He grunted his consensus. The human may be his enemy, but any shot at gathering more information on the Knights was one he'd take.
Zain's inner beast continued, And just think, maybe once reality starts filtering in, Ivy will realize the pain she's inflicted on others. She'll definitely do whatever she can to help Stonefire then, even more so than she already has. And then we would finally have the upper hand and could fight and defeat one of our greatest enemies.
No doubt his dragon wanted Ivy to think of them as some kind of hero in the end, just to get some pussy. The only reason I want her to wake up from the fog of lies is so she can become Lucien and Nathan's problem.
Until she can walk and function again, she'll be our problem.
Don't remind me.
Zain picked up his pace. He'd give Lucien and Nathan the password she mentioned and then report everything to Serafina. With any luck, the new password would open all of the cryptic data in time. And maybe, just maybe, if that became true, Zain could perform her physical therapy without saying another word.
Because if she continued to get under his skin, he could seriously fuck up his mission by sharing something he shouldn't. And since being a Protector was everything to him, he couldn't allow that to happen.
Then an idea came to him. If Zain taught the most basic of moves to one of the nurses, he wouldn't have to see the human that often. True, he'd have to come back when she reached a certain threshold, but not before.
Yes, that would work. Right after he visited Lucien and Nate, he'd approach Gregor with the idea. Because Zain only wanted to ask the human questions, nothing more. And he may have just figured out how to do that.
Chapter Five
Ivy stared at the door of her room long past after Dr. Lewis had left.
His answer to her question about dragon fire ran on repeat inside her head: "No, dragons can't breathe fire. It's physically impossible. Let me explain every reason why."
His scientific jargon had been lost on her, but the fact he had such a detailed explanation made Ivy wonder if she was wrong.
Maybe dragons didn't breathe fire.
And if that was the case, then what else had she been taught that was also a lie?
Turning her head against the pillow, Ivy stared at the wall and tried to think of where she'd first learned of dragon fire.
Hadn't it been in elementary school? Or, had it been university?
Somewhere before the Dragon Knights, for sure.
Then it hit her—it'd been during the introductory counseling sessions she'd done with the Dragon Knights' recruiter.
At the time, she hadn't known the truth behind the organization that called themselves the Friends of the World. They'd had a tent in the city center, offering free therapists and a collection of books about the dragon-shifters. The books had claimed to reveal all the dragon-shifters' secrets.
Ivy had always been afraid of dragons growing up and had purposefully kept her distance. If she stayed out of their way, they'd stay out of hers. But for some reason, she'd gone inside the tent that day. Maybe it had been the attractive man smiling at her, or something he'd said to make her laugh. Either way, she couldn't remember any longer. She'd only been twenty-one years old and had still been searching for who she was.
Back then, Ivy had probably thought the therapists would help her figure it all out.
Regardless, she'd gone home with a few books and a shot of self-confidence.
Only after she'd later read one of the books titled, The Truth Behind the Dragons of the UK, had her confidence faded and her smile turned into a gasp of horror.
They'd been so many gruesome stories, with so many deaths and innocent lives stolen.
Many of the victims had been dropped from a great height for fun, almost like a competition among the dragon-shifters.
Not to mention the dragon fire they used for torture, and how survivors had said the dragons had laughed at their screams as they burned alive.
By all rights, the British government should've imprisoned most of the dragons, or sent them to any of the prison colonies around the world designed to hold dragon-shifters.
However, World War II had decimated the dragons' numbers, to the point their population became dangerously low. That's when they'd pretended to be nice to humans again, forming alliances and agreements—dragon's blood in exchange for human females. They'd struck even more bargains with the DDA in the 1980s to counteract the AIDS epidemic.
But as Ivy lay in her hospital bed, one nestled inside a dragon clan, she began to wonder if the books had been written to make her hate them.