The first dragon shot the superintendent an icy look of disdain. “Thank you, but that will be all. If you’ll excuse us.”
Superintendent Durand spluttered.
“Thank you,” the dragon repeated, “but that will be all.”
With a fearful expression on his face, the superintendent fled the room, shutting the door behind him.
“You know who I am,” Matthieu stated to the men before him, his tone chilly in response to the dry recital of his parentage by the severe dragon. “So who the hell are you?”
The omega looked confused. “I’m sorry,” he said in very bad French, “but French my evil.”
Had it not been for the severity of the situation, Matthieu would have laughed. Try as he might to villainize the strange omega before him, there was an innately earnest quality about him that made him impossible to dislike.
“We can speak in English if you’d like,” Matthieu said in that language.
The omega looked excited. “Oh, your English is very good, and you barely have an accent. How very clever of you! I mean, not that there’s any reason for you not to be clever, but the last cloister we were in, the omega spoke very little English, and my Cantonese is pretty much limited to ordering dinner.” The omega beamed at Matthieu like he’d done a particularly good trick.
“What our saucy little tequila shot wanted to know, egg roll, was who the hell we are,” said the second dragon.
The omega colored. “Oops! My bad! I’m Harrison Lessardi-Drake, Harry to my friends. This,” he pointed to the second dragon, “is my mate, Everard Drake, and this,” he pointed to the lizard on his shoulder, “is our,” he covered the side of the lizard’s head with his hands to speak the next word, “adopted,” and dropped his hands and continued, “son Steve, and this is his little brother, Darwin.”
The pink whelp on the floor peeked at Matthieu. His eyes were the color of a soap bubble. Matthieu’s heart panged with strange, paternal longing, this time stronger than before, which he instantly quashed.
“The baby beside him is Darwin’s cousin, Julius, and this is—” Harry pointed at the first dragon, but before he could make the introduction, he was stopped.
“Geoffrey Drake, head legal counsel for the Amethyst clan,” the first dragon said in his stupidly perfect French. Matthieu gritted his teeth. There had been some recent gossip about the purple dragons, but Matthieu wasn’t one to listen to idle rumors, and he couldn’t remember what the whispers had been about. What he did know was that the dragon’s unyielding propriety got under his skin. While the dragon put on an impenetrable facade of indifference and superiority, Matthieu couldn’t help but feel like, for whatever reason, the dragon resented him.
In retaliation, Matthieu decided to resent him back.
“What exactly do you want with me?” Matthieu asked.
“We are here to enter you into a coital contract with a dragon,” the first dragon said.
Matthieu stared at the first dragon—Geoffrey—who stared back with equal disdain. “No!”
“You don’t have a choice,” the second dragon—Everard—said. “It’s a done deal.”
“Non,” Matthieu growled. “I am allowed to turn down an offer. That’s the law.”
Geoffrey pinched his lips together, his expression darkening in what Matthieu could only describe as contempt. “In normal circumstances, you’d be correct, but these aren’t normal circumstances. The council has enacted an edict, compelling all omega Disgraces currently in the Pedigree to cooperate with an…” his lip curled derisively, “experiment. They are to mate with specific dragons chosen by the clan heads in order to see if a theory is correct.”
“It’s a hypothesis,” Harry corrected.
Matthieu didn’t care to know what the difference was. He shook his head in confused bafflement. “What theory?”
“Hypothesis,” Harry insisted. The lizard on his shoulder yawned.
“Harrison, please outline the parameters of your…” Geoffrey sneered again, “experiment for Monsieur Boudreaux.”
Harry beamed. “Of course! I have a hypothesis, which I wish to prove, regarding dragon reproduction. You see, there being only alpha dragons makes no biological sense. You have to have breeding pairs. Well, there are a few species that reproduce through parthenogenesis, but not dragons, I believe. Alphas need omegas to reproduce, more or less—simple, right? So alpha dragons need omega dragons. Don’t you see?”
Matthieu didn’t, really. “What does this have to do with me?”
“Well, as an omega dragon, you—”
“Pardonnez-moi, but awhat?”
“Crumpet, you’re getting ahead of yourself, as usual. Reel in that beautiful mind of yours so our vodka sunrise can keep up. What my mate means, piña colada, is that as a Disgrace, you are biologically a dragon.”
