My dragon was still furious. I could feel it pacing beneath my skin, demanding I go back, claim what was mine, stop being an idiot about things that mattered. It didn’t understand human complications like power dynamics and appropriate professional conduct. It only understood that our mate had been close enough to touch and I’d walked away.
I got out of the truck and went inside. Dropped my keys on the counter. Stood in the great room with all that expensive emptiness around me and tried to remember why I’d bought this place.
Right. Privacy. Space to shift without worrying about witnesses.
I needed to fly. Needed to let my dragon out before the frustration of the evening calcified into something worse. The house backed up to national forest land—thousands of acres of wilderness where I could shift and fly and burn off restless energy that came from denying my instincts. I decided to wait until dark and prowled restlessly for an hour. Then I stripped in the mudroom off the garage, leaving my clothes in a pile I’d deal with later. The night air was cold when I stepped outside, sharp with the promise of snow even though it was May. Themountains rose behind the house in dark silhouettes against the slightly lighter sky.
I walked across the back deck and down the steps to the yard. The grass was brown and dormant under my feet. The trees at the property line were dark shapes, pine and aspen and scrub oak that would leaf out in another month. I could hear the creek that ran through the eastern edge of my land, swollen with snowmelt from higher elevations.
I let the shift take me.
Two hundred years of practice had smoothed out most of the rough edges, turned what had once been an excruciating transformation as a child into something I could manage in under a minute. My bones restructured themselves with familiar efficiency. My skin rippled and hardened into scales. Wings erupted from my shoulder blades in a rush of membrane and muscle.
The world shifted as my senses expanded—colors deepening, sounds sharpening, awareness of air currents and thermal patterns that came with draconic perception. I flexed my wings, feeling the night air catch in the membrane, and looked down at myself in the dim light.
Bronze scales covered my body, darker along my spine and belly, lighter at the edges where they caught what little moonlight filtered through the clouds. The tips had that golden tint that marked me as a forge dragon—not the bright gold of pure metallurgists, but the warmer bronze-gold of someone whose gifts ran toward practical application rather than theory. My claws were copper, matching my eyes, which I knew without looking had gone dark with the emotions I’d been suppressing all evening.
I launched myself into the air with three powerful beats of my wings.
The ground fell away beneath me. The house became a collection of lights and angles. The valley spread out in darkness punctuated by the scattered glow of distant homes. I climbed higher, following the slope of the mountain, letting instinct guide me toward the thermals that would make flight easier.
This was what I needed. Space. Distance. The particular clarity that came from being in my true form, away from human complications and professional responsibilities and the memory of Dante’s face when I’d rejected him.
My dragon was still angry, but flight helped. The physical exertion of working my wings, the focus required to navigate air currents in the dark, the simple fact of being what I actually was rather than the carefully constructed human version—it all combined to take the edge off the rage.
I flew higher, following the ridge line toward the peaks. The air grew thinner and colder. Snow appeared in patches, then in continuous coverage as I gained elevation. I could see Denver in the distance, a sprawl of light against the darkness, and somewhere in that sprawl was Dante in his small apartment, probably still processing what had happened.
I should have handled it better. Should have found words that didn’t make it sound like he’d done something wrong when the only thing wrong was my complete inability to maintain appropriate distance. Should have explained that it wasn’t about him, that he hadn’t misread anything, that I’d been fighting the same battle he was fighting and had simply lost it in a different way.
But explaining would have required admitting things I couldn’t admit. That I was dragon. That he was my mate. That every instinct I possessed was screaming at me to claim him, protect him, keep him close in ways that would destroy both of us if I acted on them.
I banked left, following a thermal updraft, and tried to focus on the flight rather than the thoughts circling in my head like carrion birds.
My other problem was Odin Clark. If Clark knew what I was—and he might, depending on how sensitive his blood was to mine—then he knew that forge dragons had gifts worth exploiting. He knew that someone like me could work metal in ways no human smith could replicate, could create alloys and structures that shouldn’t exist according to conventional metallurgy. He knew I could find the one thing that made forge dragons invaluable to men like him. He knew all of that, and now he had a connection to my player. Mymate, my dragon corrected viciously.
I needed to talk to Ignatius again. Needed more information about Clark’s current operations, his employees, his obsession. Needed to know if the Council had any evidence beyond suspicion that he was actively dangerous rather than just bitter.
And I needed to do all of that while maintaining professional distance from Dante, which my dragon thought was the stupidest plan I’d ever conceived.
I reached the peak and hovered there for a moment, my wings working to hold position against the wind. The view was spectacular—Denver spread below me to the east, the mountains rising to the west, the vast darkness of wilderness in between. This was why I’d bought the house. This moment, this freedom, the ability to be what I actually was without human eyes judging or cataloging or trying to understand.
But even here, even in my true form with miles of empty air around me, I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Dante had looked at me in that apartment. The hope in his eyes. The want. The vulnerability of someone who’d been hurt before and was trying again anyway.
I’d taken that vulnerability and crushed it because I was trying to protect him from threats he didn’t know existed.
No, I thought, with a clarity I’d been hiding from for weeks. I hadn’t just been protecting Dante. I could tell myself that. Convince myself I was staying away to protect him, when really, I was trying to protect myself. To stop my heart being shredded a second time.
The wind shifted, bringing the scent of snow from higher elevations. A storm was coming—not tonight, but soon. I could feel it in the air pressure, taste it in the moisture content. We’d probably get one more spring snowstorm before the season finally gave up and let summer through.
I turned back toward home, gliding on the descent rather than fighting gravity. My wings caught the air with practiced efficiency. The bronze scales along my chest gleamed copper in the occasional patch of moonlight that broke through the clouds.
My dragon wanted to fly to Capitol Hill. Wanted to land on Dante’s building, shift back to human, go inside and explain everything. Tell him he wasn’t wrong, that I felt it too, that pushing him away was killing me but I was doing it anyway because the alternative was worse.
I didn’t let it. I flew home instead, following the ridge line back to my property, circling once over the house before landing in the yard with more force than was strictly necessary, and understanding that what I wanted and what I could allow were two very different things. The problem was I wasn’t sure which one of us I was protecting anymore.
We won game three. Dante had come in to wish the team luck, hadn’t looked me in the eyes, and left with his suit on. The series was at 2-1 Chicago.
Another two days with seeing him in my periphery in medical was torture.
