“Dex…” I sighed, wishing he wouldn’t demean Damon’s job. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it, and I knew mybrothers would be lost without his help in the clinic. Especially since the expansion.
With narrowed eyes, Damon eyed Dexter’s proximity to me and his expression turned empathetic when he met my gaze. “You can do better than this one, Sage.”
Dexter growled, low and genuinely angry.
The room seemed to freeze.
For all that they enjoyed provoking each other, I’d never thought either omega truly took the other’s words to heart. Dexter’s reaction now said otherwise. But, before I could turn to assure him that all was okay, that I didn’t agree with what Damon had just said, he stormed out of the room, brushing past Damon without a backwards glance.
The sound of the clinic’s front door slamming echoed only moments later.
With wide eyes, Damon looked back at us. “I didn’t…I mean, we always…”
“I know,” I promised, my gaze still focused on the doorway, though Dex was long gone. Antagonizing each other was their thing. I sighed and shook my head. “He’s going through some stuff right now.”
That was the understatement of the century, and I knew it.
Chapter Thirteen
The breeze against my scales was the second-most glorious feeling in the world, next to discovering my mates. Having rushed out of the clinic, there had been a split second where I wasn’t certain what to do. I couldn’t go home, not to the space I shared with the mates who, as Damon had so charmingly vocalized, deserved better than me. Not when I agreed with him.
The urge to shift had hit me out of nowhere, and my knees had gone weak when I realized that I could actually do it. My dragon was back! With the intensity of my sudden heat and everything that had followed, I hadn’t had a chance to take to my scales, or to the sky.
But, having fled Brandt’s hospital room, I was only a short walk from the fields where the pack usually began their monthly runs, and I had no excuse not to try.
So I practically sprinted behind the clinic and out into the fields at the back of the property, shedding my clothes and welcoming my scales with a rush of euphoria and relief.
It had been over a hundred years, but shifting into my dragon form came to me as if I had never been out of practice. Like riding a bicycle, but better. My body grew, bones thickening andlengthening, organs rearranging, muscles bulging. I’d relished the stretch and pull of my shoulder blades forming wings, and of my tailbone sprouting a tail. The trees and buildings got smaller as I got bigger, and when I launched into the air and flapped my wings, I could have wept.
Instead of weeping, or roaring, I flew.
Fields and forestry turned into green blurs beneath me as I sailed through the sky. Currents of cool air passed over my aerodynamic shape, almost caressing me. I couldn’t whoop for joy, but I performed aerial stunts among the moisture of white clouds, swooping and diving and doing somersaults…essentially behaving like a dragonet on his first ever flight.
In some ways, I kind of was. This was my first time in scales in over a hundred years. The world beneath me had changed and so had I. We had both evolved, and everything felt shiny and new…and daunting.
They do deserve better than me.The melancholy thought cooled some of the joy as I settled into a slow glide above the farms dotting the rural landscape below.Both of them.
I’d been an arse for most of my life, but even I knew that my attitude had become damn near unbearable after I rejected Sage and lost my dragon. He hadn’t deserved any of it, nor the fact that I hadn’t really explained or properly apologized for it yet. And then there was Serge, our handsome unicorn alpha, who didn’t deserve an omega so unwilling to bear his children. Yes, Sage was certainly willing where I was not, but why would fate give him an omega who didn’t want the same things he did? One as brash and bratty as I was? He was a gentle, mellow soul and he deserved an equally gentle, mellow omega, didn’t he?
Ultimately, at the very least, both Sage and Serge merited a mate without a dickish reputation.
And yet they were saddled with me, and I was far too selfish to consider letting either one of them go now that we had discovered what we were to one another.
It didn’t prevent me from feeling guilty, though. Or from wishing I could be better.
It wasn’t as though I hadn’t been trying. Yes, it had only been a few days, but my efforts to be more personable and open looked like they would be ridiculed rather than appreciated…and that stung.
Can you blame them?
Micah’s ‘Are you high?’ joke rankled, but considering the position I’d gleefully put him and Sergio in when we’d first brought our sexy shaman to the pack…Yeah; I’d earned Micah’s scorn, and Brandt’s for the fact that Micah was his bonded mate. Additionally, I had been quite happily riling Damon up for years, so of course he would think I had some ulterior motive to my sudden change in heart and demeanor.
Huffing, I understood that I had a way to go before the pack would believe that I really was attempting to turn over a new leaf. It had been far too easy to allow the optimism and joy from my weekend mating bubble to interfere with reality.
And now I was sulking in the sky instead of facing my issues head on.
So, I supposed, I had a fair way to go with truly changing my behavior as well.
The sound of beating wings —smaller and feathered in comparison to my leathery pair— caught my earand I turned towards the sound, my heart squeezing when I recognized Sergio approaching.
