He cleared his throat, pulling back to push to his feet, clearly just as shocked as I was. “So, now that I can focus without feeling like I’m suffocating from the heat, we should begin our discussion.”
I blinked at him a few times, still confused at what had come over me. “Yeah, uhm, okay.”
Taking our seats again, I remained quiet, waiting for him to begin. I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eyes, so I settled for staring a hole in the plush gray rug beneath his feet.
“The year I was born, my father had an affair with a woman outside of our lands.”
My heart was racing as I tried to focus on his words, completely taken off guard by the severity of them. Instantly, my eyes snapped up to his and I found him gazing out at the sky through the glass doors behind me.
“Apparently, I was a difficult baby.”
The opening to make a sarcastic quip about him being difficult was there, yet I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do less, for once.
He shrugged and grabbed the decanter of liquor that was already half empty, plucking the lid off and placing it back on the table. “At least, that’s the excuse my father used to defend his deplorable actions. My parents had drifted apart and he found solace between another woman’s legs. Only, he hid his identity from her, concerned that she would demand access to our money, or worse, attempt to become the queen and disrupt our lives.”
How Theo managed to speak of this as if it was a storybook he was reading from spoke to the deep issues I assumed he was likely still struggling with. His suddenly monotone voice was so unlike him, and I wondered if it was the only way he could get through sharing this—just brushing past how incredibly fucked up it all was and explaining it all as fact.
As he drank directly from the bottle, I grimaced. Yeah, this had to be awful to discuss.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him to stop, to prevent him from reopening these festering wounds, but I held back. As hard as this likely was for him, I needed to know the details. There might be a clue somewhere in the mess of this fucked up history.
Resting the bottle on his knee when he was done, he focused on wiping his mouth with his sleeve next.
“He’s a fool and didn’t realize the woman would find him, searching for answers about the man she met in the woods and sparked a connection with, thinking she had found the love of her life when she stumbled upon him.”
I groaned, seeing where this was going and not wanting my suspicions confirmed. However, there was one thing that bothered me. Why was this woman randomly wandering through the northern territory of Andrathya? It wasn’t exactly known for its views or welcoming environment.
His head lolled to rest against the edge of the wingback chair. “Upon realizing that not only was he married and a king, he was also a beast at heart. The woman was rightfully scorned, but it seemed she and my father might have been more alike than she wanted to admit, because she wasn’t entirely forthcoming about her identity either.”
His eyes slid from the sky behind me to scan over my face. “She was a witch, or at least a descendant of one.” My mouth fell open as a million questions peppered my mind, but he keptpushing on. “She at least possessed magic potent enough to lay a curse on my father’s kind, so that no one like him would ever be able to deceive a lover again. A piece of their beast would be on display at all times, and she meant it to scare off anyone who might dare be tempted to lay with us. She cursed our kind to die out with us, leaving us unable to find a willing, true mate.”
He was quiet for a few moments, seemingly letting me digest that.
“I thought witches were a thing of myth,” I breathed out, settling on the first thought that came to the surface. “The old texts say they were the female descendants of the elemental gods, having affinities for magic in the same way the male offspring, the drackya, do. Is that true?”
His lips pursed. “That is what we were taught, but, save being able to ask an elemental ourselves, I suppose the creation of beings is hearsay this many centuries later.”
A thought hit me with his wording, and I leaned forward in my seat, a spark of excitement running through me. “Has anyone ever been able to converse with the elemental gods? If it was a witch that laid the curse, surely the creator of witches would be able to break it, right?”
He spluttered and looked at me like I was insane for even asking. “Siyana, why would the gods bother to talk with any of us?”
Not allowing him to deter me, I rebutted, “Well, do you have any better ideas? Did your dad ever tell you if the witch said anything about how to break the curse?”
“No,” he answered briskly as his hand tightened on the edge of the bottle, “he didn’t bother to tell me much before he killed himself years later, unable to handle the shame and hatred he received as a result of the curse, taking my mother with him.”
I leapt from my chair, unable to contain myself. “He killed your mother?!”
Rubbing his eyes with his free hand, he sighed. “He may as well have. When a drackya and human complete their bond, part of the magic from our dragon is shared with our mate. It allows their lifespan to stretch far beyond that of typical humans. But when their drackya dies and that magic source is snuffed out…” he trailed off, leaving me to fill in the blanks.
“So her mortality caught up with her after he was gone,” I surmised as he took a drink. My feet carried me back and forth in front of the near-dead embers in the fireplace. “Fuck, Theo…that’s a lot.”
I stopped pacing and stared at the drackya before me, no longer seeing him simply as the dragon king, or the reason I was torn from my home for the first time. I was simply seeing Theo, the child who had to grow up too quickly and take on the mantle of king from his fucked up father. Stuck with the responsibility of having to break the curse, when it should never have been his burden to bear.
“I had to take over the throne when I was thirteen,” he admitted hollowly, gaze going back out to the sky as he seemed to lose himself in thought. A long moment passed before he sighed, shoulders slumping slightly as he continued, “As you can imagine, the hatred from our people is heavy, considering it is my father’s fault the curse was given to begin with. That hatred has fallen to me in his absence. I suppose it has to be directed at someone.”
“Hey,” I whispered, finding my voice softer than it had ever been with him. My heart was splintering as more of his life was revealed. “Don’t say that. You don’t deserve their hatred. It sounds to me like you’ve had it the hardest due to your father’s horrid actions. Not only are you cursed like everyone else, but you lost both of your parents,andyou have to shoulder a responsibility that is too heavy to carry alone.”
His haunting words came back to me.No one stops to wonder what made me this way.
