“I’m devoted toyou, Sulien Blaythorn. Only you.”
Does she mean what I think she means? After all this time,I’mthe one who holds her devotion?
“You still want me?” I rasp.
“Want you?” She stares at me, expression bewildered. “I was coming togetyou.”
9
Esme hasan entire room in her house devoted to research on Antarctica and dragons.
Books on shelves and open on tables. Scrolls unraveled. Pictures of great, scaly beasts scattered about. Maps pinned to the walls with notes about different areas.
The largest is a detailed image of the Antarctic continent.
There’s a blue pin placed exactly where the colony is.
“Did you ever wonder why I owed Xavier that big favor?” Esme asks as I stare around in wonder.
After her cryptic confession, the harpy righted her clothes and dragged me out of the apartment, not caring that my body was obviously still inI want to fuck youmode. Even after the car ride to her house on the edge of town, I’m still half hard.
Silently, I nod.
My harpy strolls up to the map with the blue pin. “Because he promised to take me to the colony twenty years from now.”
“What?” The question comes out hoarse—and not just because of my injury. The idea of Esme in that place is my nightmare.
“When I found out a dragon moved to town, I sought him out and pestered him until he agreed. Only took a few months.” She smirks, all cocky and triumphant. “He promised to guide me there, help find you, and get you out.”
“Twenty years. You’d be almost sixty.” An even more fragile version of herself, braving the Antarctic wild.
“So? Yuichiro Miura climbed Mount Everest when he was eighty years old, and that guy was human.” She crosses her arms, glaring at me, like she still plans to go and needs to convince me to let her. “I’ve been training since I was eighteen. Designing some kick-ass magical winter gear, better than Gore-Tex.” She jerks her chin toward a corner with a rack of clothing that looks like it belongs in a ski apparel shop.
“I knew I couldn’t change you back. At least, I couldn’tfindrecord of any dragons changing early, other than one.” Her eyes flick to a shelf of scrolls. “But they used a god artifact that was lost on a sunken ship hundreds of years ago.”
She stops next to a pinned-up map of the world, tapping her finger near Japan before sliding south to the giant white ice patch at the southernmost point of the world. “But I figured if I wasthere, if I was nearby when you transformed naturally, I could save you from your parents. Prove whatever they might have told you was a lie.”
She shoves her fists in the pockets of her shorts, glaring at the floor. “Your mom came to my house. The day after we slept together. She told me you and your father were already gone. That you were so ashamed of what you’d done, you wanted to live in the colony as a dragon to repent for yoursins.”
Wrath boils in my gut, and my parents are lucky there’s a world between us.
My harpy straightens her spine. “I knew it was a lie. She knew you were mine, and that terrified her. So, they took you from me. Thinking I’d forget. But I never did. Not for a single day.”
The magnitude of what she’s telling me threatens to rupture my brain.
“All this … time … your loyalty.”
Esme grimaces, her eyes sad. “I’m not perfect. There were times—a whole year once—when I convinced myself it was impossible. Or that I’d go through all this, find you, and you’d shift back into a young man, and I’d be an old woman, clutching too tight to the past. That you’d pity me for never letting you go.”
Pity? More like worship at your feet.
I’m humbled by her.
“What changed?”
Esme shrugs and fiddles with the pages of an open book. “I realized it didn’t matter. If you had moved on and were happy with some lady dragon, then I’d hurt, but I’d deal. Or if you simply didn’t want me, I’d live with that too. But one thing I was absolutely sure of was, they hadforcedyou to go to the colony. And when you could shift back to your human form, I wasn’t going to let you face them alone if you wanted to escape. I could not live the rest of my life, knowing you were trapped.”
She would’ve been there. Four decades apart, and she would have come for me. Done her best to save me.
