“So that’s why you bought the Greek wolf kingdom island and the Idaho kingdom gate,” I say. Back in the day, when I was only a few years old, we passed a new law about kingdom towns not being allowed to sell property to humans. This had been in response to an Idaho king, who had lost his entire kingdom town to a Russian oligarch in a high-stakes poker game. The oligarch had gone on to sell it to Damianos Drakkon, a male the Lupine council had thought at the time was a simple billionaire. But who I’m now finding out was really a bitter alien, setting the stage to return to an earlier time on his planet.
“So why are you still here then?” I ask. “You have your gates. What else do you need to go back?”
“Alas, there was only one fating portal engineer on our mission, and that was the Betrayer King. Just like it has in your society now, our technology had reached the point that it was very hard for a lay drakkon to fully understand it, much less manipulate it. Without guidance or instruction, it has taken decades of study for us to not only locate potential fating portals but also reconfigure them so that a drakkon could use it to get matched with a fated mate. On our home planet, these fertility portals were used to draw your mate to you, not the other way around. So, it was not only a matter of changing the genetic coding on the gates, but also figuring out how to make it so the fating portal would send a drakkon male to his female match and not the other way around. We have only recently broken the science on it. Unfortunate timing, as this was exactly when my desire for you reached a fever pitch I could no longer ignore.”
“Okay,” I say, sifting carefully through that huge download of information. “So, you were planning to what, pump a baby into me, so that you could stop the itch, then bounce to your fated mate, who’d probably be a female dragon like you?”
He makes a sound in his chest, that might or might not be a chuckle. “Yes, Clever Reverence. That was exactly what I planned to do. I am impressed that you so easily figured it out. However, while I understood that it would be a biological imperative to mate with you, I did not give enough consideration to how hard it would be to leave you. I was a fool, and I will spend the rest of my life punishing myself for taking for granted this connection we share. That is why I ordered the project shut down. Nothing will be allowed to disturb the happy life I have planned for us.”
My heart stutters. He’s planning a whole life together while I’m planning how to escape. But I press on, wanting to make sure I’ve got what he’s trying to tell me right. “So the project’s shut down and you’re not going to go through the fated mate gate?”
“Why would I?” he asks. “You are my mate, the mother of my progeny. There is no greater point to my existence than paying you the reverence you are due for the rest of my life. But enough about that, Treasured Mate. It is now getting late. I will give you escort to your room.”
I follow him in a daze. Not sure how to respond to his latest declaration, or even how to feel.
But my wolf has some ideas. She flips onto her back, legs spread wide open. Total THOT emoji.
This doesn’t change anything, I tell that ho-wolf over there. I have no way of knowing if anything he just claimed is true, including the part about wanting a happy ending for us. The dude is still a supervillain. And you know this is part of some ultimate plan. We’re basically carrying the spawn of Thanos here, I remind her.
But apparently, my wolf has nothing against civilization destroying monsters. She whines and complains about no longer wanting to go through with the plan. It makes me want to scream and call her a basic bitch.
But now is nowhere near the time to get into it with my wolf.
Instead, I focus on projecting happiness and calm over my side of the mating bond as I turn to say, “Okay, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow for my bath.”
“There is no reason to guess at such things. I will, of course, appear to pay you reverence at the appointed hour.”
Yeah, definitely need to apologize to mom in real life about complaining so much about the meditation requirement when I return to my kingdom house. It takes every single ounce of my childhood training to keep my wolf from vomiting up all her guilt over our mate bond.