“What are you talking about?” Milly looked from me to Ella and back again, lines forming between her eyebrows.
I couldn’t reply. Shame had frozen my tongue while I wallowed in the pitiful existence that was my life.
“I think, somehow, she found her mate,” Ella whispered, looking from me to the corridor where Emerald-Eyes had gone.
My dragon didn’t like her looking at him. I knew I should have been happy to have her, to finally have an awakened dragon within me, but monumental moment or not, it just didn’t matter next to the lancing pain of rejection. A pulsing agony where the mate bond should have begun to form. Instead, there was simplynothing now—a gaping hole in my soul. A constant reminder.
“Her mate?” Milly sucked in air. “But that’s impossible. She … we’re clippys. We don’t have mates.”
“I know,” Ella said. “But did you see her? Did you hear her growling? That’s the sound of a dragon. I’ve seen it happen before. It wasn’t quite that—”
“Arousing?” Milly suggested when Ella paused for words.
“Yeah. Intense, I was thinking. But it was similar.”
Ella and Milly both looked down the corridor now and then back at me.
“So where did he go? Why did he leave?” Milly asked, still glued to my side.
My friends were the best. Leave it to them to not care that I had been rejected for not being good enough. To them, I was more than enough. Ella would be there with her brains to puzzle it out, and Milly … well, Milly would use her muscles if they were needed. She was the protector, the fighter, of the three of us.
And I was the useless one. The broken. The third wheel.
“You know why he left,” I said quietly, pushing up into a sitting position, the hole in me raw and tender but growing no worse. Maybe I could even get used to it.
Ha.
“I’m sure it wasn’t that,” Ella said, sitting with one knee behind my back as she hugged me tightly, helping support me without asking.
“It was,” I growled, wishing they would be angrier. Didn’t they get it?
I stopped. Of course they didn’t get it. How could they? Until five minutes ago, we’d all been clippys, on equal ground.
“He left because I wasn’t good enough. Not strong enough for him, whoever he was,” I said, struggling to push the words out. It would be easier once I said them. “He left because I was a clippy.”
Four eyes snapped their focus onto me. “Was?” Ella asked.
“Was? Am? I don’t know.”
“No, absolutely not,” Milly said, crossing her arms. “You don’t get to speak like that and then not explain it, Anna. You owe us. Tell us what you meant by that comment.”
I shrugged. What was the harm in telling my best friends?
“I think my dragon is awake now.”
Their eyes flew open. Ella gasped, her hand rising to cover her mouth.
“What?” Milly shouted. She was never the quiet one.
“Hey! What the fuck do youthink you’re doing?” a voice barked from outside the cage. “You think you’re gonna get out of there if you prostrate yourself to them, huh?”
Milly looked over her shoulder as the hunter who had captured us approached. He was older, his short, thick beard shot through with gray. His hair was shorn to the scalp, showing a big, ugly mark down the side of his head. A childhood scar that he thought made him look tougher. It didn’t.
With a hiss, Milly flung herself against the bars of the cage, her arms outstretched toward the hunter. “Fuck you,” she snarled, swiping at the air. “Leave her the fuck alone. Okay?”
The hunter easily stayed out of Milly’s reach, but he eyed her warily nonetheless, uncertain if or when she would try to attack again.
“Keep her under control,” he spat, pointing at me.
