“She’s sweet,” a voice rumbled.
Ottisjumped.
He whirled around to find a huge man standing by the door, naked but for a pair of boxers, and a lumpy scarf wrapped around the lower half of his face.
Ottis froze. “Doc?”
The man’s eyes crinkled. “That’s me.”
It felt odd, seeing his human form for the first time. Doc had dark brown hair and bright blue eyes. He was twice as broad as Ottis, two heads taller than him. His pecs were generous, his biceps and thighs too, and his bulge was pronounced against the front of his boxers.
Where the dark, crumpled scales had been, there were matching scars on his body: deep furrows eating into smooth skin, unevenwhorls that were pink and blotchy, just like the scars on Ottis’ leg.
Ottis tried not to imagine what the lower half of Doc’s face looked like. It made sense that he wanted to cover it up; Ottis tried to hide his leg from everyone, too.
“You, uh, have scars,” Ottis blurted. Then he winced really hard. “Please shut me up. That wasn’t supposed to fall out of my mouth.”
Doc chuckled. “You have scars too. But that’s not a discussion for tonight. I just wanted to see if you were okay.”
“Me?”
“Your heartbeat woke me up. Loud and nervous. It’s calmed down now, but I thought I’d check on you just in case.”
“Oh.” Ottis squinted. “I panicked because I couldn’t find Marcie. Did you think I was running away?”
Doc huffed. “Well, it’s a possibility, but a small one.” He pushed away from the wall and padded closer, peering over Ottis’ shoulder to watch a sleepy Marcie. “Were you fleeing from her alpha dad?”
“Nope.” Thankfully, it was a different alpha who had knocked Ottis up. “I was running away from my pack.”
At that, Doc raised an eyebrow. “Which pack? Crush and Titan’s? They’re the closest.”
“Yeah. They’re my brothers, and the pack keeps breathing down my neck. I’ve told them that I don’t need protection from that many alphas.”
Doc drew a slow breath. “Well. I guess that means I’m keeping secrets from my friends, and your family.”
Ottis looked up. “You know them?”
A snort. “Know them? They’re all on my phone; sometimes they fill up the group chat. But I’m closer to the older alphas; I’ve been friends with the dragons for a few centuries. Yaeger, Blade, Ace, those guys. We grew up in the same small villages.”
“Centuries?!That’s... That’s hard to imagine. How old are you?”
“Four hundred and seventy this year.” Doc shrugged. “I’ve been around.”
“No wonder you’re rich enough to build a custom mansion,” Ottis said. “You can just hoard junk from centuries ago and sell them for lots of money now, and people would buy them.”
Doc laughed. It was a nice laugh. “That’s part of what I do. I have a few storage sheds with valuable things from different time periods, or useful tools that have been cast aside in favor of better tech. Over the decades and centuries, they grew in value.”
Ottis blinked owlishly at him. “Is that your hoard?”
The alpha’s eyes crinkled. “Maybe.”
He waited until Marcie had fallen asleep. Then he leaned in, pressing closer until his lumpy scarf bumped into Ottis’ hair. Doc pulled back with a sigh.
What was that about?
“Back to bed?” the alpha rumbled.
“Yeah.” Ottis dropped a kiss on Marcie’s forehead, then carefully placed her back in her crib. He limped quietly out of the nursery and paused at the doorway to his room.
