Page 37 of Damien’s Mate

“You’re one of those Lion Guards,” he said. Except she wasn’t, he realized. She just wanted to be. She wanted it desperately—it was the only dream she’d ever been allowed to have.

“Tell me,” he said. “I’m not Lion Guard, but I can have your back.”

She took a deep breath, and let it out. Then she took another, and began to talk.

She’d been born in the Dragonlands, in a family that had served the Draken House of Makek-Dur for seven generations, down to her father and her uncle.

When she was just a small child, a rebellion had risen up within the Draken House. The rebels had stolen the Calebite Artifacts—major magical weapons belonging to the royal family—to help their cause.

“My uncle went over to the rebel side, along with some other traitors in the Lion Guard,” she said. “When the rebels were discovered, he escaped to this world with the artifacts. They were never seen again.”

Damien was fascinated. It really did sound like a fantasy movie, but it was all real.

“When the Commanders of the Lion Guard found out what my uncle had done, our entire family was exiled.”

“Your whole family? That doesn’t seem fair.” Although similar things happened in Mob families, so he guessed he wasn’t one to talk.

She said in a hard voice, “A Guard soldier must be beyond reproach, able to be trusted implicitly. My uncle destroyed our family’s honor and ran away to this world. The shame killed his sister—my mother. The only way my father could restore our honor was to recover all the artifacts and return them. He spent seventeen years looking for them. He brought me up to be Lion Guard, training me from the time I was six. So I could finish the mission with him, and when we went home, I could take up my rightful place by his side.”

It sounded like a hard, bleak life, and a childhood that wasn’t a childhood—given to trying to restore something to a man who hadn’t lived to see it.

“But he didn’t make it,” Damien said.

“No. He was killed three years ago, recovering the fifth artifact. It’s taken me all this time to get the last one.” She said again, “I have to see this through. It can’t all have been for nothing. I can’t let him down.”

Damien squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry. You won’t.” To his surprise, she squeezed his back.

After a minute he said, “It must be nice to have a dad you want to live up to.”

He left his hand where it was, and to his surprise she curled her fingers around it. “What was yours like?” she asked.

“Drunk. Mean.”

She stroked his hand gently with her thumb, as if in sympathy. “What about your mother?”

Damien didn’t like talking about his parents. It brought up bad memories. “She had a drug problem. Left when I was nine.”

Lila said softly, “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Me too.” He wasn’t going to say anymore, but that warmth was still there in the silence between them, and he somehow kept talking.

“Dad was okay before that. After she left he was pretty broken up, even though they’d done nothing but fight for two years, when she wasn’t in rehab.”

Lila said slowly, “It’s hard to lose someone you love. Maybe it was harder for him because he couldn’t save her. And he didn’t think he’d mattered enough for her to save herself.”

And Damien hadn’t mattered enough either. That was one of the sore places in his heart that had never healed. “Yeah. I guess,” he said. “It would have been nice if he’d worried about saving me, though, instead of leaving me to find my own way.”

That was the other wound that had never healed. The two he never talked about.

Lila said, “You did okay, though.”

Damien gave a huff of ironic almost-laughter. “Seeing as I’m currently on the run from two different crime families, I think that’s debatable.”

“On the upside, you have over a quarter of a million dollars.”

“True.” He still couldn’t believe it. He didn’t even know what to do with it. “My Aunt Jenn thinks I should go straight.”

“Really? What does she think you should do?” She sounded curious and interested.