Forty-five minutes.
Confused and getting increasingly worried, Hele slipped into the restaurant to ask if the maitre d’ had seen an elf come or go. Did he ask about the restroom? Did he have an emergency of some kind?
Looking frazzled, the woman at the podium had distractedly answered, “No, the only elf I saw tonight came in and asked if he could use our back door.” She shrugged. “He tipped well.”
Hele felt a wave of pins and needles rush over her skin. “Oh.”
She hurried outside then, dodging a small family with two pre-teens and an elder, to message Alex. Was this normal? Would he come back? Had she done something wrong?
Sure, she didn’t want to go out with him in the first place, but evensheknew that it wasn’t good to be left at the door before the date even started. All she’d done was introduce herself.
Hele wracked her mind, combing through every second of their interaction as she waited for her sister to text her back with instructions. Insecurities rushed in alongside a heavy dose of indignation. What was so wrong with her that men kept rejecting her? It had to be something specific to her. She had trouble imagininganyonedoing this to Alex.
It must have been something in her speech, or perhaps her looks that put the elf off so badly he needed to escape through aback door.
Hele hated that it wounded her.
She didn’t even know the man. She certainly didn’t want him in any sexual or romantic sense, and yet ithurtto know she was so strange that he couldn’t bear to even pretend to like her for an evening.
Eyes stinging, she wrapped her arms around herself and sank onto the curb by the entrance. Her sparkly shoes, a favorite pair she’d picked out herself, looked garish in the gutter. Hele sniffed hard and wished that she had never agreed to such a ridiculous idea.
She felt terribly alone as people drifted around her, on their way to spend evenings with the people they loved. It was ugly — this miasma of loneliness, rejection, and directionless failure. The feeling came from a deep place, before she knew words or time. It came from thebefore,when she was boundless, and it was terrible.
I want to go home,she thought. But where was home? Not her family’s nest. Not her empty apartment. Home was a man that made the world seem quieter, softer.
She squeezed her eyes shut. The spinning feeling, like everything was too much, too fast, grated on her nerves like sharpened claws. It was all she could do to breathe andwait.
An ear-splitting roar carried over the lake like an explosion. All around her, heads lifted. Parents and those who protected their loved ones stilled, their eyes on the sky, before they began to hurry their people off of the street — into restaurants, vehicles, wherever there was shelter.
No one wanted to be out when an enraged dragon took to wing.
Hele barely noticed that the street emptied. She simply wrapped her arms around her knees and buried her head there, waiting for her cellphone to ping.
ChapterEleven
Vael foundhis mate sitting on the curb in front of a steakhouse.Alone.
Rage was a pulse in his mind, throbbing harder, faster, with every second that flashed by. His dark eyes fixed on the speck of white and purple a hundred feet below him. Banking hard on his massive, scarred wings, he glided in a circle, down, down, toward the nearly empty street.
Fire licked up his throat, blisteringly cold. It wantedout.
It wanted to burn the entire street to ash. Dragonfire could burn for days, foryearsif properly fed. It had a peculiar chemical property specific to dragons that made it feel ice cold even as it burned you into nothing but bubbling fat and splintered bone. Let loose on the street, there would be nothing left to salvage. It was a lucky thing that he had no desire to burn his mate.
The dragon, not the man, was in control as he arrowed down toward his Hele.
Find my mate. Hide her in our nest.
His eyes were locked on her form, huddled as it was, as he glided down, wings held taut as he slowed. Her body language was one of a wounded creature. Balled up, like she expected pain and could onlyendure.It was the same way she used to curl up when they brought her to the ‘Riik. She used to make herself small, and when he held her, she shook. She’d made so much progress since then. Seeing her back in that place was…horrible.
Vael, already on the edge, spiraled out of control.
A larger than average dragon, he landed in the middle of the street with enough force to rattle windows and set off car alarms. Still, Hele did not look up. Her slim arms contracted around her knees. Her hair, normally so full of movement and electricity, lay limp around her in a pool of dull white.
Moving on four scaled limbs rather than two, Vael hurtled down the road. He felt eyes on him from the shops and restaurant windows. Opening his jaws and mantling his wings in a display of dangerous dragon territoriality, he let loose a subvocal growl that warned every living creature within a mile radiusnot to fuck with him.
Drawing close, he huffed out a smoky breath and tried to find calm. Hele looked so small when he was in his quadrupedal form. If she were human, she would have been considered quite tall, but compared to him — shifted or not — she was delicate.
Likethis,she looked as fragile as spun glass.
