5
Rhuron
She’d locked herself in a storage room.
Perfect.
I had a servant bring me clothing and dressed myself outside the door. Any distance from her was too much; this short couple of feet between us felt like murder. The original plan was to bring her by car to slowly bring her up to speed on the situation, but she’d ran, making a spectacle of us.
I had to fly her.
Luckily, she’d been mostly still during the flight, just yelling at me to drop her from a mile in the air.
She was in my castle now. She was safe. That was all that mattered.
It didn’t exactly follow my plan of breeding her immediately; I was no closer to having her pregnant than I was when we were in her shop, but at least she was here.
I could breathe the same air as her, taste her panic as I drew in each lungful.
“Izzy, I’m having the kitchens prepare dinner. Come out and eat with me,” I prompted.
“I’ll starve instead.”
A laugh huffed out of my chest at her dramatics. I’d never had anyone actually deny me like this. She was mine, I needed to make her see that. My natural side, the dragon with his pride and hunger, wanted to just push through the door and take her. It was wood, and I can imagine that I could tear off its hinges. If I could get to her, I could close the deal.
Listening to that wild side and snatching her away was what put me in this situation.
“I can’t let you starve. Open the door a little when I say, and we’ll slip the food through to you,” I offered. I had to show her I wasn’t just some horrible monster. Despite what my body needed from her; I couldn’t let her think my mind wasn’t in control. Maybe I could coax her out if I could just be patient.
She didn’t answer at first, and I worried she was just going to give me the silent treatment.
Then, through the oak paneling, I heard a soft, “Okay.”
I sighed in relief and told a servant to prepare the food in a way that could be transferred through a crack in the door. She was already here, I had her, I didn’t need her starving to death.
“Why am I here?” she asked me through the door after a couple minutes.
“This is your new home,” I boasted. “Every hall and building here is yours. The people here will kiss your feet someday,” I explained.
“You can’t do this. I have a home back there — in Ember Abyss,” she argued.
“Please, just give it time. You’ll grow to find Crystal Glass a better home than any you’ve known before.”
“It’s not home — this is kidnapping,” I heard her say as she kicked the door.
I didn’t know how to reply to that.
She wasn’t really wrong.
“You belong to me, and because of that, everything else here belongs to you. Isn’t that enough?”
“I don’t belong to anyone.”
I was getting frustrated with her. It was so easy for me to accept myself being tied to her, and yet she was putting up a fight as if this luxurious life was just a pain in the ass.
She was an ungrateful child.
I could feel my anger rising, but I bit it down. Scaring her, upsetting her, wasn’t going to do any good on top of all of the bad it had already done. She needed to know she could trust me.