“It’s like Vee said, I guess. The Internet makes it hard to keep a secret… and I doubt you’re the only dragon who’s ever gone flying in the sight of humans. The word must’ve gotten out somehow.” She sighed, scrolling through the file she had open. “It’s pretty awful stuff, Conrad. Doesn’t make me feel super proud of my human half.”
“Your human half helped us free more than twenty trapped shifters from these guys,” he pointed out. “Your human aunt was instrumental, too.”
“My human aunt,” she echoed with a tired grin. “She’ll like that.”
He blanched. “Please don’t tell her I called her that.”
“Relax.” Mira’s smile widened. ‘She likes you.”
“Not for long, if she knows I call her The Human Aunt.” He nodded at the long list of files that Mira was scrolling through. “Did you find your mother?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. His heart leaped into his throat… but her voice was small and she wasn’t looking back around at him, so he forced himself to stay quiet. She’d tell him when she was good and ready… and finally, she spoke again. “She’s dead. She died a few weeks after we left, from the dates in her file.”
“I’m sorry,” Conrad said softly, reaching out to put his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t look around, but she did reach up and hold his fingers, just loosely.
“They were coming for me.” Her voice was bleak. “That’s their move, sometimes… they find shifter-human couples who have kids, turn up and offer to spare the lives of the parents if they’ll agree to sending their children away with the Purists. I don’t know what they do with them then,” she added, gesturing to the file. “A bunch of redacted mentions of some facility somewhere… I don’t want to know. Anyway, Mom tricked them. She pretended to call Dad to tell him to bring me to them, acted like she was playing along, went with them back to their base as a prisoner. Told them that he’d do it, that the soulmate bond was stronger than the love for a child.”
Conrad could feel his heart pounding sickly in his chest, horrified by where the story might be headed. “But she hadn’t called your dad.”
“Of course not. They must have known,” she said softly. “They must have known these guys were out there, they must’ve had a plan in place for if they turned up. The way Dad just… packed up our stuff and went, no hesitation. They’d talked about it.”
“So she was their prisoner. And then…”
“They kept her for a few weeks. She was buying me and Dad time to get away, saying that he’d come soon, that he was probably just fighting with his own guilt about me…” She nodded to the screen. “There’s lots of statements from the guys who were guarding her saying how convincing she was. And then, when she could sense they were out of patience, she broke out of her cell. Destroyed half the facility—they were still using paper records back then, and somehow she managed to set a bunch of them on fire.” He could hear tears in her voice. “She—she destroyed all mention of us. They were furious, because they didn’t know where to start looking for me and Dad. They brought her down with silver, eventually.” She let out a shuddering breath. “She died to keep us safe. He must have known.”
“Soulmates know,” Conrad said softly. “He’d have felt it, when she…”
Mira uttered a hoarse little sob, and then she was in his arms, face buried against his chest. He held her close, pressing kiss after kiss to the top of her head while she cried. Eventually, the sobs faded, and a solemn silence returned to the living room, incongruously bright with the morning sunlight.
“Is it weird, that I feel better?”
“Not at all.”
“Knowing that my mom’s dead shouldn’t make me feel better.”
“You understand what happened now,” he said softly, squeezing her shoulder. “You can see the whole picture. It’s still a tragedy, but it’s a tragedy that you can understand. That’s easier to make peace with than a mystery.” He couldn’t help but think of his friends back home with another pang of guilt. What if he was the mystery they couldn’t make peace with? What if he never saw any of them again?
“Conrad?” Her voice was very small. “Should we go to bed?”
He smiled, rising to his feet and pulling her with him. She stumbled a little, then uttered an enormous yawn that was just about the cutest thing he’d ever seen. Was it really fair to expect him not to lean down and kiss her? She protested briefly, pulling away to inform him that she hadn’t slept, that she looked a mess… but when he kissed her again, softer and sweeter this time, he could feel her reaching up on her tiptoes to deepen the kiss. This time when they parted, they were both a little breathless, and there was a glint in her golden eyes that sent a jolt of arousal arcing through his body.
“I thought you wanted to go to bed,” he murmured, leaning in to let his lips brush against her ear. He could tell from the way she shivered at his touch that she felt what he felt, exhaustion or no exhaustion.
“I did say bed,” Mira said, and Conrad could have drowned in those golden eyes and been happy about it. “I don’t think I said anything about sleep.”
Chapter 27 - Mira
They fell into bed together, and all of the exhaustion of the last few days couldn’t have been further from her mind as she felt Conrad’s hands roam possessively across her body, almost tearing her clothes in his urgency to get them off her. That sent a curious jolt of arousal through her. She hadn’t seen this side of him before… the side of him that was a hair’s breadth from losing control, the dark, animalistic glint in his eyes as they roamed possessively across her body. She lay back against the pillow and welcomed his staring, lifting her arms above her head to give him a full view, arching an eyebrow in a silent challenge.
He gazed at her for a long, frozen moment, and the look in his eye couldn’t be called anything other than worship. Then he was on top of her again, his breath scorching against her skin, his hands roaming freely across her body and lighting fires everywhere they went. It was like he’d been taking notes of exactly what felt best every time he’d touched her. Her friends had been right, she thought faintly, arching her back against the bed and pressing her breasts into Conrad’s eager hands. Sex really did only get better after the first time… not that her first time hadn’t been absolutely amazing, too. She might have left losing her virginity a little late—people made jokes about forty-year-old virgins all the time, didn’t they?
But then again, those timeframes didn’t really apply to her, did they? She was a dragon, not a human. It didn’t matter either way, she decided. Human or dragon or something else entirely, if it meant her first time was with Conrad, she’d have waited another hundred years if necessary. He was just… he was it, wasn’t he? He was kissing her lips, sweet and urgent as his hands roamed steadily lower, and she broke away for a moment, looking into his eyes with a helpless little smile on her face. He tilted his head, breathless.
“What is it?”
“You,” she said softly, shaking her head. “I just—it’s you. You’re … you’re the only person I’ve ever—the only person I think I could ever…” She bit her lip, panic suddenly setting in, freezing her solid. This was too much, wasn’t it? She was doing that thing she’d always sworn she’d never do, plunging in, committing herself recklessly to someone… but Conrad was looking at her closely, something cryptic in his eyes.
“You know that shifters have soulmates,” he said after a pause, clearly working hard to choose the right words in the face of the distraction offered by her naked body… he wasn’t alone in that, she thought faintly, fighting the urge to let her eyes roam downwards. “One destined partner in life, one person who is simply… it. Once you meet them, you know.”