”
Either his chest constricted or his heart grew. He wasn’t sure. But he had to kiss the sweetness off of her lips. He gently brought her face to his and rolled them over so that she was pinned underneath him.
“Lucy, you’re missing the most important part of the title ‘true mate’. It’s ‘mate’. You couldn’t be my true mate unless you got pregnant by me.”
She looked up at him. An emotion crossing her face that he couldn’t read. Wanted desperately to be able to, but couldn’t.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lucy woke up alone the next morning. And for every morning for the next month. She knew she would. Each night, Amos would sneak into her room. He’d make intense, holy love to her and sneak out before the morning.
Lucy had never been so happy and so sad in her entire life. Her days were filled with drab monotonous pretending. Pretending she wasn’t completely disgusted by King Dalyer. Pretending she was faithful to him. Pretending she was getting used to being counted among his wives. She dreaded it with her whole soul. Her days were marked only by her prayers for them to go faster.
But her nights were marked by intense, ecstatic pleasure. And safety. And wild love.
The love part she’d only begun to admit to herself. She felt that it was utterly useless to deny. She could feel it coursing off of her in waves toward him, even when he stood forty feet away in the King’s chambers. Even though they were good at hiding it, it was a miracle to her that other people couldn’t sense the intensity between them.
She wondered if the other wives might suspect something. Especially Zara, whom Lucy had come to know as incredibly smart and observant. The other two wives, Beatrix and Sara, were much less interested in Lucy. In fact, they’d barely acknowledged her for the first two weeks they were forced to coexist.
Lucy assumed it was because of the bias that so many dragon shifters had against humans, but Zara had corrected her on that.
“No,” Zara had said. “It’s not because you’re a human, it’s because they don’t want to get attached to you. There have been other wives. Ones King Dalyer has been less patient with than me and Beatrix and Sara. It’s always really hard when he decides he’s done with them.”
“Done with them?” Lucy had asked, feeling sick.
“Yes. King Dalyer is merciful though. He always executes very quickly.”
In a way, Lucy hated any extra information she ever got about King Dalyer. It made her days with him so much harder. It was almost impossible not to flinch away from him. But she knew it was even harder for Amos to watch the King paw at her. She could feel Amos’s fiery, furious energy anytime the King even spoke to her.
And their sex had become more and more intense in response. Any day that the King had touched her, Amos would wash her that night. He was always so thorough. His hands touching every part of her body, he’d wash away any memory of the King. But once he was inside her, the gentleness would disappear.
“Mine,” h
e’d chant in her ear, tugging on her nipples and riding her into orgasm. She would lose count of the number of times he’d make her come every night. She came on his hands, on his face, on his cock. They had sex on every surface of her room. Sometimes falling asleep on the floor, in the bathtub, sitting up against the door.
But every morning she’d wake up tucked into her bed. And she’d know he stood outside of her door, pretending he’d just arrived for his morning shift.
This particular morning, Lucy wasn’t dreading the day quite as much as she usually did. It was Sunday. The one day of the week that the King didn’t require the wives to sit dutifully at his knee. They were allowed to take care of their affairs and do as they wished around the fortress.
Lucy and Zara had taken to spending those Sundays together. Usually going up to the roof where Amos had taken her before. Zara’s dragon form was so beautiful and Lucy loved to watch her shift. To watch her dip and fly among the clouds.
“What you need is a saddle,” Lucy said to Zara as she sat in the sun next to her.
“A saddle? Like, those things humans use on horses?” Zara asked, confused.
“Yeah, you need a dragon saddle. And then I could ride on your back.”
Zara flopped down and laughed. “Uh, no thanks, human. I’ll pass on being your horse.”
“Not so you could take me around to any old place. I mean so that I could learn what it feels like to fly.”
Zara smiled. “Flying is really great, but Lucy, it’s not worth the risk. Saddle or not, my scales would absolutely flay you alive if you slipped against them.”
“I know, I know,” Lucy pouted. “They’re sharp.” She’d had the exact same conversation with Amos and he’d reacted the same way. First in outrage at the indignity of a human riding him, and then in horror at imagining what his dragon form would do to her fragile human body.
“Maybe you could ask Amos,” Zara said, somewhat nervously. “I’ll bet he’d let you.”
“Why do you say that?” Lucy asked stiffly.
“Because he would do anything for you.”