And he hung his head to concede, “Anymore.”
Then lifted it again to say, “I am only asking that you listen to me. Let me explain.”
Well, “explain” hit me in my journalist kryptonite.
Instead of ordering him to leave, I gave him a reluctant nod. Also, I now understood that making him vacate the room would bring the horror-holo version of my heat cycle roaring back.
He dropped his hands. Then came around the bed to lower himself onto the floor beside it.
Even with him kneeling and me partially sitting up, we were nearly eye to eye.
But he bowed his head like a supplicant and said, “Treasure, you honor me. May I speak? Tell you my story—our story?”
A dragon geneticist, nearly eight feet tall and powerful beyond belief, kneeling on stone. To me. Asking for permission.
I nodded. Too curious about this story to worry that this was some kind of trick.
“Before this…”
His own breath caught, and a curl of steam released from his nostrils.
“Before this, I have always been the one to catch you,” he continued. “Every lifetime, when you fall through the portal, I am there. I bring you back to these rooms. I reintroduce myself to you. And I fight anew for your love.”
Dragons don’t need to blink. Aengus had told me that. But Orpheus’s eyes hooded, lowering to the floor as he spoke.
“You asked me why you would agree to be with me, even with a decreased appetite for mating. It is because something in you remembers.”
He raised his green gaze to mine. “I have loved you, and you have loved me back, for hundreds upon hundreds of cycles. In every lifetime. And with each arrival, it has taken less and less time for us to become what we are to each other.”
He paused. Then said the next thing like it was fact. A formula as irrefutable as gravity. “We are soul mates. Twin flames that burn across millennia together.”
Soul mates?He believed we were truly fated in ways that went beyond his alien fertility matching portal?
My mouth fell open. And for once, the urge to interrupt and ask questions was nowhere to be found. I could only hold my breath, hanging on to each word as he continued.
“And in every lifetime, that love has increased. Each cycle, I have loved you more than the last. I did not believe that was possible, and yet it has proven to be true, nine hundred and ninety-nine times.”
His eyes burned with emotion—only to suddenly go dark. Like something behind them had been snuffed out.
“But then I lost Dorie 999.”
He stopped. And I watched a dragon who’d been nothing but cold to me prior to these moments struggle to speak.
“Her loss was… beyond what I could endure. And the Widower’s Madness that followed was like nothing that came before it. A piercing hole in my being that sent me directly to the lake, unable to remember the promises I’d made you.”
“Promises?” The question slipped out, despite my decision to stay quiet.
“Yes.” He reached for me, but came up short, hands jerking back like they remembered my order not to touch me, even if he did not.
But he continued on anyway.
“I made you two promises. Not just to love you across every lifetime. But to bring you back so we might have another chance to do so. One promise I kept. For I could not stop loving you, even when I wished to kill that love as one kills a wounded animal. But the other… I broke that promise when I didn’t come out to catch you, when I chose to end you rather than ever suffer your loss again.”
His bare chest did something strange. The scales started flaking away from it, like shimmering blossoms being carried away by an invisible wind.
“You are so brave, my treasure.” His voice became rougher. More glass than smoke. “You are always so very brave, every single cycle. But I have been a coward. Too afraid to remind you of our love. Leaving to my variants what should have been my priority from your first day in my realm.”
This was…
