Adrissu couldn’t quite stop the smile that spread across his face, showing his teeth. Hewasa dragon, after all, and he always got what he wanted. Even if he hated that he wanted it.
“In that case, I will have the contract written up now,” he said, looking toward the guild hall. Ruan only laughed, following him as he turned to go.
“See you all later,” he called out to his companions, sounding insufferably smug. The humans he had been sitting with grumbled a reply that Adrissu only half-heard.
He had done it. Somehow, his lie had worked.
Chapter Three
Itonlytookaweek of their new arrangement before Adrissu began to dearly wish that he could bring himself to hate the insufferable human.
Exactly as Ederick had warned him, Ruan was too loud, too restless, too terriblyhuman.Despite how eager he had been to take the job, he clearly hated being idle. Though Adrissu had invited him into the sitting room on the ground floor when he’d shown up for his first day of duty, the human’s constant humming and tapping and muttering to himself was so distracting that Adrissu couldn’t get any work done. Not that he would have gotten much done anyway: not with how distracting his mere presence was, as it took every ounce of willpower to ignore what his body instinctively wanted to do now that he’d gotten his mate alone in his den. He offered Ruan a book to read, but the human declined. He showed Ruan around his tower—at least, the parts of the tower that were safe for him to know about—but he seemed mostly disinterested.
He told the man to guard the door from the outside on the second day, which was only marginally better. At the very least, Adrissu got a bit of work done in the morning, when he could pretend that the human wasnotonly a few steps away from him. Ruan had asked to eat his lunch inside, though, complaining of the heat. Adrissu agreed, only to instantly regret it as he loudly chewed the bread and cheese that he had brought, andbelchedjust as audibly, as if he had no manners at all.
Even the knowledge that Ruan washis—and the primal urge to be around him and claim him as his own—did not ease the constant vexation of his presence. Adrissu had hoped that a bit of time spent around each other would soothe some of the irritation away, and that he might even be able to enjoy Ruan’s presence eventually; but so far he was only miserable, and he was sure Ruan knew it.
The only good thing about him was that he was not afraid of Vesper, and they even seemed to like each other. Ruan had been stunned at her appearance on his first day, and apprehensive at first; but Vesper was curious and probably too friendly for her own good, which won him over easily.
“I’m glad he gets along with one of us,” Adrissu muttered sourly that evening, after Ruan had left for the day. Vesper had only answered by tilting her head to one side, her tongue flicking in and out.
Sometimes Ruan would make small talk with him, when he was eating in the sitting-room.
“So did you get robbed recently or something?” he asked through a mouthful of food one afternoon, peering curiously over to the opposite side of the room where Adrissu sat, reading.
“No,” Adrissu answered primly, not looking up from his book. He hated seeing humans speak with their mouths full.
“So why hire a guard?”
“A preventative measure, if you will.”
“Hm.” He did not sound convinced. “I guess you do have a lot worth stealing, though.”
At that, Adrissu glanced over his book toward him, an eyebrow raised. “I hope you aren’t getting any ideas.”
Ruan laughed: much as he hated himself for it, Adrissu did dearly enjoy hearing him laugh. “Not at all. I wouldn’t know what to do with any of this stuff, I assure you.” He glanced around the room before speaking again, this time blessedly with his mouth empty of food. “I guess you must make a pretty decent living doing all this? Do you sell potions or something?”
Adrissu managed a dry chuckle. “Not at all. Most of my work is the study of magic, which earns very little.”
Ruan’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “Then how can you afford a gold a day for a guard you don’t even need?”
Adrissu’s smile grew cold at the pointed question. “I was lucky enough to receive a sizable inheritance from a relative,” he said, returning his attention to his book. “That is what allows me the time and resources to pursue the mysteries of magic without having to worry about such trivial matters as food and housing.”
He could feel Ruan rolling his eyes even without looking up at him.
“What mysteries of magic?” the human asked after a moment of silence. Adrissu sighed and closed his book, setting it in his lap. Getting any work done while Ruan was there was going to be impossible.
“Much of magic is a mystery,” he said with a shrug. “Though its usage is widespread, we actually know very little about how it truly works. It seems to be a force of nature, but is it a limited resource that one day might run out? Is it truly some force of will created by its wielder?”
“I don’t know,” Ruan shrugged in return. “I suppose that seems interesting, though.”
“Very,” Adrissu agreed dryly. Ruan did not ask any further questions, and when he looked back down at his book, the man tidied up the table where he’d been eating and went back to his post outside.
Their stilted conversations did not get any easier, and Adrissu was trapped in the constant state of limbo: wanting the human to like him, while simultaneously being frustrated and irritated with nearly every interaction that they had. It would have been so much easier to hate him; it would have been best if he had never spoken to the man at all.
He was already on edge, so when Ruan had some friends join him for part of the day at the beginning of his second week, he stormed out of his tower in a rage and demanded they leave.
“Why?” Ruan scowled. And even though his two companions, boys who looked even younger than Ruan, shrunk away with obvious remorse, the man remained seemingly unaffected by Adrissu’s anger. “We can be quieter if we’re bothering you. But they shouldn’t have to leave.”
