Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve

SIYANA

“Don’t bother trying to keep pace with me,” he warned as I told him to fill my glass again after he brought the entire bottle over to his side table. “My metabolism burns it off much faster than a human’s. You won’t prove anything to me by having another, besides that you’re too stubborn for your own good, which I promise I’m already well aware of.”

“I’ve taken care of myself for a long time now,” I argued, not appreciating his implications. “If I wanted to impress you, I’d do something other than drinking myself under the table.” Both his circular human pupil and slitted dragon one widened at that comment. No, he most definitely wasn’t wondering what I meant by that, right? I shouldn’t have said it. Switching gears, I tossed out, “Besides, the liquor is keeping me warm, and who knows when I’ll have a chance to have it again, considering this marriage will be short lived.”

“I won’t be cleaning up your puke, but be my guest,” he murmured, an air of arrogance swirling around him as he leaned over to refill my glass. It seemed as if some of the tension and animosity we’d felt around each other had evaporated with the revelation of our impending divorce.

Could we work together in the meantime? My guard would remain up, but perhaps a truce would assist us in making progress.

I resisted the urge to scowl at him, just barely, instead choosing to focus on the task at hand—gathering information. “I need you to start at the beginning. Where did this curse originate, and what do you know about breaking it so far? Our history books don’t cover the topic, and those who were alive when it happened refuse to speak of it, despite our town being full of gossips. I need to understand it in its entirety.”

His broad shoulders heaved with a deep inhale before he stood and let it out. I noted trickles of sweat streaming down his temple as he glared at the fireplace. Clearly, it was only burning for my sake, and while I was enjoying basking in its warmth, a part of me felt bad that he was agitated and uncomfortable in his own chambers.

“You can kill the fire, if that would help you settle in for this conversation,” I offered just as he turned to glance at the bright light streaming in from the balcony. From this angle, it showcased the black tunic stuck to his wide back, drenched through with sweat and showing his muscles bunching as he placed his glass up on the mantle. “I have a feeling we’re going to be here for a bit and that there isn’t anywhere else we can go, considering your cagey behavior on the way back from the dining hall.”

He glanced back at me and I quickly averted my gaze from my perusal before forging on, “Don’t think I forgot about that weird behavior from earlier. I want an explanation for that as well.”

“Will you perish if I snuff out the fire? I fear I don’t truly understand what you can withstand.”

Something about his question had me chuckling with genuine delight, which caused his brow to pinch in confusion as he waited for my answer. He was being so serious. The undine king, unaware of the limits of a human body–it was as ludicrous as it was humorous. But then, I suppose there was more than enough that I still didn’t understand about his people and their way of life. The thought was all the levity I needed to bring me back to the moment at hand, though I couldn’t help but still chuckle.

“No, I won’t perish ,” I breathed out between laughs as he shook his head and ran a hand through his hair, pushing back the damp pieces from his face. “Put out the fire and I will let you know when the cold becomes overwhelming.”

Relief seemed to wash over him, his shoulders sagging as he bent down. Holding a hand in front of the fireplace, shards of ice came flying out of it, piercing the wood. He let out a curse as he crouched down fully, balancing on the balls of his feet. I watched in fascination as the ice quickly melted within the grips of the fire that licked mercilessly against it, and Theo tried again. This time when he lifted his hand, a steady stream of snow blasted from his palm, coating the entire area. Steam began to fill the room as it melted against the embers and the fire began to dim.

It was the most dramatic way to put out a fire that I’d ever seen, and it became abundantly clear that he’d never done this before. I let out a sigh and shifted to my feet, feeling the buzz of the bourbon washing through my veins as I stood and ambled over to where the iron poker sat, clean of the grim of soot and clearly unused. I felt his eyes on the side of my face as I knelt down onto my knees and placed my hand on his, pressing down lightly to get him to stop.

“You’re actively fighting against the fire,” I murmured, poking the pieces until they fell and the heap of wood no longer remained.

With the damp logs still sizzling and the flames slowly tapering out, he admitted, “You’re lucky that starting the fire was easy. I’d never had to do that before either.”

I couldn’t help but joke, “All this for little ole me? And they say an old dragon can’t learn new tricks.”

Glancing over at him, I choked on a laugh as his lips thinned. “I’m two years older than you, Siyana. I am not old.”

I brought my hand up to cover my giggles and slowly but surely, a small laugh fell from his own lips. I was enraptured as soon as the sound hit my ears. It was rich and deep, with a vibration that seemed to fill the space. The way his scales bunched up as his smile grew was odd to see, watching the edges shift over one another with ease.

Before I could think it through, my hand lifted in the air, reaching out to touch them. How could they move so seamlessly, considering their rigidity? His smile fell as soon as he realized what I was doing, but he didn’t stop me. Silently, I traced the tips of my fingers along the edges of the scales, and his eyes widened with the contact.

His serpentine eye sparked with that bright blue magic I’d grown to know meant his dragon was present.

“Hi there,” I murmured as if the beast could hear me, concentrating on the rough ridges within each scale but marveling over the pliable skin between them. It was much rougher than our human skin, but I could see how it could absolutely be pierced by a blade, unlike the seemingly impenetrable scales. “So your scales can shift over one another as a defense mechanism to protect the skin. How fascinating. Is it like that all over your body?”

A low buzz had settled into my mind at some point, and my fingers tingled with the prolonged contact.

My gaze wandered, and as soon as I saw his very human eye gazing at me, it was like I was sent hurling back to reality. I snatched my hand back, gasping as I realized what I’d done.

I’d just freaking pet the king of dragons. What had gotten into me?

He cleared his throat, pulling back to push to his feet, clearly just as shocked as I was. “So, now that I can focus without feeling like I’m suffocating from the heat, we should begin our discussion.”

I blinked at him a few times, still confused at what had come over me. “Yeah, uhm, okay.”

Taking our seats again, I remained quiet, waiting for him to begin. I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eyes, so I settled for staring a hole in the plush gray rug beneath his feet.

“The year I was born, my father had an affair with a woman outside of our lands.”

My heart was racing as I tried to focus on his words, completely taken off guard by the severity of them. Instantly, my eyes snapped up to his and I found him gazing out at the sky through the glass doors behind me.

“Apparently, I was a difficult baby.”

The opening to make a sarcastic quip about him being difficult was there, yet I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do less, for once.

He shrugged and grabbed the decanter of liquor that was already half empty, plucking the lid off and placing it back on the table. “At least, that’s the excuse my father used to defend his deplorable actions. My parents had drifted apart and he found solace between another woman’s legs. Only, he hid his identity from her, concerned that she would demand access to our money, or worse, attempt to become the queen and disrupt our lives.”

How Theo managed to speak of this as if it was a storybook he was reading from spoke to the deep issues I assumed he was likely still struggling with. His suddenly monotone voice was so unlike him, and I wondered if it was the only way he could get through sharing this—just brushing past how incredibly fucked up it all was and explaining it all as fact.

As he drank directly from the bottle, I grimaced. Yeah, this had to be awful to discuss.

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him to stop, to prevent him from reopening these festering wounds, but I held back. As hard as this likely was for him, I needed to know the details. There might be a clue somewhere in the mess of this fucked up history.

Resting the bottle on his knee when he was done, he focused on wiping his mouth with his sleeve next.

“He’s a fool and didn’t realize the woman would find him, searching for answers about the man she met in the woods and sparked a connection with, thinking she had found the love of her life when she stumbled upon him.”

I groaned, seeing where this was going and not wanting my suspicions confirmed. However, there was one thing that bothered me. Why was this woman randomly wandering through the northern territory of Andrathya? It wasn’t exactly known for its views or welcoming environment.

His head lolled to rest against the edge of the wingback chair. “Upon realizing that not only was he married and a king, he was also a beast at heart. The woman was rightfully scorned, but it seemed she and my father might have been more alike than she wanted to admit, because she wasn’t entirely forthcoming about her identity either.”

His eyes slid from the sky behind me to scan over my face. “She was a witch, or at least a descendant of one.” My mouth fell open as a million questions peppered my mind, but he kept pushing on. “She at least possessed magic potent enough to lay a curse on my father’s kind, so that no one like him would ever be able to deceive a lover again. A piece of their beast would be on display at all times, and she meant it to scare off anyone who might dare be tempted to lay with us. She cursed our kind to die out with us, leaving us unable to find a willing, true mate.”

He was quiet for a few moments, seemingly letting me digest that.

“I thought witches were a thing of myth,” I breathed out, settling on the first thought that came to the surface. “The old texts say they were the female descendants of the elemental gods, having affinities for magic in the same way the male offspring, the drackya, do. Is that true?”

His lips pursed. “That is what we were taught, but, save being able to ask an elemental ourselves, I suppose the creation of beings is hearsay this many centuries later.”

A thought hit me with his wording, and I leaned forward in my seat, a spark of excitement running through me. “Has anyone ever been able to converse with the elemental gods? If it was a witch that laid the curse, surely the creator of witches would be able to break it, right?”

He spluttered and looked at me like I was insane for even asking. “Siyana, why would the gods bother to talk with any of us?”

Not allowing him to deter me, I rebutted, “Well, do you have any better ideas? Did your dad ever tell you if the witch said anything about how to break the curse?”

“No,” he answered briskly as his hand tightened on the edge of the bottle, “he didn’t bother to tell me much before he killed himself years later, unable to handle the shame and hatred he received as a result of the curse, taking my mother with him.”

I leapt from my chair, unable to contain myself. “He killed your mother?!”

Rubbing his eyes with his free hand, he sighed. “He may as well have. When a drackya and human complete their bond, part of the magic from our dragon is shared with our mate. It allows their lifespan to stretch far beyond that of typical humans. But when their drackya dies and that magic source is snuffed out…” he trailed off, leaving me to fill in the blanks.

“So her mortality caught up with her after he was gone,” I surmised as he took a drink. My feet carried me back and forth in front of the near-dead embers in the fireplace. “Fuck, Theo…that’s a lot.”

I stopped pacing and stared at the drackya before me, no longer seeing him simply as the dragon king, or the reason I was torn from my home for the first time. I was simply seeing Theo, the child who had to grow up too quickly and take on the mantle of king from his fucked up father. Stuck with the responsibility of having to break the curse, when it should never have been his burden to bear.

“I had to take over the throne when I was thirteen,” he admitted hollowly, gaze going back out to the sky as he seemed to lose himself in thought. A long moment passed before he sighed, shoulders slumping slightly as he continued, “As you can imagine, the hatred from our people is heavy, considering it is my father’s fault the curse was given to begin with. That hatred has fallen to me in his absence. I suppose it has to be directed at someone.”

“Hey,” I whispered, finding my voice softer than it had ever been with him. My heart was splintering as more of his life was revealed. “Don’t say that. You don’t deserve their hatred. It sounds to me like you’ve had it the hardest due to your father’s horrid actions. Not only are you cursed like everyone else, but you lost both of your parents, and you have to shoulder a responsibility that is too heavy to carry alone.”

His haunting words came back to me. No one stops to wonder what made me this way.

“Well, I’ve done a shit job since taking the crown, according to my people,” he admitted before his jaw clenched tightly. “I’m nowhere close to understanding the curse or how to break it, and here we are, twenty-seven years later, still stuck. The patience I’ve asked them to have has all but dried up, and they’ve begun to take matters into their own hands—hence them snatching humans from your lands in a desperate attempt to find a mate.”

I scoffed, “Yeah, because that’s smart. Terrify the women before hoping they’ll pledge their life to you as a mate.”

Snagging my drink, I gulped the bourbon down as the cold began to settle back into my bones, much quicker than I anticipated. Thankfully, the liquor warmed my chest and heat spread across my cheeks.

“You don’t understand, Siyana.”

Every time he used my full name, it felt wrong, as if I was a stranger he was being formal with. But I supposed that’s exactly what I was. Here he was, baring his life story to me, yet he didn’t know me at all.

I lowered my glass to my side and met his eyes. What I saw had my knees trembling. There was a deep hunger in those navy depths that made me want to shrink away, once again feeling like prey.

He pushed to his feet and stalked toward me, and all I could manage was to not step back and show the fear building tightly within my chest. Suddenly, he was crowding my space like he had in the dining hall, forcing me to tilt my head back in order to maintain eye contact.

“Dragons mate for life,” he whispered, causing the skin on my arms to pebble as a chill went down my spine. “It begins to drive us crazy. Knowing our mate is out there, yet being unable to claim them, it drives us into a frenzy eventually. The older we get, the less time we feel we have to satisfy what the beast within needs.”

My lips were suddenly dry as I croaked out, “And what’s that?”

His head tilted as his dragon’s eye sparked and zeroed in on my lips. “To claim our mate. To breed them. To worship them. To not understand where one soul stops and the other begins once the bond is complete.”

My breaths grew shallow and rapid as my heart rate spiked. I swore my heart had drifted into my ears at the way the steady beat whooshed within them. His closeness was doing things to me, or maybe it was the alcohol finally kicking in. Things that shouldn’t be possible were rising within me, considering I despised his kind. Yet his scent and warmth wrapped around me in a comforting embrace that I was beginning to get used to, and I found my own eyes tracing his lips in return.

The words were falling from my lips before I could even stop myself.

“And why are you so sure that I couldn’t be yours?”