He clearly knew her greatest weakness. She needed to keep more distance, be more careful, and shut down her instincts more thoroughly.
And his bare chest was suggesting that the table between them was not nearly wide enough for the distance she needed. She couldn’t stop replaying his kiss, his words, the feeling of his hands over her skin...
“What do you have to tell me?” she demanded, furious with herself for continuing to let him bait her with his sexual appeal.
“I’m a dragon shifter,” Mal said, and he raised his arms to her in demonstration. “A warlock dragon from a long proud line going back for thousands of years. Our magic has quietly been keeping order between shifters and humans... and other things... for centuries.”
“Other things...” Scarlet said suspiciously.
“There are old things in the world. Older than people. Older than dragons. And one of those things sleeps beneath this island.”
Did he think she would be surprised by this revelation? “I know of this creature,” she said cautiously. “It has never bothered me or mine.” She could not help adding, “Which is more than I can say about you.”
“I have never tried to destroy the world,” Mal retorted. “And if—when—it wakes, it will attempt to take a vengeance that will drown not just this island, but all islands, and all continents, and it will not rest until the world has been destroyed.”
Scarlet scowled at him skeptically, but she was listening carefully. “What is it?”
“It is a great wyrm with two heads, covered in deadly sharp feathers. It can appear as a human, but don’t be deceived. It is not a shifter, it is a powerful, old creature of air and water and it is wrathful. It is instinct and anger, not reason. It is wild, and vicious... and it’s going to be really pissed off when it wakes up.”
“You’re saying this thing is just... napping beneath my island?”
“Not just sleeping, but imprisoned as well; my family is thorough. Eleven hundred years ago, my great-grandfather battled him into submission and built a cage around him deep beneath the island.”
“Why not just kill him?” Scarlet asked. “Wouldn’t that have been simpler?”
“It is immortal. There is no way to kill it because it’s not really alive. Imprisonment was the only choice. Every three hundred years, the spells are renewed, the cage is rebuilt, and the wyrm is cast down again. My grandfather did so the second time, and then my father, almost two hundred years ago.”
“And now it’s your turn?” Scarlet wrenched her eyes up from his damned chest and scowled, trying to make herself focus. “That math doesn’t add up.”
Mal’s eyes were no less distracting than his muscle-knotted shoulders. “We should have decades more, but we don’t. I don’t understand what has happened, but the cage is crumbling, and its slumber has been disturbed.”
“Corbin?” Scarlet proposed. “Gizelle said he was... noisy.”
“He might have precipitated the creature waking, but I don’t understand the damage to the cage that I’ve seen. It’s less recent, more insidious. It’s as if it has slowly rusted... the magic feels old and weak, and it’s leaked into all of the rock around it.” If Mal full of confidence was devastating to Scarlet’s peace of mind, Mal admitting that he didn’t know something was even more unsettling. He raked a hand through his hair and gave a confused shrug. “I checked the wyrm’s prison myself when Rupert Beehag began construction and it was as strong and impenetrable as ever at that time. There’s been some change, something new since then. I thought it might be Gizelle’s broken magic... but it could just as easily be you.”
Scarlet drew in her breath with a hiss. “You think I did this?”
Mal met her gaze without flinching. “I don’t know what you are,” he reminded her. “I don’t know how you work. But since you came here, a spell that previously withstood hundreds of years containing the power of creature older than the continents has crumbled to almost nothing in the span of a few decades.”
Scarlet stared back at him, more dismayed than she wanted him to know.
“I don’t think you necessarily did anything on purpose,” Mal added swiftly. “I know you well enough to know that you aren’t trying to release an old thing to destroy or rule the world. Maybe this has happened because of some aspect of what you are. Or some side effect of something you’re doing here. If I knew more about your nature...”
This could be her fault? Scarlet almost drowned in the guilt that rose in her throat.
Mal leaned forward onto his elbows, which made all the planes of his shoulders change in a terribly distracting way.
“You were never my enemy, Scarlet,” he said.
“You certainly never treated me like an ally,” Scarlet retorted sharply. “If you needed me to leave so badly, why didn’t you come tell me all this in the first place?”
“Would you have gone? Would you have believed me?” Mal countered. “Until I saw the radar maps of the storms this week, I thought I had plenty of time to solve this puzzle—years if not decades. I had no idea that Corbin would do anything so stupid as start to wake the creature up, and I didn’t realize that the cage was failing until I got here. I thought I could play the long game, and I could apply just enough pressure that you would do what was best... best for you... without having to step in and force your hand.”
“Is that what this is to you?” Scarlet asked scathingly. “A game? Where you are the superior chessmaster sitting back in his throne dictating the lives of those less worthy?”
“No,” Mal said at once. Then, hesitantly, “Maybe.” He raked his hand through his hair again and Scarlet had to glare at her hands to stop herself from staring at his chest. She really should have made him put that shirt
back on.