Her Dragon Captor (Her Dragon King Duet 1)

Now it’s my turn to laugh. “Thank you,” I say, wiggling my butt as I go back to stirring my grits.

I stay in a great mood, even though Damianos only takes a little nibble of the straight manna I made before declaring it, “Quite tasty for an unnecessary grain,” and going right back to his huge plate of ham.

I hadn’t been lying when I said he could catch me if I ran, easily. But…

“I woke up early with a lot of energy for some reason,” I tell Damianos as I’m finishing up my first bowl of grits and he’s cutting into his second plate of ham. “I feel like I could take a really long walk, or”—I wiggle my eyebrows at him—“take you on a very nice ride.”

It’s been over a week since I’ve had enough energy to do anything but lie on my side like a beached whale during sex as Damianos took us both across the finish line. So I’m expecting him to be like, “Yassss, Reverence! Let’s do this!”

But instead, he lowers his fork, and a certain dread floods my mate bond.

“What?” I ask, putting down my spoon.

“You are within days, or perhaps mere hours of labor. The Betrayer King explained that before Golden Son was born, his treasured mate also had a sudden burst of ecstatic energy. It is your body flooding you with adrenaline and endorphins to aid you in your labor.”

Okay, well I put my fork down, too. “Wow, really? Because that’s the basic opposite of human and wolf births. We’re just in a lot of pain.”

“Perhaps your original designer was so surprised by your race’s outrageously high reproductive rates that they made birth painful to discourage you from replicating like rabbits,” he says with a thoughtful look.

“What did you just say?” I start to ask.

“There is no time for questions, Reverence. I must prepare a nest for you of blankets and pillows, so that you may lay our hatchling. We’ll also need towels and other necessary sanitation tools.”

He starts to leave the room, but then he stops and looks back at me.

And his expression…there’s no way to describe it. Not anger, I realize right away after checking in with our mate bond. It’s more like distress with a weird layering of grief on top.

If I wasn’t sitting right there, I’d think I’d already died from the way he’s looking back at me.

And I find myself asking him, “What’s wrong?” even though I’m the one whose apparently in the early stages of labor.

He doesn’t answer.

And I’m starting to get scared. Really scared. So scared that for the first time ever, I push into his head. “Damianos…baby…what’s wrong. Talk to me. You’re scaring me.”

He jerks his head as if my words inside his head have ripped him out of some sort of trance.

Then he says, “I…I can’t do this. I shouldn’t do this. If anything goes wrong, it is once again my fault.”

“What?” I ask for what feels like the umpteenth time this morning.

He turns all the way back around and walks over to where I’m still sitting with my empty plate.

“I must…I must grant you access to your family,” he says, his voice quiet inside my head now. Somber. “If this labor does not go as planned and there is any chance they might help you…”

He reaches his hand out to my collar and presses into it with his thumb.

And just like that, the collar loosens around my neck.

With a noiseless whomp, my head suddenly fills with the sounds of my rebooting system.

“Your GoGen chip was turned off without sufficient notice,” a perfectly modulated voice informs me. “Running emergency diagnostic check…”

I look at Damianos, unable to believe he did this. He gave me my freedom. Just gave it to me, without any warning at all.

“So you’re letting me go?” I ask, a weird ugly emotion washing over me. “What happened to one of us having to be dead?”

“I’ll never truly let you go. Until my dying day, you will remain in my heart.” His voice is little more than a harsh whisper inside my head now with all the rebooting notices popping off. “But I do not want our hatchling born to an imprisoned mother. I want what I envisioned for us, a wedding in front of your wolves and my drakkon. What you talked about during our last round of heat sex…the matching yellow flame you call love. I want that for him. And I want that for you. And therefore, I cannot make the same mistakes as before. This is a second chance, and this time I must do right by you.”

I stare at him. Not knowing what to say. Or what to do.

“Alert! Alert!” my biochip screams at me. “You are in the early stages of labor. Please proceed carefully to the nearest hospital. Would you like me to call an ambulance for you?”