Thankfully, the wolf part of me kicks in before I can completely freak out.
My wolf sniffs the air and catches his distinct fire scent. He’s in the house I’m assured. She’s just not exactly sure where.
Cutting my panic attack short, I see what she means. I can’t see him, but I can smell him. Not quite close by. But also, not far away.
I start sniffing in the direction of the door leading to the living room, only to stop when the scent starts to fade. Is he outside then? No… the same thing happens when I start sniffing toward the door.
Now, I’m more than irritated. The baby’s also twisting and turning. Not so much that it’s painful, but definitely more than usual. I think Damianos and my biosystem were right. It’s coming. Soon….
“Damianos!” I yell. “Damianos, where are you? If this is some kind of trick or joke, it’s officially not fucking funny. This baby wants out, and I don’t want to do this without you!”
I wait, all the things he’s said about revering me, about loving me until his flame extinguishes echoing in my head. But no answer.
“Damianos!” I yell again. I clutch my squirming stomach, feeling alone for the very first time in my life.
“Damianos…baby…please…” I plead into mental air, my badass bitch voice totally breaking.
“My queen…”
His voice drops into my head. Small like it’s coming from somewhere far, far away. But I can smell him. I can smell him like he’s in the other room, even though the scent gives out whenever I try to leave the kitchen.
Where else could he be? I look up, trying to think what would be above the kitchen. A bedroom, maybe? A bathroom?
But no, the kitchen ceiling is too high up for his scent to be emanating this big. It’s like it’s rising directly into my nose.
Rising…
My eyes suddenly find the padlock on the door leading to the basement.
But no, it couldn’t be. Could it?
The baby moves again, and this time, it’s way beyond squirming. I watch as he does a full on one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees turn underneath the skin of my stomach. Like he’s lining himself up. It doesn’t hurt, but holy Fenrir Wolf does it look and feel strange.
I need some help. I can’t do this alone.
Okay, forget trusting Damianos. I’m desperate.
I grab the cast-iron frying pan off the stove and hit the padlock with all my wolf strength. That does it. I tear the broken lock off its new hinge, twist the privacy lock on the knob below, and yank the door open.
I’m immediately hit with a wall of Damiano’s fire scent along with an underlying, but fairly strong body odor.
“So you got magic tricks,” I call down the stairs. “Good one. But can you come up here? I swear this baby is about to come flying out of my vagina like ‘welcome to show!’”
No answer.
And I don’t understand. I really don’t understand why he would be ignoring me. But a very, very bad feeling invades the extremely small part of my gut not currently taken up by the dragon king’s big-ass baby.
I don’t want to go down the stairs.
But something is telling me I have to.
“Damianos?” I call, my voice small as I grab on to the rail and start making the trek down with the contorting XXL medicine ball inside my stomach.
No answer.
“Damianos?” I demand again after I somehow make it to the bottom of the stairs without falling.
Still no answer.
“Damianos, why are you—”
I stop when I see the man chained to the wall, with shackles on both his wrists and his ankles. There’s not one, but three thick strips of duct tape over his mouth.
He’s sickly thin and only wearing a pair of loose pants.
Like Xenon when we found him….
But not quite. He doesn’t look like Xenon. He looks exactly like Damianos if he suddenly dropped a massive amount of weight.
The shackled dragon’s head lolls to the side in a way that makes me suspect he wouldn’t have been able to respond even if his mouth wasn’t duct-taped shut. He stares back at me out of one glazed eye. And his face…his beautiful, perfectly symmetrical Greek statue of a face…it’s been beaten to a pulp. There are also cuts all over his body. Like, actual stab wounds, deep and painful-looking. Along with bruises.
I have no idea what’s going on, but this man has obviously been beaten, stabbed, tortured, and starved. For weeks.
No, for months, a voice says inside of me, starting to put two and two together.
I take a step forward, unable to tear my eyes away from the pitiful sight of the male who looks exactly like my dragon king underneath all those wounds. No, it couldn’t be…
But the single glazed eye proves it.
It’s brown and matte.
Not golden and glowing.
My heart drops to my feet with a sickening thud. I’d been right, I realize in that moment. I’d been right all along.