CAI buttoned his shirt as he thundered down the stairs. His shoes clomped on each cement step, and his footfalls reverberated in the steel and concrete stairwell.
He wasn’t going into mating fever.
He wasn’t.
He stopped at a landing and pried his phone from his pocket to take a selfie so he could examine his eyes.
Even before the camera clicked, even without the zoom that he had thought he would need to examine his eyes, just as the rear-facing camera picked his face out of the white-painted walls, his eyes glowed with green fire and rushed with vibrant sparks.
No.
Even as Cai bargained with the Dragon Gods—he would never see Ember Niamh again, he would never drink alcohol again, he would never touch any woman again as long as he lived—he knew it was hopeless.
He leaned against the cold wall in the stairwell and ran one hand through his hair, holding onto his scalp as if his brain was exploding inside his skull.
The mating fever was upon him.
And it wasn’t the early stages of mating fever—a spark here, a little hunger, there—no, this was a full-blown case of stage-four mating fever.
Soon, it would turn to mating frenzy.
That was going to hurt.
And then he would fall into senescence.
And then, like Cai’s father after his mother had left him, Cai would die, too, and it would be lonely, lingering, aching death.
He slid down the wall, his shirt catching on the rough plaster, and ended up with his elbows resting on his thighs and his head, hanging over his knees.
Cai should have locked himself up in a damned monastery. He should have taken Holy Orders and joined some cloistered monastery high in the Andes mountains where he would have never met Ember Niamh or any woman, his whole life. He’d known he was playing with dragonfire. He’d thought that if he felt a tingle, he could run and short-circuit the conversion to mating fever.
He should have known better.
Dragon Lords, he had literally fallen to his knees when he’d met her.
He had already been lost.
Crouched in the stairwell, Cai stared at his phone, trying to decide who, if anyone, he could call.
There was no use in calling his friends yet and worrying them. The mating frenzy shouldn’t set in for at least a week or two. Dragging out his good-byes to his friends would torture everyone. Nope, it would be better to do it all at once, right at the end.
As his therapist had told him after his dad had died and he’d become the Duke Wyvern at far too young an age for that kind of responsibility, he was having trouble processing his new status.
In this case, his new status of soon-to-be-dead.
Cai unbuttoned his collar another button and pulled the fabric away from his skin. His skin was steaming from the dragonfire building up inside him. Hunger gnawed his stomach.
Okay, and what did Cai Wyvern do when he was bereft and reeling and in pain?
Yep, time to work. This damn casino was going to have its gala opening on time. If Cai was going to slide into a mating frenzy and then senescence, he had a hell of a lot of work to do first. The acts for the first few months after the casino’s gala opening needed to be lined up, the contracts signed, and the arrangements made. Contractors had to be notified, negotiated, and signed on. He couldn’t shirk his responsibilities just because things were looking grim for him.
When his father had been descending into senescence, before he had removed himself to a cave in the mountains for his last few weeks, he had worked through the pain and made legal and practical arrangements for the dukedom to pass to Cai without a guardian installed, even though Cai had been barely twenty at the time. Dragons mature and age slowly, compared to humans. Cai had appeared to be about fifteen in human years at the time and had been about the same maturity level, but he’d promised his father that he would hold the dukedom and care for it.
And he had.
He’d worked his butt off, finishing school and overseeing the dukedom. He’d hoped that, somewhere, his father was with the Dragon Lords and had watched him handle it every day, day in and day out.
When he’d finally come of legal age for a dragon at twenty-eight, he’d started his event production company and doubled his dukedom’s wealth within five years, even though it had looked like he’d been just hanging out with rock stars and starlets the whole time.
And now, it was all over for him.
He had thought he would have more time.
Everyone thinks they have more time.
Cai looked up the stairwell at the ascending flights of stairs above him like an Escher drawing, where all the steps seemed to lead in a circle to himself. “I’m sorry, Dad. I tried to stick it out. I really did. I’ll figure out how to unwind the dukedom to do some good before I go to the cave. I have a few weeks before this gets real, right?”
His voice echoed off the concrete stairs and steel railings, and Cai bowed his head.