Perhaps, with the jagged fragments, Matthieu could weaponize his army of woodland creatures and head a rebellion against draconian ways. If he succeeded, there would be liberation for all. If he failed, he wouldn’t know it. Matthieu hadn’t received a world-class education, but he did know that piles of soot and charred bone didn’t do much introspecting.
Matthieu pushed a scream through his teeth, muffled further by the pillow, then rolled over and stared at the ceiling. If he stayed here and felt sorry for himself, nothing would change. What he needed to do was to track down Ian and Geoffrey and confront the problem head-on.
In a bid to circumvent attaining princess status, Matthieu kicked his way out from beneath the sheets and headed out the bedroom door. He found himself in a hallway lit by a single crystal chandelier. Oil portraits decorated its walls, each one’s color and mastery of dimension reminiscent of Vermeer. While the paintings would have been impressive to an outsider, they gave Matthieu pause—a dragon’s hoard was separate from a dragon’s lair, but division or not, there was no escaping the fact that Geoffrey’s lair was terribly plain. No dragon would willingly keep his home so meager. Matthieu then tried to picture Geoffrey in a palace, surrounded by gilt furniture, and failed. He realized at once that the typically ostentatious displays of wealth dragons were supposed to crave didn’t suitmonsieur dragon grincheuxin the slightest. He didn’t seem to care for obvious extravagance any more than Matthieu did.
He wondered what was inside Geoffrey’s hoard. Matthieu found that he craved the idea of exploring it and finding what Geoffrey’s eye found beautiful and worthy of treasuring.
The thought made Matthieu’s heart twist like a whirligig caught in the wind.
Before he could pull himself together and think better of it, Matthieu was on his way to the end of the hall and down the glossy wooden stairs. Ian and Geoffrey had left him dressed, but had taken his shoes. In his haste, his foot slipped on the highly polished step.
With a truncated cry, Matthieu flung himself at the railing. He succeeded in grabbing onto the banister, but in doing so, crashed chest-first into the railing. The air was knocked from his lungs, and a momentary but debilitating ache spread like fire across Matthieu’s chest at the site of impact. He wheezed in pain.
Elsewhere in the house came a tremendous crash, like a table had been flipped over. Inexplicable fear and panic arrowed through Matthieu, piercing his chest and striking home in his heart.
They weren’t his own.
As Matthieu clung to the banister, two sets of footsteps pounded down the hall, and Geoffrey skidded to a stop by the foot of the stairs, followed closely by Ian. Geoffrey’s pupils had narrowed to pinpricks and the color had drained from his face. Ian, who scarcely looked better, fell in behind Geoffrey and set a hand on Geoffrey’s lower back.
The sight of Geoffrey standing there in all of his pompous glory both elated Matthieu and sickened him—it was confirmation of what he already knew, but didn’t want to acknowledge.
Judging by the way Geoffrey wilted when their eyes met, Matthieu was positive he did not suffer alone.
“Do you believe me now?” Ian asked in a small voice. It was the kind of voice that Matthieu would have described as disappointed had it not been so heart-wrenchingly sad. “You knew where he was. The second it happened, I didn’t just see you react, Ifeltit. I felt the fear clench inside you. The look in your eyes right now…”
“No.” Geoffrey shook his head, but his voice was thin with desperation. “I just heard him crash into the banister, that’s all. That’s… that’s it. It’s not anything else, Ian. It isn’t.”
Matthieu knew better. The pang of terror and disappointment and heartbreak that constricted his chest wasn’t his own—it came to him from an outside source and made its home in Matthieu’s soul just as easily as it did in Geoffrey’s purple eyes.
The evidence stacked higher.
The sudden outburst of emotion during his flight, the sound of Geoffrey’s voice remedying his mental fog, and now the presence of feelings Matthieu wasverysure were not his own?
There was no fighting the truth. Not anymore.
Matthieu was mated to Geoffrey Drake, and no matter what he did, he would be forevermore.
* * *
“It’s not possible,” Geoffrey asserted for what had to be the hundredth time since they’d come to sit in the parlor. It smelled vaguely of woodsmoke. Matthieu, who wanted to look at anything but Geoffrey, studied the hearth. Beneath the cast iron grate was a pile of ash into which were nestled several glowing embers. The fire had been extinguished for a while, but Matthieu hazarded he could set it back alight, if not with a flint and steel, then with the concentrated rage that had begun to bubble over in his mind.
The more Geoffrey denied what was fact, the more Matthieu wanted to grab him by his stupid dragon ear and force him to listen to reason. Geoffrey wasn’t the only one whose life had been uprooted by what had happened, and his selfish behavior infuriated Matthieu to no end.
“It is possible,” Matthieu mumbled, arms crossed over his chest. He glared at the embers. One of them glowed brightly, then sparked and popped, causing Matthieu to twitch in surprise. “How else would you explain what has happened to us?”
“There is no mark,” Geoffrey crowed. “If there is no mark, there is no mate bond. It’s why Ian and I aren’t mated, despite how we feel. No mark, no bond. It is law.”
“We haven’t looked for a mark,” Ian said in a soft voice.
“There is none,” Geoffrey hissed, then sighed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken that tone with you. There just… there can’t be a mark.Weare mated, Ian. You and I. We have been for a century. I’m in love withyou,not with him.”
“Putain, tu me gonfles,” Matthieu muttered to himself.Fuck, are you ever pissing me off.“It doesn’t matter if you love me or not. What has happened to us has made it clear that love doesn’t matter. The point of the mate bond is to tie an alpha and an omega together so they may produce a clutch. Real emotions are unimportant. The bond doesn’t care how you feel. It justis.”
There was a rush of air and a burst of heat—not enough to harm, but enough that Matthieu became aware that a very pissed-off, potentially on-fire Geoffrey had stormed up behind him. “Ian is myworld.”
Matthieu thinned his lips. The ember in the hearth that had previously sparked ignited and burned with a flame that was very nearly invisible. “And now I am your universe.”
A silence fell. The ember burned out. Matthieu, desperate for distraction, looked out the window at the sole tree occupying the small, fenced back yard. The peacock—Lucian—had flown up into the branches and peered into the room. He looked at Matthieu with accusatory beady eyes, then wobbled and hopped around on the branch, fanning his tail irregularly.
