“Tora?”
“I saw your dragon.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” She headed off with the drink and took another sip.
I followed her. “You saw my dragon?”
“New topic. Please.” She sipped more of her drink and picked up her pace.
Saw my dragon. . .what the hell does that mean?
Her words haunted me long after she walked ahead.
The phrase looped in my mind, unsettling and electric.
What did she see exactly?
A flicker of energy in the air?
Some mythical vision?
Was it a metaphor of the shadow of what I was beneath the skin?
Or had she really glimpsed the darker thing that lived inside me—the one that had bombed Tokyo, destroyed families, and bathed itself in vengeance?
Maybe she’d seen the part of me I spent years burying beneath order and ritual.
Maybe she’d seen what even my men feared to name aloud.
Or maybe she’d simply felt it—the ancient hunger that stirred whenever she smiled, the beast that called herminein a tongue older than language.
The questions pressed at the back of my skull like heat behind my eyes.
I wanted to ask more.
To know everything.
To corner the truth out of her.
But the breeze carried her laughter again, light, lovely, human, and so passionatelyalive,and I swallowed the questions before they could wound the air between us.
There would be another time for this conversation.
I would not push it anymore.
Not here.
Not now.
Not while the sun touched her brown skin.
Not while I finally had her all to myself.
I let the mystery linger.
If she truly saw my dragon, I would let her keep the vision for now—because the next time we spoke of it, I intended to make her understand exactly what it meant to awaken the creature inside me.
