36. Ogden

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

OGDEN

I woke up with no concept of how much time had passed or even where I was. A soft mattress with silk sheets pooled around me, and someone’s head rested on my stomach. I looked down to find Lux softly snoring.

When he disappeared under Tyson’s bulk, my heart stopped. Even my dragon stilled as everything we should have said to each other screamed at me.

He could have died.

But he hadn’t.

My heart fluttered. I looked at the ceiling without seeing it and pieced together what happened before I passed out.

Most of Lux had been trapped under one of Tyson’s dragon butt cheeks. Rehan and my combined strength wasn’t enough to free him. We still needed the rings off the jewelry-covered mage, and in the end, we risked freeing Drukpa by having Tyson shift.

Lux, fully scaled, hadn’t been happy, but he’d been strong enough to shift, erasing the damage done to his human form.

Drukpa was not as lucky. Although his shields might have saved him from breaking every bone in his body, his love of accessories took him out. We found one of his spikier bracelets lodged into his left eye and several of the gem-studded necklaces embedded into his chest.

Jay and Rehan managed to free Tenzin and remove the necklace from Caoimhe. Immediately, the nymph’s gaze focused on her mate. She rushed forward with tears streaming down her face.

Tenzin was in bad shape. Drukpa’s spell had soaked into Tenzin’s very essence, and he couldn’t shift. It was a minor miracle his human body survived the gunshots. I’d pushed my healing magic into the young fire dragon until I fell unconscious.

Someone must have put me here with Lux?

The too-beautiful-for-his-own-good air prince stirred. One of his hands ran down my leg to rest on my thigh. My heart raced, and my mind spun with questions. Had he chosen to lie here? Or had Jay put his unconscious body with mine? Had he been unconscious?

My conversation with Tyson before all this went down circled in my mind. The fire prince didn’t think anything I’d done was wrong. He’d been infuriatingly helpful and, unfortunately, right. Curse or not, we were a group of five. And that was complicated.

I needed to uncomplicate it.

Lux stirred again. His hand drifted closer to my too-large dragon dick, hidden in my boxers. I reached down and brushed his shoulder to wake him. He stretched, grazing my dick, and it rose to attention like a fucking jack in the box.

“I’m so sorry,” I scrambled back.

Lux sat up, bare-chested, blinking and rubbing the sleep out of his big eyes.

“Did Jay stick you in here?” I asked.

Lux stretched his neck, managing to look incredibly sexy even with his longish locks tangled and compressed oddly on his head. If I still questioned whether I was bisexual or not, this solidified it for me.

“She didn’t,” Lux answered. “We need to talk, so I invited myself. Are you upset?”

I glanced at my erection, not hidden at all by the sheets I’d pulled over my boxers. “I think the opposite, really.” Heat filled my cheeks.

Lux blushed too. “I’m still figuring myself out.”

I put out a hand. “Of course, I shouldn’t have…“

“No, you should have,” Lux cut me off. “I was rutting, and if my dragon didn’t want it, we would have said no. My only regret is not talking to Jay and you sooner.”

I let out a relieved breath. “Me too. I, um, got a lot of pleasure out of the experience.”

Lux blinked at me as if unsure what to do with that information. “I guess I just assumed you did, as you did it all night.”

“Ah, right,” I prepared a spell to bury myself in the ground.

“But, just to be clear, for now at least, it’s Jay.” Lux smiled as he said her name. “I want to fool around with you, but with Jay between us, or maybe watching.” Lux ducked a bit. “I don’t know. I just…I feel like we’re losing her, even though we never had her. She’s so convinced our feelings aren’t real.”

I gestured to my dick. “Ignore him. He’s just excited all the time. I also want us to revolve around Jay. Jay was the reason I stepped in.” I wrinkled my nose. “I lost myself in a rut, and it left me with three days of hazy memories and a lot of regret. I didn’t want your first time with our girl to be, well, that.”

Lux reached out and gripped my shoulder. “Thank you.” He released me. “Speaking of Jay, where has our mate gotten off to?”

I felt for our bond, which tugged me North. Lux tilted his head in the same direction.

“Let’s go find her,” I stood and stomped my feet, forcing blood to circulate away from my dick. “And, ah, where are we?”

As we walked toward Jay, Lux filled me in. We were still in Drukpa’s fortress, though Lux had renamed it Fort D, the d standing for dragon (not my initial assumption). Drukpa had been a well-known human trafficker and a generally unliked guy. Eventually, someone would show up to claim his underground empire, but for now, Jay paid off his surviving minions. The dead were hidden in plain sight, chill’n and unmarked in the morgue, where, hopefully, they wouldn’t be discovered until long after we’d gone.

Caoimhe and Tenzin were back with Cikku, where they would remain for the foreseeable future. After I passed out, Cikku brought us our stuff and took Tenzin to a human hospital. It would be months before he could shift and fully heal.

“I would say don’t laugh when you see Tyson,” Lux added. “But please do.”

We rounded a corner, and a massive red-scaled dragon tail and three claws stuck out of a door.

“He can’t…” I got the two words out before my laughter interrupted me.

“Feck me, it’s not that funny,” Tyson’s voice came from the room. “And it’s already gotten smaller! I can fit through doors now.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Tyson didn’t spend much time in Drukpa’s anti-shifting spell,” Lux explained. “Only his leg and tail got caught. We really must enjoy this while we can. It really is shrinking fast now.”

“Fecking Dodo Bird.” Tyson tried to swing at us as we hopped over his overgrown appendages, but his massive leg, which looked like a kid glued it poorly to his human body, kept him pinned in place.

“I mean, it’s less convenient and less fun than your dick, Og,” Lux stage whispered. “But it is a statement.”

Tyson growled and lunged, but his dragon leg hit the wall first, then the ceiling. Chunks of plaster rained down on us, and the fire prince hissed like a snake.

Lux and I burst out laughing.

“Hey, fight after we finish the video!” Jay yelled. “This is the only security room I’ve found.”

I controlled my laughter and observed my surroundings. A collection of monitors, which reminded me of the British Museum, came into view. Rehan leaned against the wall, just out of Tyson’s reach, while Jay sat in the room's only chair.

The water dragon passed me a coffee, then Lux, before returning to his spot. Jay turned in her chair and smiled. I pursed my lips, mentally arming myself for another fight. Her smile fell. Lux kicked me in the shins, but I didn’t change my expression. I just sipped my coffee.

Jay crossed her legs, and I couldn't help but admire their shape.

“I get it,” she said, pulling my gaze to her face. “And I don’t expect anything to change until I can back up my words with actions, but I will do better.”

I snorted. “Just like that?”

Jay wrinkled her nose. “I mean, we had to get our asses handed to us by a two-bit mage with a bunch of toys.” She turned back to the screen. “And, there are these four dragon shifters who’ve been wearing me down for weeks, but I’m sure they have nothing to do with it.”

Lux grinned, and Tyson snorted. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, feeling like I missed something while I slept. Before I could ask, Jay pressed play on the computer. The same video came up on every monitor.

Gold. Coins, bars, and dangling bobbles filled every corner of a large square room. My dragon leaned forward, and a glob of drool ran out of the corner of my mouth. Diamonds sparkled out of display cases. Runes glowed along the back wall, and I forced myself to look away from the massive display of wealth to study the collection of artifacts displayed from floor to ceiling.

My human mind joined my dragon. Our new collection.

Jay’s magic, in the now familiar shape of a portal, shimmered to life in the video, distracting me. She and the same man in a ball cap stepped into what had to be Drukpa’s vault.

The lighting dimmed and brightened as I assumed alarms fired and a hazy gas released into the air. Jay and the man poked around the room for a few minutes, utterly unaffected by the gas, before finding a piece of Gorm’s Casket on the back wall.

Two of Drukpa’s minions came into view in gas masks. One fired a gun while the other sent a bolt of orange power toward the intruders. Jay put her hand up, and both the magic and the bullet slowed before reversing direction and whizzing back to their makers. The minions dropped while Jay and the man made their exit.

Jay paused the video and turned back to us. “So, the man in the video is Bradly Cooper. He is, in fact, my actual ex, I think. Though he’s a bit young to be the old man who said he gave me dragons.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And how did you learn this?”

Jay wrinkled her nose. “Long story short, my accountant. Turns out, I added him to my financials and don’t remember it.”

I sighed. “So, all of this could have been avoided if you just communicated better?”

Jay held up her hand. “I’m not getting into the ‘what ifs.’ The only reason we were looking for a man meeting his description was because of the first video we saw in Ireland, which led us to London, where we saved Caoimhe. Malta had a Drukpa problem which needed sorting. Given, it didn’t need to be us who fixed it, but it was. Life can be unexpected.” Jay chewed on her bottom lip, and her eyes were unfocused as if she were talking to herself.

“Fine. I’ll give it to you.” I stepped forward and brushed her shoulder to keep her present. “So where do we go from here?”

Jay caught my hand and held it. “We figure out how Bradly Cooper fits into this mess, and we get into that vault to see if Drukpa’s collection includes anything helpful.”

Tyson whined like a begging dog. Literal piles of gold sparkled in my memory, and it took all of my self-control not to make the same noises.

Jay cocked her head to the side. Her gaze twinkled as she studied each of us. “For once, I think all of you might be excited to follow my instructions.”