Her Dragon King (Her Dragon King Duet 2)

A beat of silence, then he closes his eyes and gets a look of concentration on his face I didn’t like.

“Could you do it without brainwashing anybody, please?” I ask, weary face emojis floating up from my brain. “I already told you how I felt about that.”

He throws me an annoyed look and pushes a button to retract the tray table touch screen. “Yes, you’re so traumatized by any type of bondage. Yet, you kept me chained up for days.”

“I planned to let you go if that makes you feel any better,” I answer with an apologetic wince.

“When?” he asks, rising to his feet. “After you brought me to heel? As if my species was the one specifically designed to obey yours and not the other way around?”

Regrets…yep, I got a few as he levels me with that golden stare. The same yet nothing at all like the dragon I fell in love with. “Look, I know this version of you likes to pick a fight with me whenever I ask you to do anything halfway decent. But I’m still processing all the drama that went down back in North Dakota and I’m just not in the mood. Now can you get Bazzi set up or what?”

DAMIANOS

Bazzi…

I startle. Though not at her still impertinent tone. “Bazzi….is this a shortened form of Basileios?”

She nods.

“But how did you know this was what I wished to name him?”

“We discussed it. Other You and me. I only agreed to think about it, but when he disappeared…”

I can sense her sadness. Not only over our mate bond but also in the dark blue of her flame.

“You grieve the pretender,” I note with a tilt of my head. I mean to deliver this line in a disparaging tone, but more feeling slips out than I would like.

She lifts her eyebrows at me. “That surprises you?”

I consider the ramifications, then make a decision to risk sharing my thoughts in order to know hers. “You hated me before my imprisonment, but you felt…differently about him.”

“I don’t hate you now.”

My flame thins. “Because of him.”

“Yeah, because of him.” I am careful to keep my side of the mate bond muted, but my feelings about her feelings must register on my face. For she scrunches her forehead and says, “Shocked face emoji, so now you’re jealous?”

I am not sure how to talk about the feelings confusing my flame. Yet after so many nights spent in lazy discussion in front of her wall screen, doing so with her comes more easily than I would have expected. “If he were here, I would torture him for millennia, worse even than I tortured the Betrayer King. He attempted to take my place. To take you from me.”

“Yeah, but…” She tilts her head in the same direction as mine. “You’re acting like he was another dragon. Not you from…I don’t know exactly where he was from, but I’m guessing it was another timeline. He’s a possible version of you. One that hasn’t been realized.”

At her words, a cold realization washes over me. “So that was your plan? To turn me into him?”

Myriad emotions flash through in her flame before she seems to decide to answer, “Yeah, that’s my plan exactly.”

She is my mate. But she longs for another. It is easy to be cruel. “That is a stupid, ill-thought-out plan, Ola.”

She lets out a wry sound, somewhere between a sigh and a chuckle. “You think so?”

“I could never be him.”

She lifts her chin and pushes her chest out in that vexing way of hers. Over prideful and idiotically defiant. “I mean, I guess we’ll see.”

Impatience rears, and I cannot keep myself from replying. “No, we will never see. I will never be him. His eyes…did you not see how they glowed brighter than mine? Without cease?”

Her chest flame flickers with uncertainty. Yet her chin stays lifted. “Yeah, and…”

I do not know whether to shake her for her refusal to concede my superior knowledge or be impressed that she bows to no one. I settle for delivering the cold truth upon her. “And that is the main sign of a condition we call widower’s madness.”

She stills, and I can see the truth is beginning to sink in. “So I was right. I did die on him. That’s why he revered me and treated me like I was the most precious thing on Earth. Why he loved me…so much I couldn’t stop myself from falling in love with him, too.”

Her words hit my flame like a splash of cold water. He loved her. And she loved him.

That last realization inspires me to twist the knife and make her see the utter hopelessness of her silly plan to turn me into that crazed drakkon. “He is the version of me that would have happened if you had died in childbirth. If both you and Basileios had died in childbirth. But you did not die. Basileios is here and mine. And that is a paradox that could not be reckoned with inside the quantum field. This is why he disappeared. And this is why your plan will never work, she-wolf. Even though you’ve once again made yourself my prisoner.”