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My throat choked off, and it was all I could do to not cry. “I was okay.”
He slammed his fist on the fridge, though nowhere near Asher’s pictures. He pivoted and strode to the back door, scrambling to unlock it.
While I gaped and rounded the island, he wrenched open the back door, flung himself outside, and leaped off the small back deck.
In a flash, he’d shifted.
I raced after him and clung to the deck railing as his dragon fled, flying up over the woods and disappearing from my sight.
Chapter 12
Gravor
Iflew as fast and hard as I had after I’d escaped and burned the commune to the ground.
When I landed hard in the tall, scruffy grass outside the crumbling ruins, I shifted, dropped to my knees, and bellowed.
It was bad enough they’d stolen five years of my life. They’d nearly broken me too many times. I had scars that would never heal both inside and out.
But they’d also stolen the five years I could’ve been with Mazie. I never would’ve left her and not only because she was my mate. Her goodness shone in her eyes and in the touch of her hand. She soothed my soul like no other.
She ignited me in ways I couldn’t define.
They’d stolen four years I could’ve had with my son. I wasn’t there to hold Mazie’s hair to the side if she had morning sickness. I hadn’t gone to childbirth classes with her, laughing together while she practiced puffing out breaths.
I hadn’t been with her when she delivered my son.
I’d missed all his baby moments, his first step and his first word.
I’d missed him calling me Daddy.
“Arghhh!” I lifted my fists and shook them at the sky, then I slammed them down onto the earth. But all that did was make my hands ache as badly as my heart.
“You fuckers!” I yelled, and my voice echoed around me. Rising, I stumbled toward the ruins. I walked among them, kicking bits of charred beams and scorched metal cabinets. I sought fragments of a bone I could crush or a feeling of a spirit drifting through this desolate, hopeless place, but I found and felt nothing. The police had taken the remains, and if spirits existed, theirs had been dragged to hell and punished.
I couldn’t take my revenge from their flesh a second time, and that realization burned through me like my fire had ripped through these buildings.
Turning, I walked over to the edge of the woods and slumped to the ground, sitting with my back against a tree and my legs kicked out in front of me.
Mate, my dragon sighed.
Yeah, I ruined that, now didn’t I?
Not you. Never you.
It still happened. I couldn’t put it behind me.
My mind kept cycling through all I’d lost; all I couldn’t go back in time and savor.
He grunted. Made them pay.
That I did. Wish I could do it a second time. Then a third.
No need.
Sure there is.
But was there? Leave it to me to bail on Mazie again, to fly here as if this was my sole connection to the world. After burning it to the ground long ago, I’d still remained. I told myself I did so to make sure I truly took care of things, that they were actually gone.
