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“Choosing your mate is critical to the blessed in many ways,” he said. “Your mate will guard and protect you when you’re vulnerable. They’ll guide and direct you when you’re lost. But most of all, one day, you’ll restore the strength of the blessed, and she’ll make a strong mother to your future children.”
“How do you know?” I had asked. Even then, I knew that no new eggs had been laid since we left Earth. He didn’t tell me the answer. He didn’t tell me for a very long time, in fact.
But he did prepare me for his latest edict from the start.
When Liz tells me she thinks we should each move ahead with mating. . .with someone else, of course she’s right. I know she’s right. I can’t mate with her.
She’s a human.
I’m blessed.
But beyond the most obvious, if I were to mate with Liz, and insanely, if it worked, instead of being delighted about the first blessed egg in millennia, her creation of any sort of egg would out me.
Or at least, if it was a flame blessed egg, it would.
Because only Axel could mate with Liz, who is a human. Unless everyone knew that Axel and Azar are the same, Axel’s mating with Liz wouldn’t free Azar from his need to mate with Asteria. Anything else would make public the secret I’ve dedicated my life to concealing.
So when Liz grabs Gideon’s wrist, I want to incinerate someone more than I ever have in my entire life, someone I could easily reduce to ash in any form. But instead, I grit my teeth and bear it.
When she walks inside his room and closes the door, it doesn’t create any sort of privacy from me. I can still hear every single word, every single sigh, and every beat of Gideon’s wretched, unworthy heart.
Like someone who enjoys misery, I can’t even distract myself. I listen to every last word.
“Am I a monster?”
Liz’s words sear their way into my very soul. I’ve always known she sees the blessed whom she insists on calling dragons as enemies, as other. But the word she uses, monster, is infused with such hatred, such animosity, and such repulsion that I realize something.
She feels that same hatred. . .for herself.
Because of her connection to me.
I didn’t understand the depth of her pain, or that it’s inextricably connected to me. I didn’t really comprehend how much she hated me. Not until this moment. And then stupid Gideon comforts her, and she lets him, in a way she has never allowed me to even try.
When he says, “Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. Always,” her body relaxes. She softens. Her heart rate slows.
“Are you saying I’m your master?” I can tell by the light way she asks the question that she’s smiling. She’s happy.
Relaxed.
Free.
“Liz, you always have been, since we were kids. You always will be. No matter what,” he says, and I wish, desperately, that I could see them. I’m sure he’s touching her.
I’m sure she’s touching him.
But I’m stuck, ignoring the things Rufus and Gordon are saying to me, standing in the family room like a statue, listening through the bond to the words he shares that can help her in a way I never can.
“I told you,” Gideon says. “I love you, Liz. Heart and soul.”
The bond burns then, and something inside of me catches fire. I’m doing my best to contain it, but I’m a creature of fire, flame, and heat already, and knowing that she’s walked away from me and toward him, it’s supercharging the lava that always simmers down inside of me.
And then I feel it.
When she kisses him.
I feel the heat growing inside of me. If I release it, it’ll melt the entire building to the ground. “I have to go,” I manage to mutter. And then I’m sprinting out the door.
Rufus tries to stop me. “Wait, are you alright?”
