“So you’re saying I’d have to be dead for you to love me like he did? To show me Reverence?”
Instead of unshelling, I sink down onto the bed, rubbing at my chest flame. And I grit my filed teeth, as heightened emotions crash into me like waves upon my isle’s rocky beach.
I will put the contacts in, I decide, standing up. Ignore my flame. Ignore the ache.
However, when I reach the bureau where I’ve stashed my back up pairs of contacts, I find something else inside. My old handheld ever charge phone. I updated my phone a few months ago and should have thrown this one out. But I didn’t. Because it was the one that I was speaking on in the moments just before Ola came crashing into my life.
Sentimental claptrap. I should take the phone with me on my flight and chuck it into the ocean. I pick it up, intending to do just that. But when I touch it, the screen alights with one number and two Greek words.
I appear to have one new message.
A wrong number surely. No one else would call me on this phone. But then my flame stills when I see the delivery date underneath. It is from nearly a month ago. Before the Future Timeline Damianos disappeared.
With a shaky hand, I press play on the message…
And the old language immediately starts spilling out. “If you are listening to this, my worst fear has come true. I am gone, and she has found you in the basement. If this is the case, there are things you must know…”
I immediately jam my thumb into the pause button.
The terrible feeling is no longer so vague.
Fear. This is fear. Plain, as English speakers so colloquially describe it, but not at all simple.
Fear overtakes me, and then a knock sounds on the door.
“Damianos, Damianos, it’s me,” Ola says on the other side of the wood. “Please, baby…we need to talk.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
OLA
Damianos is an ass.
He’s been holding something back from me. I know that like I know I’ve got big titties. But the truth is, the party’s not much fun without him there to see how much fun I’m having.
And he’s not the only one keeping secrets. Mine are just easier to hide. At least they were easier to hide.
It’s time for a reckoning.
Which is why I am knocking on his door less than an hour after he leaves me to dance the night away.
What was it he said to me in that club? Go ahead, Ola, have your fun. I’ll wait.
He yanks open the door.
His side of the mate bond is set to numb—that’s the first thing I notice. The second thing is the crazed look in his golden eyes. And the third thing is that he’s Ken Doll naked.
Worry replaces the need to reckon this shit out right now. “Is everything okay?” I ask.
“What are you doing here?” he demands without answering my question. And he sounds annoyed—like, even more than usual.
Good. I’m used to annoying people. Worrying about them, not so much.
“I wanted to say thank you…for the party,” I answer, remembering how my Uncle taught me to go completely against type and gently introduce difficult topics. Or as he put it so that I’d remember: Gratitude then Attitude.
But Damianos narrows his golden eyes suspiciously at my thank you. “You came all the way up here to thank me?”
“What? You’ve never tracked a scent up four sets of stairs and through a labyrinth of hallways to tell somebody thank you?”
“No,” he answers. “Not once have I done that in all my millennia.”
“Well that’s because ya rude,” I answer. “But I think we’ve already established that, amirite.”
Damianos stares down at me for a long stony-faced second. Then he says, “You’re welcome,” in that aggrieved tone he uses whenever I’m getting on his nerves.
And when I look down at his scaled pelvis, it’s perfectly flat. Nothing squirming or straining with any kind of desire.
Which makes me feel very, very awkward.
Being wanted by him is a cornerstone of our relationship. It’s what got me through, even when it felt like I’d never bridge the gap between the dragon I lost and the dragon I had to make see reason.
But now he just continues to stare down at me, his expression cold and unwavering. An unfathomable feeling stirs in my belly, I almost turn around and leave. But I am still Leroy Greenwolf’s great-granddaughter. Damn if I’m going to start backing down from fights now.
My heart trembling, I hold his beautiful gold eyes and say, “I know why you won’t let me in.”
Another aggrieved sigh. “Ola, this is not about sex.”
“I know it isn’t,” I answer. “It’s about you being afraid.”
His expression goes even colder. Like he’s competing with his friend Colossus to see who can look deader in the face. “You think I’m afraid?” he asks, lion toying with a mouse.