The hairs rose on the back of my neck. Now he was pissing me off for a different reason. I didn’t insult strangers for no reason, but I didn’t bother defending myself. If being perceived as belligerent and hostile was enough to dodge the Dragonfate draft, that was fine with me. I refused to participate in their bullshit.
“Are we done here?” I asked.
Nobody voiced a halfway decent argument in time, so I stood up and trudged towards the door.
As my hand reached for the handle, Cobalt spoke up.
“Will you at least tell us why?” he asked.
I paused, my fingers hovering in midair.
They wouldn’t like my answer. More so, I knew they wouldn’t accept it. Their minds were all turned to saccharine mush by their fresh romances. A couple years ago, they were all single. Now that they all had mates and children, they thought love could solve every fucking problem in the world.
It couldn’t.
Their love stories were all perfect. Perfectly matched alphas and omegas. Their biggest problem was running out of peanut butter, or some stupid shit like that. They had wealth and security and a warm body to hold every single night.
It wasn’t like I wished tragedy upon them. They were family, and I’d always fight to protect them from harm. I just couldn’t relate to my brothers. Any of them.
Without turning around, I said, “I have no fated mate. That good enough for you?”
“I’m sorry, Viol, but I don’t believe that,” Saffron cried.
Fuck, he was naive. And annoying.
“Believe whatever you want,” I muttered. “Just stop forcing me to listen to it.”
“But—”
“Oh, let him go,” Aurum said, waving it off. “Crimson’s right. Put Viol in a room with a bunch of strangers and he’ll bite their heads off. Let him be lonely for the rest of his life, if that’s what he wants.”
Asshole. Of course I didn’t want that.
But I bit my tongue. Let him and the others think of me as a rejected outcast. I’d bear any untruth to escape this situation.
“All right,” Jade finally said. “I won’t pressure you into the Games if you don’t want to participate, Viol.”
I felt relieved that he’d dropped it. “I don’t.”
“Just know that we’re here for you.”
That kind of overly sympathetic drivel made my skin crawl.
“Yeah, sure,” I muttered before finally escaping the room.
My adrenaline slowed as I stormed down the hall towards my bedroom. As I reached it, I reconsidered. If any of my brothers wanted to restart that annoying conversation, they’d know exactly where to find me. Instead, I turned on my heel and walked out the castle’s front door.
The summer sunshine baked against my skin, stifling and hot. I shed my human skin and leapt into the sky as a dragon. I pumped my wings until I approached the tropical mountain overlooking the rest of the island. Nobody would bother me there.
I perched on the peak and stared out into the endless sea. It stretched out in every direction, sparkling as it reflected the sun’s light. Usually the sight of it calmed me, but I was agitated from being trapped in that room and forced to talk about my feelings.
My brothers didn’t understand. Nobody did.
Except one person—one who wasn’t here.
One I could never have.
My claws sank into the rocky ground. How much did my brothers know? Were they trying to set me up?
