Page 8 of Dragon King’s Bullied Mate

Instead, she sat back slightly and studied him in silence. Any fear she should have felt totally gave way to something far more dangerous. Her sense of curiosity.

“You could have told me, you know,” Lyra went on after a moment, her lips smirking faintly despite the weight of the realization pressing against her. “Though I suppose being unconscious makes that difficult.”

Her gaze drifted again to his upper torso, half-expecting the scales to appear once more, but his skin remained smooth and betrayed nothing.

“If the stories are true,” she continued, quieter now and more thoughtful, “then you should already be healed.”

Not to mention the fascinating fact that the king of Iskavard was half dragon. That was a fact she had never heard before.

Her eyes narrowed slightly as she looked back at the partially closed wounds. “Which means something is stopping it.”

The answer came to her almost immediately. “The poison.”

Lyra exhaled slowly, the pieces falling into place with unsettling clarity. She had tested him a few times but the persistent toxin still lingered in his system despite her efforts to draw it out with salves and elixirs that she knew of. She had attributed it to something external, but with this new understanding, the role of the poison felt far more significant.

“It’s interfering,” she said, more to herself than to him. “Slowing whatever… you are.” Her gaze softened as it returned to his face. “You’re fighting it, though. I can see that.”

For a moment, she simply watched him. She pulled the blanket back up and tucked it under his chin and around his shoulders. The quiet of the room wrapped around her thoughts as they shifted, no longer constrained by what she had once believed possible.

“You’re full of surprises,” she murmured.

A floorboard creaked behind her, and Lyra turned just as Beckett stepped into the doorway with his serious little face directed at Mikael.

“You’re still in here,” he said, though it wasn’t quite a question.

“Where else would I be?”

Beckett stepped closer, but he was hesitant. “He looks… different.”

Lyra tilted her head slightly. “Different how?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Like he’s not as close to dying.”

Lyra glanced back at Mikael. “He’s a fighter and that’s helping him heal.”

“Can I sit in here with you?”

She motioned to a chair. “You can keep me company.”

“Can you tell me a story?”

Her heart warmed. She had won the little boy over with stories when he first came to live with her. “How about one about dragons?”

Beckett’s expression shifted, interest cutting through his wariness. “You know stories about dragons?”

She nodded. “The kind most people don’t believe, but sometimes are the ones worth paying attention to.”

He crossed his arms, clearly intrigued. “I’m ready.”

She moved away from Mikael and cuddled next to Beckett. “Okay then. Here we go.”

Once upon a time, in a village tucked between a forest and a line of soft blue mountains, there lived a little boy named Ollie who was very good at climbing trees and very bad at finishing his vegetables. He was also very afraid of dragons.

Everyone in town told him that dragons breathed fire and ate people, so Ollie stayed far away from the mountains, because that was where dragons lived.

But one afternoon, while chasing a runaway kite, Ollie found himself farther than he had ever gone before. The trees thinned, the ground turned rocky, and when he finally caught the kite, a dragon was curled up right beside a boulder.

This dragon was smaller but still big enough to make Ollie’s heart jump into his throat. The dragon jumped when Ollie scared it, but one of its wings was lopsided. And instead of roaring, the dragon sneezed.