His little mate struck him with her foot again, this time right in the kidney.
Seeing as he weighed three times as much as she did, the kick didn’t actually hurt him when she wasn’t aiming for uninsulated bone. That didn’t mean he liked his mate striking him, though.
Dom snatched her foot before she could pull it back. His fingers, huge compared to her fragile build, curled all the way around it. “Stop hitting me, little wildcat,” he snapped. “Mates don’t do that.”
She tried to tug her foot free of his grasp, a cute little hiss sneaking out from between her tiny fangs, but Dom held fast. He wasn’t about to let her get another shot in, for one, and he liked the feeling of her smooth skin under his fingers. Of course, he’d rather be petting her than restraining her, but if she only gave him the one option, he wasn’t fool enough to refuse her.
His mate bared her tiny fangs again. Somewhere behind her, a low buzzing picked up — a distinctly and befuddlingly fey sound. “My parents are arrant, asshole,” she seethed.
Dom blinked owlishly. “How is that possible?”
His mate glowered at him, but it was hard to take her seriously when she had one foot in the air and dirt streaked across her skin like a wild thing. The buzzing tickled his ears, too, and it took him a moment to place exactly where it could be coming from. Not her chest, surely, and he was fairly certain she didn’t have a rattle hiding anywhere.
It’s her wings, he realized with a small start. Dom leaned slightly to one side to peek at the glassy petals of her small, vestigial wings as they shook with what he presumed was fury. My mate has tiny little wings.Huh. Cute.
When she caught him looking, his mate made an outraged sound and announced, “I’m a Changeling, okay?”
A Changeling? Dom’s grip slackened, allowing her to yank her leg out of his hold. He stared at his fierce little mate with wide eyes. My mate’s a Changeling.
It was the polite way of saying she was an abandoned child raised by parents outside of her race. It was a succinct title that proclaimed, in a word, that her covey didn’t want her, so they probably shoved her at the nearest arrant couple, forever sandwiching her between two worlds. There was nothing inherently wrong with that position, but there was a reason so many people pitied Changelings. In a world as terribly fractured as theirs, they just never seemed to fit.
Dom’s chest ached as he watched his mate curl up into herself against the door, her cheeks flushed and her eyebrows lowered in a defiant look, as if she expected him to say something cruel.
As if he could ever be cruel to the one person who made the world seem less overwhelming, less intent on causing him pain.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed.” He scrubbed a palm over his day-old stubble. Gods, he just wanted to be good at this, good to her. Too bad he was a surly recluse who preferred wounded animals to people and lost whatever charm he might have had in a bloody cornfield a hundred years ago. “I’m messing everything up. I’m not good with people.”
“I just want to see my parents.” The sight of her lower lip wobbling made his nerves fizzle. “I don’t care about what else is going on in the world. I just want to get out of this place and go home.”
“Okay,” he rasped, fighting the compulsion to stroke her hair, to nuzzle her throat, to soothe her in the way his people did. He’d do anything to make that wounded look in her eyes disappear. “Okay. We’ll figure it out. But not right this second.”
She shot him a watery, narrow-eyed look. “Why not now?”
“Because you’re hungry, tired, and adjusting to being outside of a fucking terrarium for the first time in gods know how long.” Dom slowly shifted, moving inch by inch, until he was sitting beside her, his back pressed against the door jamb. She tensed, but only her eyes moved as she tracked his movements. “Here.” He held his phone between them. “Let's get some food in you. Then we’ll talk about how you can see your parents.”
When she didn’t immediately take the phone from his loose grip, he tipped it in her direction. “Go on. Choose anything you want.”
Her fingers were dirty, smeared with dark soil and bits of crushed greenery, but they were also fine-boned, with claws buffed to a high shine. He liked the way she moved, how she twisted her wrist and took his phone from him with delicate, graceful fingers. He liked it even more when she bit her lip and looked up at him through her wet lashes, a little of her wariness fading into something soft, almost hopeful.
“Thanks.” Her voice cracked, the hard edge of desperation blunted as she breathed out a long, shuddering breath. Cradling the phone with two hands, she swallowed hard before adding, “I’m Charlotte, by the way.”
Charlotte. A strong name for a fierce little fey. His mate, Charlotte.
He smiled, showing off his own set of fangs — larger and duller than hers, meant for crushing rather than tearing, but fearsome in their own way. “Domhnall,” he answered. “But you can call me Dom.”
* * *
Charlotte was woman enough to admit when she’d made a misjudgment. Not aloud, obviously, but within the privacy of her mind? Sure, she could admit it.
Inhaling her third slice of gooey cheese pizza, she surreptitiously eyed the demon sitting in the tiny wooden chair by the equally under-sized table by the window. He kept his brawny arms crossed over his chest and his eyebrows pushed low over his amber-on-black eyes, but despite his surly attitude, he’d actually been pretty nice.
She still thought he earned the kick to his nose, though.
Charlotte sat cross-legged in the center of the motel bed, a huge box of half-eaten pizza in her lap. It was late, but she was too wired to try and rest. All she wanted to do was eat and eat and stare at the handsome demon who insisted he only meant to keep her safe.
My mate, she thought, squinting at him over the top of the pizza box. I don’t know how I feel about that.
It wasn’t that she didn’t believe him, necessarily, but that she found the entire concept so deeply unnerving that she couldn’t process it all at once. The world outside the terrarium felt huge and overwhelming. The air felt different on her skin. The politics of her home territory had changed overnight. She felt her wings buzz and shake every time Dom came within a foot of her, making her bones vibrate with the need to shift just a little bit closer, to entice in the way the fey were famous for.