“He may keep you on then,” Layne said, shrugging. “To try for an heir. Too bad for you. I don’t think he’ll be happy about it. But he will keep trying until he gets a son. Then again, maybe you’ll get lucky and he’ll just buy a new breeder.”
I closed my eyes and screamed again.
Chapter Sixteen: David
The place was sprawling. My own home is big, no doubt about it. But it’s big for Manhattan. It’s mostly luxurious but it’s not the kind of sprawling estate that Darien apparently called home. The three of us were huddled nearby, in the dark shadows of a neighbor’s garage. It was night again now. I thought my head was about to explode now, I was so worried about what might have happened to Dana since she’d flown off. All kinds of irrational thoughts floated through my head.
What if she wasn’t even here after all?
What if she hadn’t flown to Darien’s but had come to her senses and still didn’t want to come back to me? How would I even know? I’d spend the rest of my life searching for, just in case she was in danger.
The thoughts raced around and I knew they were stupid, the result of my anxieties and buried trauma from all those years under the thumb of The Collector. The guys kept giving me wary looks too even as we rushed over to Darien’s mansion. I think they were worried I’d crack at any moment. That was somewhat my fault. I’d only alluded to what I had been through, to a pain so dark and all encompassing I couldn’t bear to talk about it. I’d been able to talk to Dana at least. But I knew that wasn’t enough. When all this was over, whether it ended happily or not, I promised to seek some help with it. Dragon shifters tended to be a little macho about things. But there was no shame in talking to someone about your pain. I knew that too. It couldn’t all be solved by fighting crime in Central Park in the middle of the night.
“You should go in first,” Jessie said. We all stood in a circle in the dark, arms crossed, devising our plan. Michael was better with that stuff. He did what I did but on a larger scale.
“I was going to,” I said darkly, implying that I wasn’t about to brook any alternative.
“Well, you’re the stealthiest,” Michael said, shrugging. “You always have been. And your size is definitely an asset in this case, once you shift.”
“You also have the hottest fire,” Jessie pointed out.
“Size isn’t everything,” Jude said with a wink.
“We got your back, man,” Justin said, clapping me on said back.
“And just remember,” Robbie said, smirking at me. “I abandoned a movie set for this.”
I rolled my eyes but I did unclench just a little bit too. I had every confidence in my friends. If there was a way to save Dana, they’d find it. It was tricky though, not knowing precisely what her status would be. I knew Darien wanted that baby so certainly she was alive. I just hoped she wasn’t hurt.
“We’ll need a signal,” Michael said. “That you can send us when we should ambush and we’ll come running. Er...flying probably.”
“I’ll just breathe fire out a window,” I said, shrugging. “Like a flash.”
“You can control it that tightly?” Jude said, raising his eyebrows.
“Yeah...can’t you?” I said. The guys all exchanged sheepish looks and I couldn’t help but feel a bit of pride that I had a kind of power they didn’t possess.
There was a tall gate surrounding the entire estate. That was good for keeping humans and some types of shifters out. But it didn’t stop me from flying right over and shifting again to land in the grass in a secluded, woodsy area behind the mansion. Under cover of darkness I ran, keeping to the shadows. There were a couple of armed guards I could spot, pacing around the back. I don’t know what this guy did for a living but it couldn’t have been good. He certainly lived like a drug lord.
I was stealthy as a dragon but I was also pretty damn stealthy as a human, my skills as a dragon having spilled over to my human side. I stuck to the shadows and moved fast and silently. I counted three guards now milling around and standing between me and getting inside. I got as close as I could. That was pretty close. I’d managed to get all the way to a tall hydrangea bush and just on the other side were the guards. They hadn’t even seen me. It was possibly I was better at this than even I knew.
I waited until I heard them, close on the other side of the hedge, and only then did I shift. Within an instant, I was a dragon again and before they could sense me, I breathed fire right through the hedge setting not just it but also the three guards aflame. I had no compunction about it. I wasn’t sorry at all. They were keeping my beloved prisoner. They were necessary casualties. The great thing about my super heated fire was that it burned things to a crisp in a few seconds. The guards were blackened corpses on the ground, the hedge just a pile of ashes, and I shifted again and slipped right in the back door. It wasn’t even locked. Why bother to lock the door when you’ve got armed guards?
It was easy to get lost, the place was so big but I picked up the scent of Dana soon enough and then I heard a scream that made my dragon crazy. It was her. She was upstairs and she was in terrible pain.
I tried to control myself. I really did. It wouldn’t do Dana any good if I made myself known too quickly and was taken down somehow. But my dragon would not be moved. He was too full of rage. I saw in my mind, The Collector, but he was torturing Dana. He was making her suffer for his own self-interest, treating her like a thing, like she wasn’t even a person. Just how he’d treated me. I knew in my the quieter and more coherent part of my mind that it wasn’t The Collector, it was Darien. But they might as well have been the same in that moment.
I pillaged the entire house.
As a dragon, I could smell her more easily. I could also smell Darien. He was upstairs too.
I blew fire at anyone who stood in my way. I didn’t even count the number of men I took down and I nearly forgot to go to a window and billow flames out of it to alert the guys. Any sense of strategy or stealth was gone. I burned everything in my path even taking down part of the staircase before I finally found myself smarting from a painful spell thrown at me by an old woman in white with a cloud of black hair. She was glaring at me, hissing spells, her hand stretched out towards me like a claw.
“You can’t burn me!” She screeched at me. We were standing off in the corridor and I could hear the others joining the fight, taking down any staff or guards I’d missed so far. “No dragon’s fire is hot enough to-”
I blew such fire at her as I’d never blown before, so hot there was still a scream dying on her lips even as she’d become a blackened husk before crumbling to the ground.
Then there was Darien.
The house was half destroyed by fire already and I worried now that it was endangering Dana. I could still smell her at the end of the giant red-carpeted corridor. But then that blonde bastard with the slick smile appeared and I breathed fire but he shifted quickly and ducked out of the way, stepping right through a wall. He moved fast, coming around me before I could blast him caught my jaws in his teeth and then the two of us were tumbling from the landing, crashing through the railing and down to the floor of his well appointed foyer.
The two of us wrestled viciously. I fought him off my neck. He hadn’t got a good enough hold to do any real damage. The problem was that he was probably three times larger than I was. The even bigger problem was that I was perfectly willing to die if I could have the slightest hope of taking the bastard down with me, as long as I knew Dana was safe.
I’d, of course, completely forgotten that my friends were right there.
Darien’s dragon was black and silver and he was just a bit bigger than Michael, who was the largest of all of us. But there was only one of him. Soon enough my friends had attacked. Jessie got his tail and Jude grabbed a back leg. They were all on him at once, six grown dragons to one. We were destroying the place as we crashed through walls and knocked down furniture and fell atop the crispy corpses left there by one of the others.
To sa
y we killed Darien was a gross understatement.
We tore Darien apart.
There wasn’t much left of him by the time we were done. He was in bits and pieces all over the mansion. I think we all went a little bit wild in killing him. But I wasn’t particularly sorry.
By the time it was over, I was a gross, bloody mess even once I’d shifted back into human form. The house was on fire. We had to find Dana now. I could smell her. She was alive. She was alive and we had won…
I glanced around at my friends, catching my breath, ignoring the dragon gore strewn about me. My throat was bleeding just a little, but it was nothing remotely fatal. I was mostly bruised and covered with Darien’s blood. He’d given me a good bite to the leg though and I was in a daze, hobbling around, looking for a staircase that wasn’t collapsed, before Jude finally stopped me to tie a jacket tight around the leg and stave off the bleeding.
“You need a hospital,” Jessie said.
Or I think that’s what he said. He was far behind me now as I pushed aside a tossed over chaise lounge that had ended up in the corridor. My leg was killing me but I didn’t care as I found a back staircase and ran up as fast as I could, the others close behind me. I hobbled down the half-demolished landing, following Dana’s scent, all the way to the other end of the house, throwing open doors the whole way just in case I missed something.
When I heard the sound of a baby crying outside one doorway where Dana’s scent was strongest, I stopped cold. I could smell the child too.
But...it couldn’t possibly be hers…
That wasn’t possible, I told myself. Dana had not been far along. There had been months left in her pregnancy. It must be some other child.
I couldn’t see any way around it, yet when I pushed open the door and saw Dana sitting up under a blanket with a new-born cradled in her arms, I knew without a doubt it was hers.
She looked sweaty and tired, but not too very different from the last time I’d seen her. I braced myself, standing frozen in the doorway as the mansion burned around me. That was stupid, I needed to get her and that baby out as quickly as possible. Yet there was the worry that she was still under mind control. What if they’d kept feeding her that potion.
But then she looked up at me and I saw the joy in her eyes as she whispered, “David.”
I stepped into the room, the guys waiting in the hall. I turned to glance at Justin and he cast me an alarmed expression. I knew what that meant. We needed to get out of here as fast as possible. Not only was the place burning but that would bring a fire engine and there were a whole lot of dead bodies littering the mansion, not to mention a dragon carcass.
Not that I really cared about that right now but I knew we needed to make haste.
“I knew you’d come,” Dana said tearfully.
I ran to her side and knelt there. “Are you hurt, are you-”
“No, I mean…” She licked her lips and took a breath. “God, I was. Oh David, it was awful-”
“Oh God…” I looked over at her, tempted to look under the blanket just to see if she’d been hurt terribly and I’d missed it.
She was busy calming the baby and the way she looked at him, with such love in her eyes. It was then, I knew. Somehow, this was her child.
“Is the baby yours?” I asked, utterly baffled.
“They accelerated the pregnancy,” she said softly. She winced as she said it. “I just gave birth a few minutes ago while you were fighting, I… It was so hard…” She was crying again and Justin darted forward, taking charge where I was too focused on my mate’s emotions. It was difficult to focus.
Justin said, “Is it alright if I take…”
“Him,” Dana said. She looked to me for help and I nodded. “Yes, be careful.”
“He’ll be fine,” Justin said, smiling warmly.
The moment Justin had the baby safe in his arms I picked up Dana in mine. I’d never carried her before but she weighed practically nothing to me. The guys smiled shyly at her, doubtless feeling awkward to be intruding on this intimate moment. But there was no time to spare now as we hustled back out into the corridor and down the staircase, full of smoke, Justin carefully shielding the baby from it all. We were fast, thank God. Soon enough we were outside and striding purposefully away from the blazing mansion just as several fire engines came screaming toward the place.
When we were well away from Darien’s mansion, we stopped for a moment to make sure the baby hadn’t been harmed by all the same but he was breathing alright. I credited that to the strength of a shifter child. I leaned against the tree, Dana still curled up in my arms, and met her gaze with mine.
“I was afraid you’d be too late,” she whispered. “But I knew you’d come.”
She was too pale and sweaty and dirty from smoke and soot and I was covered with dragon’s blood and not exactly looking my best. But I felt like the best man in the world, holding the best and most beautiful woman in the world as I stood there holding her in the moonlight.
“I’ll always come for you,” I said, kissing her forehead. “Always, my love. You’re my mate.”
“And you’re mine,” she said, before kissing me on the lips.
Chapter Seventeen: Dana
With a baby in tow, we weren’t about to fly all the way home. Besides which, once I realized how badly David was hurt, I demanded he go to the hospital. I felt bad for making him carry me but he hadn’t complained once and I even noticed the goddamn jacket tied around his leg. It was all a bit chaotic. I was beginning to feel this wasn’t going to be the last time I went with David to the hospital. But eventually everything was sorted out and a few hours later, David’s friend Michael was driving us home in a comfortable and rented SUV as the rest of the guys flew back to New York. The ride was a good three hours but that was okay by me. I fussed over the baby in his car seat and nursed him a bit and when he was finally asleep I found myself dozing off against my own will.
I was sore and exhausted and starving. We’d probably stop to eat. But in the meantime I just wanted to lean on David next to me and let him put his arm around me and know I was finally safe for good.
I didn’t remember much of the rest of the ride, passing it in a daze of takeout food, nursing the baby, and snoozing curled up to David.
When I woke up in front of David’s place, I burst into tears out of sheer emotional exhaustion and David comforted me, stroking my hair. It took me a few minutes to calm down enough to even get out of the car and David led me inside, his arm around me as Michael came in with the baby. It was silly, but I did wish I could have met his friends in better circumstances. I sniffed and took a deep breath as David led me upstairs, idly thinking that we should have them over for dinner to do it properly.
“What about the baby?” I said, as David helped me climb into bed, tucking the blankets around me. “He is nowhere to sleep, he has-”
“I’ve taken care of it,” David said gently. He sat down next to me and leaned over to kiss my cheek. “I had Miles start work on a nursery. Just in case.” He shrugged, looking sheepish. “It’s not like it was a lot of money to me. If you’d decided you didn’t want this, I would have just-”
“I want this,” I said quickly, just so there would be any misunderstanding. “I want this so much.”
“Good,” he said chuckling. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’ve got Miles here. He took care of me when I was a baby. He’ll look after…”
“He doesn’t have a name yet,” I said. “I’ll pick one tomorrow.”
David left me then and I fell fast asleep, the exhaustion from the last day immediately overwhelming me. I was thankful that for all my trials, I had been born a dragon shifter. I don’t know that a human woman could have withstood the day I’d just had but I would bounce back soon, I was sure, despite that rushed and incredibly painful accelerated gestation and labor.
When I dreamed, I dreamed of the future to come and all my dreams were peaceful. I dreamed we raised our boy the way David had been ra
ised. But we’d protect him and keep him safe from anyone who might ever harm him. Still, I knew there was a danger that between the two of us, we might be overprotective. The two of us valued our freedom more than life. We’d have to remember that when it came to our child. I dreamed of David’s friends, helping us along. They seemed resourceful and maybe wise from what I’d heard so far. At least in their own special ways. They’d be good to have around for a growing boy dragon.
I dreamed of afternoons with David and my son in that pretty and messy and jungle-like courtyard out back where wild things grew but you could still hear the city. I dreamed of teaching him to fly and taking him to play in the park. I dreamed of joy.
When I woke up, hearing my boy’s crying, I knew just what we would name him.
I stretched under the covers and forced myself to rise, pulling on a robe as I padded out into the corridor. The crying was coming from a room across the hall. As far as I knew, it was just a guest room, but now as I gently pushed the door open my breath caught when I saw that Miles hadn’t just made a “place” for the baby, he’d put together and decorated a full nursery.
The nursery was huge. It looked like some Victorian prince’s nursery. It was painted in pastel yellow and blue and already well supplied. There was a stately white crib and next to it David was swaying, holding my son in his arms, gently murmuring. He had been sleeping too. But I suspected he’d been snoozing there in that room as there was a big, white rocking chair next to the crib and David was wearing his pyjamas, his hair slightly mussed.
He looked up at me and smiled softly. “Little upset,” he whispered.
“He needs milk.” He smiled and I sat down in the chair, pulling up my shirt and let my son latch onto my breasts and he quieted. I sat back, wincing a little and chuckled, getting more comfortable, looking around the giant nursery. There was a massive teddy bear in one corner, a changing station, a short shelf with cubbies full of toys and books and cuddly blankets and other stuffed animals around. The wallpaper border was little ducks and bunnies. It was exactly the idyllic kind of nursery anyone would want. And David had done it all for my son. For our son.
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