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Like a venomous bite.
Like being flayed open.
For some reason, my entwined looking away from me, shying away in what closely resembles fear, it pains me badly.
“You’ll. . .want to mate?” I ask. “With me?”
She shakes her head. “No. Never.”
That stings too, a little. “Because I’m blessed.”
“Because you’re a dragon, and that makes you the enemy.”
Without thinking about it, I slide one hand under her chin and tilt her eyes back to mine. “You really think I’m the enemy?” I look into her large, grass-green eyes. “You still do?”
She’s scared.
What’s she scared of? Me?
“You don’t even know what love is,” she says. “You’re not human, so you’ll never understand. But for us, kissing, mating, and love, they’re all related. And the bond is confusing for me, okay?” Her hand rises and gently curves around my jaw. “You look like us, so sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that you’re not like us. You can’t love me. You can’t be what I, as a human, need.”
“What do you need?” Some strange feeling surges inside of me, and I want to be able to do it, whatever that is. It’s probably the bond. It’s probably that we’re entwined, so I want to protect her. That’s what she said love is, right? When you want to keep the other person safe? “Maybe I already love you.”
“Tell me this,” she whispers. “When you find the heart and the dragons finally leave, what happens to me? What happens to all the Ensnared?”
Now I don’t want to meet her eyes.
“When you all go home, what happens then to the human girl who can’t bear to be very far away from you?” The pulse in the bond tells me that she already knows.
When we find the heart, and I leave, the quandary we face right now with my father will only worsen. “You’ll have to come with us, back to our home, and if you refuse. . .you’ll die when I leave.”
I expect another slap, but this time, she just looks sad as she ducks underneath my arm and walks away.
I don’t stop her, not this time. It feels like I’ve already done enough. For someone I want to protect, I appear to have doomed her.
5
Liz
It’s not like this is some big shock. The second he bonded me, I started thinking endgame. I knew that threatening my life would be a mere inconvenience for him, but my only bargaining chip was my own death even then.
This is hardly new.
But for some reason, after we entwined, I don’t know. I thought some things were different.
And they are.
I’m totally screwed, now. No matter what, this bond spells the end of the line for me. I sit in the corner, alone, thinking, for a while. At the end of the day, this is a long-term problem, and it’s not really a new one. The dragons are the bad guys, the conquerors, and we’re their victims. That’s always been true. They can’t fall in love. They can’t be anything to us but a plague.
So why do I keep forgetting it?
I’m the idiot who was jealous of an electro dragon mating with my captor. I take all of that remaining emotion—complicated by that big jerk trying to kiss me again—and I shove it away. I wrap it up in bubble wrap, then tie it off in duct tape, and I hide it in the corner.
Never again will I care about Azar. Axel. Whatever.
To make sure that happens, I need to focus more on how much I care about Gideon. I’m actually ashamed that I’ve been crushing or whatever on Axel. Ugh.
Focusing on what matters may also help. Our looming problem has two main prongs. First, we have to figure out a solution to Axel seeing his dad that doesn’t kill me, and second, we need to locate that heart and get the dragons out of here ASAP, whether it kills me or not. We can try and figure out how to un-entwine me then. If we can’t, well, the loss of a few humans like me is acceptable collateral damage for keeping the world safe.
