Max asked softly, "What happened?"
"One day, my father left us. From what I learned later, he was unhappy being the only human inside a dragon clan. He fell into drinking, and because he'd never officially mated with my mother, he abandoned her without consequence. And since dragon-shifters have to stay with dragon clans in Australia, likehere in the UK, the government didn't care about anything except me and my mother staying put.
"Eventually, my mother got really sick, some say from heartbreak, and died slowly. I was nine when she passed and barely remember a time when she wasn't in bed or depressed. As a child, I never understood why she was sad all the time. And nothing I did helped."
Her dragon said softly,Don't you dare think it's our fault again.
No, dragon. I miss her every day, but I know I couldn't have saved her.
Max asked, "Did you eventually transfer clans, then? Because I know for years you lived with Clan RiverRock in southeastern Australia."
She smiled. Of course Max had done research on her, much like she'd done on him.
The familiarity of it helped to wash away some of her sadness. "I'm getting to that. Word must've reached my father about my mother's death, and he kidnapped me. At first, I was happy and thought he wanted to raise me. But I was dead wrong. No, he tried to sell me to a type of circus. When they refused—it would've brought the Australian government down on them—he dumped me in the bush. I ran after him and caught up. But he shoved me away to get into his car, and I landed on a jagged rock, unable to fathom why he'd leave me."
"That's how you got the scar on your thigh," Max stated.
She nodded. "I cried, both from the pain and my dad leaving. I was lucky because if I hadn't been a dragon-shifter with faster healing abilities than humans, I probably wouldn't have lasted the night. The next morning, some human Aboriginals found me and took me in temporarily. Once I healed, they took me on a journey, one that lasted nearly a week, to a clan-less group of wandering dragon-shifters. The group adopted me withoutquestion. I wandered with them for a few years, learning how to survive in the wilds of Australia without being noticed by the DDA, moving with the seasons, and mastering skills I'm still grateful to have."
Max's grip on her hand tightened, and she glanced up at him. The anger blazing in his eyes made her blink. He growled, "Is your fucking father still alive?"
Oh, dear. She knew a look of anger and revenge when she saw it. "Yes, but he's in jail. I haven't gotten to that bit yet." At the calculating look in his eyes, she added, "Don't you dare ask your dubious connections to murder him. That's too quick, and I'd rather he serve his time."
Max grunted, and she smiled. She wasn't used to seeing this side of him. "Should I tell you the rest?"
"It might make me want to murder your father even more, but I suppose that's a risk you'll have to take."
She leaned forward. "You're not going to kill him. Promise me that, Max."
Seconds stretched, but she didn't look away. He finally sighed. "Fine, I promise. But tell me the rest. I need to be prepared in case the bastard ever walks free."
She shook her head. "He won't. But I'm getting to the why." Still starving, Lavinia swallowed a few bites before saying, "Eventually, Clan RiverRock changed leaders, and my wandering family was welcomed to join them. Most of my life for the next decade was pretty normal—school, university, and falling in love with history and archaeology. My career was going well, and even if getting to the UK to study Queen Alviva was my eventual goal, I enjoyed looking for old dragon sites in Australia. It was at one of these sites I heard talk of dragon poachers who sold dragon's blood on the black market and how we had to be careful. John Walker's gang was the worst of the worst, and we needed to acknowledge the risk before excavating."
Lavinia still remembered the shock of hearing the name and the atrocities the gang had committed—draining dragons, butchering them, taking their scales to sell. She'd wished with everything she had, it was a stranger and not her father, even if her gut had shouted otherwise.
Not wanting to get ahead of herself, she pushed on. "Since John Walker is a common enough name, I held out hope it wasn't my father. But my curiosity won out, and some online research and pictures revealed it was indeed him. While the police couldn't prove it, they suspected he'd drained five dragons that year alone. Right then and there, I vowed to bring down his operations."
It hadn't been easy at first, but Lavinia was good at research. Plus, she'd made contacts within the Australian Department of Dragon Affairs, thanks to her work for them on a few archaeological sites. It'd taken roughly a year to learn her father's patterns and usual hunting grounds.
Max asked, "You eventually did just that, right?"
After draining the last of her coffee, she nodded. "Except I was too late to save their most recent victim. The police and DDA staff had been held up somewhere in traffic and arrived two hours late. By then, the dragon had died from exsanguination."
Since she'd been hiding nearby, watching it all, she'd seen them carry off the dead dragon. It was a sight she'd never forget.
Her stomach churned, and she pushed away her plate. "I don't know if my father ever found out I was the reason for his capture, but I had no desire to visit him in jail. He's serving life with no chance of parole." She met Max's gaze again. "So you see? I also did some underhanded things in my past too. While different from your case, I understand a little about how innocents get caught up in things and how it weighs on you. It was unfair that a dragon-shifter had to die in order to capture my father. And yet, he and his team will never kill another. It'san impossible argument—saving a single person versus many—but one I had to come to terms with. All I could do was focus on the innocents saved in the future. That's how I managed to move past it and focus on my work again." She paused a beat before adding softly, "And it sounds as if you aren't quite there yet, Max."
His gaze searched hers, unreadable and intense. She had no bloody idea if she'd said the right thing. But if Max carried the guilt around for too long, it would destroy him. And for some reason, the thought of that happening was unbearable.
Max rarely lost his temper.Sure, he sometimes overreacted on purpose to fit whatever persona he'd donned when working for his brother. And he would get upset if someone stole a dig site from under his nose, reaching it first. However, it'd been a long time since he'd felt such all-consuming rage, almost as if he needed to pummel someone for an hour to get it all out of his system.
What Lavinia's so-called father had done was unforgivable. No parent should abandon their child in the wilderness and be left to die. Add that to her tough upbringing, losing her mother, and then wandering the Australian bush for years, and well, there was no other word to describe her but strong.
Promising not to kill the bastard had been difficult, but he'd done it. And then she had to be even more bloody wonderful by trying to understand his guilt and how to assuage it.
To say he wanted her more than ever before was an understatement.
However, his dragon lady waited for a reply, and Max finally sighed. "I'll try my best, Lavinia, to better come to terms withmy past. But it's not as if I can wave a magic wand and instantly erase my guilt."