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“Really?” I asked. “Is that why you’re so icy?” It was my turn to shoot him a wink. His smile grew, which did wonders to ease my worries. “What happened?”
“With my broken heart?”
I nodded, taking a moment to examine his face. Handsome, slightly rounded, strong nose, big lips, thick neck leading down to broad shoulders. Focusing on those tiny details helped me momentarily forget about the crimson-colored mess I had stepped in.
“I was left at the altar,” Maddox said, looking off somewhere behind me. My eyes opened wide. I wasn’t expecting that, mainly because I didn’t see him as the type to settle down. “I loved him. More than anyone I’d ever been with. I was twenty-six, which is young for us dragons, but I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. Been with him since I was sixteen. My one true love. My entire family had gathered; it was supposed to be a huge ceremony right there on Manticore Beach in Malibu. Garrett never showed.”
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” I said, shocked. “Did you ever find out why?”
“He’d been cheating on me for three years. Found someone who not only wanted to take him from me but also use him to get more information on how dragons lived. He was basically studying me and my family in secret, taking notes and recordings. It was beyond fucked.”
“Oh, Maddox, that shit is… yeah, that’s not right.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Maddox said, kicking at a rock. “Messed me up for a few years. Lost trust in people and decided I’d just fuck my way through Los Angeles to ease the pain.”
“Did that work?”
“For a little bit, yeah,” he answered. “But I have to admit, I’ve been starting to feel empty. I’m not getting as much satisfaction from empty hookups as I used to.” He sighed and shook it off, rolling his neck in a circle, a few audible pops sounding off.
“But forget about my messed-up love life. Let’s focus on the matter at hand: Kyler Irons. My friend said she can get us into an interrogation room, but we have to get there in the next fifteen minutes.”
“To the jail? That’s in Downtown—it’ll take us an hour if we’re lucky with traffic.”
“What if I told you we didn’t have to deal with traffic,” he said, grinning wide. “Ever ridden a dragon before?”
Chapter 11
Dragon’s-Eye View
Caleb
I let out a surprised laugh and shook my head at Maddox’s ridiculous question.
“Of course not,” I said, skeptical, although my heart started to pick up its pace. “And I don’t plan on it either.”
“Really?” Maddox said, seemingly taken off guard by my answer. “That’s… Usually, people are pretty excited by the prospect.”
“Really? People are usually happy about climbing onto a giant lizard and being launched hundreds of feet into the air? Yeah, I doubt that.”
He blinked and stumbled for words. Something about making the cocky ice dragon speechless made me a little giddy. I shot him a smirk and looked around for my car. “I can drive and just meet you there.”
“First off, dragons aren’t lizards. We’re dragons. Second off, we’re running out of time. So stop being stubborn and climb onto my back when I shift. And don’t worry, I won’t let you fall.”
“You sure about that?”
“Deathly sure.” He gave me a wink and looked around. We were on a side street, the huge metallic sphere of a museum behind us, reflecting some of the afternoon sunlight. He stepped out into the empty street, moving past the parked cars, and stopped in the center, where he suddenly became consumed by a navy blue plume of smoke.
Moments later, the smoke disappeared and revealed the ice dragon underneath.
And holy fucking shit was he beautiful.
Beautiful didn’t really cut it, actually. Maddox was majestic. A body of glinting sapphire scales twitched and shook as he tilted his massive head and looked at me with those light blue eyes of his. The color of his scales was a jaw-dropping gradient of blues that seemed to ripple like the surface of a lake on the cusp of freezing. He was huge, bigger than I expected for a dragon, built wide and powerful. He was a tank. There were two bull-like horns that aimed forward, perfect for impaling someone like a skewer, smaller ones down the side of his face making him even more intimidating. He flared open his wings, the thin, leathery flesh being illuminated by the sunlight, a shadow briefly falling over me before he snapped them back to his side. His tail—ending in an arrow-shaped point—snapped against the concrete and left a crack. He took a few heavy steps toward me, and I could have sworn his lips curled up into a smile, revealing a row of lethal teeth all the size of my head.
“I… wow… I mean… you’re beautiful.”
In true annoyingly cocky Maddox fashion, he gave a sassy roll of his eyes and a nod of his head.
