Damian watched Andi gulp for air after his confession.
“Even though I’m human?” she pressed.
“I don’t know what to tell you. My mother was human, too. It happens.”
But “it” didn’t happen. Mates happened. He wished so badly he could tell her without scaring her, but if she couldn’t even acknowledge she wanted to be in a relationship with him—despite the way that her scent changed whenever he came around, the way he watched the heat that flushed her core—there was no way for him to safely push her forward.
And as it was right now, he needed to be ready to pull his dragon back. It’d never paid so much attention to a human conversation before. Damian could feel it lying right underneath his skin, watching, waiting, listening so closely that it was a wonder that Andi couldn’t see it. The carnivore in him calculated the myriad of changes flowing over her as they spoke. The way her pupils dilated, how often she licked her lips, the rise and fall of her pulse at her throat. He wasn’t sure if his dragon wanted to eat her or fuck her or if there was all that much difference between the two in the end.
Tell her I like the way she smells, his dragon commanded in the lull.
Damian blinked. No.
Why not?
Because it’s creepy.
Why? his dragon pressed like a human child.
Internally, Damian sighed, then supposed at least if he told her that, maybe she’d believe it because it wasn’t the kind of thing he would say as a human. “He’d like me to share with you that he likes the way you smell.”
Her eyes widened in what he was afraid was horror. “What do I smell like?”
Everything I’ve ever wanted, Damian thought but didn’t say aloud. “Apples, caramel, and the sea.”
She blushed and then tentatively brought the back of her hand up to sniff it. “You’re joking, right?” she said as she squirmed.
“Not at all.”
Andi was quiet so long after that that he thought he’d said the wrong thing. His dragon kept ticking away seconds patiently, reporting on Andi’s physiology like she was a weather front, an increase of pressure here, rising heat there—when what his human-self needed were her words.
Her full lips finally parted to rescue him. “Does he care about me?” she asked so quietly that if he hadn’t been part-dragon, he wouldn’t have heard.
Yes, his dragon answered for him, without hesitation.
Damian froze. How would any human react to finding out a dragon cared for it? What reaction could there be but horror?
Tell her, his dragon pressed.
If I do, she’ll run.
His dragon didn’t deny this. You swore to never lie to her, it countered.
There’s lying, and then, there’s elaborately dodging the truth, he told the beast inside. It roiled inside him. He’d let it get so close to the surface while it was listening that the sudden motion hurt him. He had to fight to not let it show.
She wasn’t asking you. She was asking me.
He braced himself to shove the beast back, to pretend that his dragon never thought of her like that, like he hadn’t spent the past week of his life tortured by how badly it wanted to see her, how much it yearned to just be by her side. It couldn’t have her like he could, couldn’t take her like he could, but it was content to just be in her presence with him. How could he ever explain to her that the horrific thing inside him that killed other monsters and men without thinking twice longed for nothing more than to lay its head down at her feet?
Damian knew that was all too much for right now. But he couldn’t lie to her either. He’d already watched the outcome of a relationship built on lies in his parents, close up. If she ran off screaming, could he blame her?
No matter how much it hurt him, mightn’t it also be for the best?
Damian closed his eyes because he didn’t want to watch Andi recoil. “He says to tell you yes.”
After that, he listened. He heard the beating of her heart and the beating of his own and a slight rustle of fabric, which he assumed would proceed her running out the door. Then a soft hand touched his cheek, and he blinked his eyes open to find her staring at him. “Tell him if that’s true, and if he truly does care for me, then he’s not allowed to have you.”
Damian could feel his dragon staring out at her, thinking hard, the creature as heavy inside him as molten lead. As for himself, he could hardly dare to breathe.
Tell her…that I will try, his dragon rumbled, and for a moment Damian thought he might be free—had the answer always been so easy?—before the beast continued. But even love cannot break a curse.
His dragon’s words hit him like an anchor dropped on glass.
“He says to tell you he will try,” he said softly, staring into her beautiful brown eyes, shining at him in hope.
“That’s good, right?” she asked with a smile.
“It is,” he said, catching her hand in his and turning his face to place a kiss against her palm.
Andi followed Damian out of the bedroom and into the rest of the house. He’d called his magic cat to convene a meeting in some conference room. She hadn’t asked if she could come along; she would assume so until he told her otherwise. But every step there made her a little more anxious than the one before because she’d only met his people…twice? Kind-of-sort-of? And here she and Damian were, both coming down from his room, with similarly wet hair—it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out what they’d been up to. She knew Sammy was sex-positive, but she had no idea what Damian’s roommates?—Castle-mates?—thought about things.
He opened a door and gestured her through. She walked in without thinking, found everyone else already inside looking deadly serious, and she felt even more out of place.
Andi named them again in her mind: Mills, the witch who could only tell the truth; Max, the very pale man with paler hair and strange goggles; Zach, the werewolf whose life she’d saved at her own hospital; and Jamison, a dark-skinned man with one arm made of metal. She assumed Austin was still watching the princess in the library, and she had no idea what’d become of the magic cat.
“Um, hi, again,” Andi said, waving nervously. Damian strode around her and pulled a seat out for her, entirely ignorant of the room’s tone. She sat down lightly, trying to figure out how much of a fuss she was prepared to make if someone told her she needed to go.
“Everyone, Andi. Andi, everyone,” Damian said, sitting down roughly beside her. His mood had darkened on their way here, despite the fact that his knee touched hers—very much on purpose, she was sure—underneath the table.
Zach cleared his throat and started speaking. “This is a little unorthodox, Damian,” the werewolf began, and she felt Damian tense.
“Whatever you have to tell me, you can say in front of Andi.”
She looked around the table at them and noted that they weren’t looking at her at all, only at Damian. Oh, shit. Andi knew exactly what this was from having watched them before on TV—an intervention.
“No…not her,” Jamison said. “We’ve been talking and—”
“They’ve been talking,” Max corrected, crossing his arms. “I still agree with you.”
“Well, we—minus Max, apparently—think you made the wrong call,” Mills said. “With the janitor. You should’ve brought him in.”
“Why?” Damian leaned forward. “What’ve you found while tracking him?”
“He’s gone home for the evening. I’ve got his TV listening in on him now.”
“And are there screams of children being murdered in the background?” Damian asked flippantly, and Andi turned to stare at him in horror.
“That’s not funny, Damian,” Zach said.
“I didn’t mean it to be,” Damian said, turning toward him. “If there are, we’ll fucking swoop in. But until then—”
“Until then, we just wait for the murdering?” Jamison pressed.
Damian sighed. “Mills…you of all people should understand. Do we have any other leads on the Hunters currently?”
“Nothing…except for the fact that Andi’s uncle’s home was rented through the same shell corporation as the van full of Hunter paraphernalia we need to slag. But, it’s a wall.” The woman frowned.
“And did you try to hack it, Jamison?” he asked.
“Everything but brute force, as per your request,” the metal-armed man said, also frowning. “But I’d rather do that and out ourselves than wait here, like this.”
Andi raised her hand politely. One by one, they all stopped and stared. “Excuse me, but what the fuck? Murdered children?”
“Only metaphorically,” Max took Damian’s side.
“Thank you,” Damian told him.
“So far,” Zach corrected both of them.
Andi made a time-out symbol with her hands. “Okay. I hate to be annoying, but could you please back up? I’m clearly missing info.”
“Sure thing,” Zach said, putting his elbows on the table and talking fast before Damian could cut him off. “Damian here decided to let a Hunter go free earlier today—one who was hunting at a mall.”
She looked at Damian and could see the muscles clench in his angular jaw. “Why?”
He gave her a look that distinctly said, ‘Not You, Too.’ “Because, Andi, we’re not set up for prisoners, torture isn’t always reliable, and he could just be some schmuck getting paid to wave a wand around. We don’t know a thing about your uncle’s operation. He could be our only connection to it. If we can follow him back—if he says the wrong thing, makes a phone call, goes to their location—we’ll know more.”
Andi pulled out her phone and put it on the table with a flourish. “Did it occur to you that you could just ask me to call him?” She reached for it again, and Damian caught her hand, pressing it down.
“No,” he said in a tone of voice that was used to being listened too.
She ignored it. “His secretary’s been stalking me all day, according to my roommate. I dodged her this morning before I went to the cemetery.”
Everyone else around the table looked at one another with a pregnant pause.
“We could….” Mills said slowly and began walking her fingers out on the table.
“No,” Damian repeated, even more final than before.
“I’m just saying,” Mills went on.
“Don’t you dare,” he clipped.
“Okay, fine, Damian, leave the room so I can hear what they want to say,” Andi told him. He looked at her, eyes wide in some combination of denial and anger, and Max started laughing hysterically.
“Oh, you are well-matched!” The pale man clutched his stomach, shuddering. “Your father would’ve been so proud.”
Damian exhaled in a rush. “Not now, Max.”
“Yes, now. She’s got fire. Let her spend it,” Max said, grinning at her.
“I’ll keep an eye on her, Damian,” Jamison said.
“And we’ll be following her in the tour bus,” Zach promised.
Damian looked around the table, aghast. “She doesn’t even know what she’s offering—she’s human!”
Andi stiffened and yanked her hand out from under his. “And is that not good enough for you?”
He rounded on her and spoke through gritted teeth. “That is absolutely not fair, and you know it.”
“Oh? So, it’s okay for you to go off and have adventures and me to wait at home, not knowing, but you can’t handle the reverse for just one evening?” Her eyes panned over him, waiting for him to trust her enough to back down, and when he didn’t, she came on twice as hard. “I told you I was not a wait-at-home woman. I want to do this.”
He made a strangled sound and spoke like he was talking to a child. “Andi, if something happens to you, I will not be able to control my dragon. It will destroy half this city until it gets revenge.”
Jamison cleared his throat.
“What, Jamison,” Damian growled, while still staring her down.
“That’s kind of why we have that one gun, isn’t it?” he said. “For…just in case?”
Andi watched Damian glower as she looked between the men, then saw Mills subtly nod for her to go on. “Damian, I’d rather put myself in a tiny bit of danger than have you roll the dice on someone’s death.”
“And I would rather not be having this discussion,” Damian said, his voice like grinding gravel, “but here we fucking are.”
“He’s not going to kill me.” She put her hand back on top of his and much nearer her phone. “He won’t do anything bad to me.”
“Famous last words,” Damian said like a swear.
“How do you know, Andi?” Mills pressed.
“Because,” Andi said, looking around the table briefly. “My brother would never forgive him if he did. And I feel for sure he needs my brother, for whatever the hell it is he’s planning.”
Damian stared at her, and when she didn’t fold, he turned to see the others all watching him. “I. Hate. This,” he said, making the three words separate sentences. “And, if anything happens to her, I will never forgive any one of you.”
“Well then,” Mills said brightly. “We’d better do our best.”
The rest of the meeting was spent in logistics, and Andi was well aware of Damian seething beside her, listening to their conversation go on without him. The plan was for them to drop her off at the bus stop and for her to go home, where Elsa was still waiting—according to a fresh text from Sammy—and then for her to knock on Elsa’s window and ask why she was there, in the hopes that she only wanted to coordinate a meeting and not a kidnapping.
But, if the kidnapping happened, their “tour bus” would be waiting nearby and would follow Elsa’s car and wait in reserve, listening in via a tracking device that they gave her, running in for a rescue the moment she needed one. It felt like a sound plan to Andi, Damian’s nonparticipation aside.
At the end, once details were finalized, the group stood to go out. Mills stopped by the door, turning back suddenly. “Damian, why did you call us here?”
“We’ll discuss it later. I’m talked out,” he said, despite not having talked for the past forty-five minutes.
Mills inhaled to fight him, then shrugged, and Andi had to fight not to grin because she precisely recognized that feeling. “Okay. Everyone know what to do?” Mills asked instead and got a roomful of grunts and nods. “And…you feel prepared, Andi?”
“Yeah, thank you.” She now had separate tracking devices in her bra, jeans pocket, and shoe, which felt like overkill to her, but hey…and then followed the rest of them outside to get loaded into Damian’s Pagani for the short drive to the bus stop.
He opened the gull-wing door and sullenly watched her get in before closing it, his hands in his jeans pockets as he walked around the car for his own side. Once there, he buckled his seat belt and silently turned the car on.
“Are you just not going to talk to me?” she asked him as they passed through the first gate out of his compound.
“I don’t want to yell. So not talking is safer,” he said, swinging through a turn without looking over.
Andi curled up in the seat of the car and sighed. “When are you going to tell them about the dragon heart?”
He was quiet long enough she thought he might not answer. “Once I’m sure I’m not going to Godzilla out on the city later on this evening.”
“You’re being dramatic, Damian,” she complained.
“I prefer overprotective. It’s more manly.” He finally glanced over at her. “You drive me crazy, you know that?”
“Clearly.” She rolled her eyes.
“No. I mean it,” he said, whipping the car over to the side of the road, rolling it onto a wide grassy berm. He hit the steering wheel, easily denting it.
“Damian!” she gasped. If the car was two million, how much was just that?
He growled, popped it back into a rough circle with his hands, and then turned on her. “What if this is the last time I see you alive?”
“It won’t be,” she said firmly.
“You don’t know that, Andi.” His golden eyes searched hers, and the tension radiating off of him was like the thrum of a high-voltage wire in humidity. “What if it is? I don’t know what this is like for you or how many other people you’ve cared about before. But you are it for me. The only one. And if you die, a part of me dies too.” His words echoed in the sports car, and Andi didn’t know what to say. His hands wrung the steering wheel as he went on more quietly. “Maybe all of me, Andi. I feel that. Don’t you?”
When he said it like that, she wanted to. She wanted to give in and just let herself feel with abandon, to never worry about not feeling again, or how she’d survive if the spigot were suddenly turned off. “Damian,” she whispered quietly, ready to tell him as much when he whirled on her again.
“Don’t you dare say that I’m being mean when you’re trying to throw your life away to prove a foolish point,” he snapped.
She bit her lips and swallowed. “Fine. Then I won’t.”
He closed his eyes, and she wondered if she’d driven him to counting, which was a thing that her ex Josh used to do, to make a show of just how infuriating she could be, and then his eyes reopened. “I can’t imagine life without you.”
Which was what he’d been trying to do with his pause, she realized. Not counting. Just trying to picture a life without her in it. She hadn’t scared him away by being her most real self, and he was still fully present with her.
How on earth could all this feel so real so fast?
Maybe because he wasn’t from earth at all.
But neither his feelings nor her response to them changed what needed to be done—although Andi had a sudden sympathy for moths drawn to burning flames. “I’m sorry, Damian. But I’m still my own person. I get to make my own decisions, and this decision feels right.”
“What if it is not, though?”
She sighed sympathetically. “If there’s one thing working at the hospital has taught me, it’s that there are no guarantees. Not ever. If it’s not this plan, then it could be some morning my bus gets hit by a semi. Or a patient chokes me out. Or I trip down the stairs on my way out the door.” She reached over and put her hand atop his on the steering wheel. “I can’t live my life being scared of a maybe.”
He shook his head in denial. “But there are ways to control risks, Andi—”
“You mean like being followed by the best magical crew on the planet and having a man and dragon who are…” she began, and then caught herself before she put words like ‘in love with me’ in his mouth, even though that was surely what this was—which was why he hurt so bad and didn’t know what to do about it. The thought made her heart leap into her own throat in some combination of fear and delight, and she knew she’d never be able to untangle the two. “Intimately concerned with my well-being,” she finished quickly.
“Intimately concerned with you not being foolish, princess,” he corrected her.
Her eyes narrowed. “There’s a fine line between overprotective and infantilizing, dragon, and you’re riding it.”
He made a wordless sound of frustration, put the car in drive, and yanked it back on the road.
Damian pulled the car to a stop just inside the Briar’s gates, completely unsure what to do. Everything in him told him that he needed to stop her, to protect her at all costs, her opinion of him be damned, but then he realized that it was a slippery slope from there to what had happened to his mother. Sure, he could use the Forgetting Fire on Andi and wipe even the idea of this from her mind, but who would she be without her fierce though foolish passion and seemingly endless strength?
“I still hate this,” he muttered, but he hit the button that opened her door for her.
Andi turned toward him, lit by the dashboard lights. “I will be as safe as I possibly can, I promise.”
“I don’t believe you, but apparently you don’t care,” he said. She looked wounded, and he realized he didn’t even begin to want those to be his last words to her. “I…take that back,” he said, swallowing down all the bile in his throat at the thought of losing her. “I do believe you.” He inhaled deeply. “I just need you to try your hardest.”
“I will,” she said hesitating.
And then what now? Kiss her like he might never see her again? If he touched her, there was no possible way he would ever let her go. He faced the steering column, holding it tight. “Good luck on your mission.”
She waited, seemingly for something else, and then when he didn’t give it, she leaned forward and brushed his cheek with a kiss before getting out. He watched her walk to the bus stop, cradling a hand to his cheek as if her kiss were a living thing that he could keep there.
If anything happens to her, his dragon began, then didn’t finish; it just assaulted him with images of pain, destruction, and death. If someone hurt her, then the dragon would take out all of its rage on the city—the world, in turn—take out every moment of pain it’d ever had at being trapped in human form, revenge for every day Damian had kept it from the sky.
Yes, Damian agreed as the bus arrived, and Andi got on board. Because without Andi in his life, absolutely nothing else mattered. He wouldn’t be able to—wouldn’t want to—stop his dragon. Jamison would have to shoot him down; it would be their end, no doubt. If anything happens to her, he told it, I will let you.
He watched the bus pull away and whipped his car around, driving back up to his castle at top speed.
“I’ve got her,” Jamison announced the second he’d parked his car. Everyone else was already loaded up, and Damian took a seat in the back, between Max and Zach, most likely so that if they heard anything dangerous, they could stop him from throwing himself out the door. Jamison and Mills were in the front, and Austin was still on nurse duty.
Mills was driving, so from his spot, he could see the computer perched on Jamison’s lap, with its not-comforting-enough beacon on Andi, and his thoughts were interrupted by the squealing sound of brakes and the warning chime that preceded a bus’s stop.
“It’s one-way only,” Jamison said. “Although she knows that we can hear her.”
“Can I sit there?” someone asked her, and his stomach lurched. What if it was a Hunter closing in?
“Of course!” Andi said too brightly, and Damian felt entirely hamstrung, just listening for any sounds of danger.
“She’s going to be okay, Damian,” Zach said.
“For at least the first fifteen minutes here anyways,” Mills added. “That’s the length of the bus ride.”
“Not helping,” Damian muttered aloud and folded in on himself.
They made it to their destination just before the bus did as planned, pulling in to parallel park far enough away to not be seen, but close enough to be able to use binoculars to see Andi’s apartment’s entire parking lot. As Andi walked off of the bus, a tall blonde woman got out of a waiting car and strode over to her. The woman definitely looked like an Elsa, and he momentarily wished that Andi hadn’t told them about the claw she wore on a leather thong around her neck.
“Running plates,” Jamison announced. “Leased to Bright Star Corporation again…same goddamned wall.”
“Andrea,” the blonde must’ve announced because no one else would’ve used Andi’s full name for her.
“Elsa. Again,” Andi said, crossing her arms and sounding perturbed. “What the hell are you doing here? Sammy said you’d been here all day.”
“Waiting for you, obviously.” The blonde’s voice was husky, and Damian wondered when the last time she’d eaten any meat/drank any blood.
“Why?” Andi asked.
“Your uncle would like to talk to you.”
“I bet he would,” Andi said, with just the right amount of snark. It wouldn’t do for her to seem too eager, as they’d priorly discussed. “What makes him think I want to talk to him?”
“She’s good,” murmured Max.
“Agreed,” said Mills.
Elsa took an inhale deep enough to come through over the wire and then sounded like she was talking through gritted teeth. “He would like the chance to talk to you. In person.”
“So, why are you here and not him?” Andi asked her sharply.
“That was not part of the plan,” Damian growled.
Mills looked back at him. “Her pain’s genuine. Let it flow.”
“Your uncle is a very important man,” the strange woman went on.
“Yeah, fuck that,” Andi said, and Damian winced as she went on, worried for her. “My whole life, I’ve been hearing about how Uncle Lee’s sooooo important, but he’s also a fucking liar. So, fuck him and go fuck yourself too.” Damian watched Andi turn on her heel and walk toward her apartment with purpose.
Zach made a thoughtful sound. “Is she blowing this?”
Damian grunted. “I’m not getting my hopes up.”
They heard the sound of heels trotting on concrete through the wire as the woman ran after her. “He wants to apologize to you. For keeping you in the dark all these years. He never meant to hurt you, Andrea, and frankly, all of this would sound better coming from him, not me. I never apologize.”
Andi stopped three stairs up to make a rueful sound. “I believe you. You’re shit at this.”
The woman sighed again. “So, let him talk to you. Indulge an old man.”
“A man who kidnapped my brother, let me think he might be dead, and then somehow turned him into a dragon?”
“One and the same,” she said.
Andi put her hands over her face and rubbed her temples. “I can’t believe I’m even beginning to consider this.”
“You want answers, don’t you? If nothing else?” the woman pressed.
Andi waited for what seemed like a long time even to Damian and then exhaled in a rush. “Yes. Fine. Fuck.”
The woman chuckled, and walked back toward her car, opening up the rear door. “Get in.”
Damian’s stomach twisted in knots as Andi rode quietly in the back of the woman’s car. Jamison endlessly triangulated possible destinations, laying odds on them with Mills, but Andi’s signal was the only sign of life he had from her. He belatedly realized the trackers weren’t attuned to her health. What if she was already dead inside the car they followed? If Hunters had jumped her with chloroform and knives the instant she’d gotten in? Surely, if that’d happened, he would’ve felt it somehow, through their inexplicable yet growing bond, but…. His muscles bunched, turning rock hard, as the dragon inside him readied to fight.
“Damian, don’t,” Max warned, bringing him down.
He regathered control of himself. He and his dragon had been so likeminded, he hadn’t even realized he’d been losing it, and he nodded at the other man. “For now.”
“They’re at the ports,” Jamison said, as Mills slowed the tour bus down to take a turn. His electronics put in a code that allowed them access not long after Andi’s car had passed, but they had to fall even farther back—there were no other active cars here and even fewer places to hide. Mills hit the button to take the SUV into electric mode so it could coast silently and traced their way to the water’s edge where the car that had held Andi was tightly parked in between two shipping containers, with no way to see the other side of any of them.
Damian’s dragon growled low at the same time as Damian announced, “Fuck this.” He tore his seat belt and lunged over Zach before the werewolf could react, throwing himself out of the moving vehicle to run for the water’s edge. He jumped for the edge of a shipping container, caught the top of it easily, and hauled himself up to see what was happening to Andi on the other side…just in time to see her at the end of a pier, getting into a boat.
He grabbed hold of the metal beneath him, ready to tear it off and take it into the sky with him as he shifted, gasping out the word, “Boat,” first for his earpiece, so the others would understand, and then, Max and Zach were there tackling him.
He shouted in incoherent rage and shoved them off, standing now to watch the boat as it raced away.
Chase after her! his dragon roared, surging inside of him.
“Jamison still has her!” Zach shouted while Max took the more direct route of punching him across his jaw. Damian’s head snapped with the impact of the bear-shifter’s hit, and he instinctively wheeled on the man.
Max fell to an obedient knee. “Control yourself, prince.”
Damian panted, hands clenching into fists at his side. “Where is she?” he growled.
“I’ll be able to tell you in a second here,” Jamison said from where the SUV was parked below. Damian flung himself down to the ground beside it, as Jamison opened up a box and said, “Fly, my pretties!” Half a dozen drones the size of dinner plates swarmed out, soaring into the air and heading the direction Andi’d gone. Once they were aloft, Jamison glanced at Damian with that half-trance look in his eye he sometimes got when he was communing with his tech. “I can’t keep an eye on them and be thinking about shooting you, too, so, behave.”
Damian growled again, and then Mills was there, taking his hand in hers. He looked to her and knew she couldn’t tell him any bullshit like that ‘it was going to be all right.’ Instead, she told him the truth. “She’s smart, and she’s tough.”
Damian inhaled deeply, regaining himself, despite his tormented dragon’s howls, pushing the beast back. “Where are they going, Jamison? And why isn’t she talking?” He tried not to sound panicked about that—and failed.
Then as one, they all heard the tracking devices on her check-in, as a man’s voice said, “Andrea!” at top volume.