Page 42 of Billionaire Dragon King’s Rejected Mate

Chance held her gaze and didn’t look away. “I’m sorry. They weren’t after you, they were after me.”

The sound of the Gulf filled the silence between them, steady and unchanging, a stark contrast to everything that had shifted.

“I thought I could keep this away from you,” he added. “I thought distance was enough, but I was wrong.”

And this time, there was no denying it.

Chapter 18

Randi

Randi came awake slowly. Consciousness was thick and resistant that she had to push through layer by layer. Her body was heavy and her thoughts were disjointed at first.

The last thing she remembered was lunch and Josh beside her before she was grabbed violently from behind before everything had gone dark.

When her eyes opened fully, the world didn’t make sense.

The ceiling above her was unfamiliar. The distant sound of waves reached her ears in a soft, rhythmic hush that felt completely at odds with the chaos she instinctively knew had just happened. As she shifted, her head throbbing faintly but her gaze snapped to the figure sitting not far away.

Chance. Memory rushed back all at once.

She pushed herself upright too quickly and her breath caught as dizziness followed. She didn’t stop, though, because confusion had already begun to twist into something more demanding.

“What happened?” she asked, her voice rough but steady enough. Her eyes searched his face with growing intensity. “Who were those men? Why were they after me?”

Chance didn’t answer immediately, and that hesitation ignited something in her.

“No,” she said and shook her head as confusion hardened into frustration. Her anger camouflaged the fear she refused to show too openly. “You don’t get to do that, not this time. Don’t just sit there like this is nothing, Chance. I was grabbed in broad daylight, Josh could be dead for all I know, and then I wake up here with no idea what’s going on. You don’t get to be quiet about it since you were obviously there.”

He exhaled then and took a slow breath, as if whatever he was about to say required him to steady himself first. Something in that alone made her chest tighten because this wasn’t going to be simple.

“It wasn’t random,” he said finally, his voice low but clear, each word deliberate. “They weren’t after you.”

Randi blinked and the statement landed in a way that almost made sense and yet didn’t.

“Then why take me?” she shot back, her brows pulling together. “That’s not exactly a mix-up kind of situation.”

“Because of me,” Chance said and there was no deflection in his expression. He made no attempt to soften the truth. “They took you because you were with me.”

The room seemed to still even more with those words.

“But I wasn’t with you. I was with Josh for lunch.”

This time he avoided her eyes. “They know you’re important to me.”

Randi stared at him and searched for any sign that this was exaggeration but there was none, only a quiet certainty that made her pulse pick up.

“Start talking,” she said, more quietly now but no less firm. “All of it.”

And this time, he did.

He told her about Noriveille, not as a distant place or some abstract concept, but as something real and complicated. During her time in Stagholt, she had heard about Noriveille but never visited. She knew that it was a country bound in tradition and power and that Sven had not been fond of the king, who was about expectation and control. As Chance spoke, the pieces began to fall into place in ways that made her stomach tighten.

He told her about his brother’s execution and his words were so stark and heavy that they seemed to echo in the space between them. Randi felt her breath catch because there was something brutal in his tone that had shaped the man sitting in front of her.

He told her about his mother and about how grief had hollowed her out until there had been nothing left to hold onto and even her heart had given up under the weight of loss.

He told her about the times he would find his mother standing at the palace window weeks after Roderick died, staring out at the snow-covered cliffs.