Her Dragon King (Her Dragon King Duet 2)

It took hours, not minutes for my male works to retract last night after she left me in that state. And even if I am not truly more interested in food than the pleasure of her sex, the fact is I should be.

I will need nutrients to break these chains, and I can already feel my drakkon strength returning after last night’s consumption of meat.

Given her angry glare, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she stormed out of the room instead of feeding me. So I am relieved when she sits down on the side of the bed, albeit with a huff.

“What are you watching?” she asks when she notices the inane action entertainment playing on the wall screen.

The story was so grating, I’d muted it shortly before she entered. “Something called Hard Death,” I answer as yet another building is blown up behind the film’s hero. “And you were right. The pretender must have been indulging you. This plot seems little more than an excuse to level a city and chase each other in gaudy drones.”

Instead of taking offense, she grins and stops the spoon just an inch from my mouth to say, “So, you were thinking about me. Smirking Cat Emoji. That’s a start.”

I have done a lot more than think about her all day. But out loud I insist, “I was curious about my doppelganger. I thought this might give me some more insight into his motive.”

“Which was…?”

“What do you believe it was?” I am honestly curious about her answer.

“Okay, well…” She dips the spoon to scoop up more stew. “I’ve been thinking about that and have mostly come up with a whole bunch of I don’t know. But I think this might be a time traveling situation. Which would mean you and me are fated mates.”

I still. “Why do you believe that?”

“Mostly because he kept on calling me his fated mate,” she admits with a wry grin. “I thought he was being, you know, really intense and dramatic—he could be like that. But then when he Michael J. Foxed out…”

“Michael J. Foxed?” I ask.

“Yeah, you know, like in Back to the Future.” Her face falls when I continue to regard her with a quizzical look.

“Oh come on. I know you said you don’t like movies, but you didn’t even see Back to the Future? How about Star Wars?”

I frown. “I have vague memories of hearing about these films. But I do not like the so-called science fiction the upright primates produced prior to the current century. It was—”

“I know, I know. So absurdly unrealistic. Other You gave me this speech about a thousand times. But lucky you, you’re all tied up. So unlike him, you’ve got to watch Back to the Future with me.”

This is how I come to spend the next hour watching a—well, absurdly unrealistic is the only way to describe it—depiction of time travel while Ola feeds me. “That’s what I was talking about!” Ola says, pointing the spoon at the screen when the main character begins to fade in a rather rudimentary display of special effects.

“So you believe he simply faded away due to an event that didn’t happen in his own timeline.” I keep my voice neutral, but in truth, I’m impressed by how close her hypothesis is to mine.

“Yeah, I think…” she scrunches her brow over the stew pot. “I think I might have died in childbirth or something tragic like that. And maybe our child too—the way he was talking about our future, I honestly don’t think he could have left a kid behind just to come back for me. Also, he was obsessed with having me train for labor and when the baby came, everything went exactly to plan. His plan. Like seriously, the pushing part was done in under ten minutes. And my recovery…well, here I am, serving you stew. My lady parts aren’t even sore a week after birth, which I didn’t even know was possible.”

Again, I am impressed by how much she has been able to cobble together. Impressed and strangely proud. For all her crude language, my she-wolf is much more clever than I gave her credit for previously.

“Also, there is no other way to explain why else Xenon would have—”

She abruptly stops.

“Why Xenon would have what?” My pride gives way to suspicion upon hearing the name of the male near the top of my revenge list.

A small wave of sadness ripples over our mate bond before she answers. “You’re right. You’re not him. Not yet, at least.”

“Not ever,” I insist. “You will not be able to manipulate my flame as you did his.”

She twists up her face and sucks on her teeth, “Okay, it wasn’t manipulation, Supervillain. It was love. But I don’t feel like fighting tonight, so let’s just save this subject for another day.