I backed toward the door, nearly tripping over the mat because my entire nervous system had decided to turn traitor.
His attention shifted for one second, and he offered a small, grateful nod.
It undid me.
I slipped out of the room before my brain could misfire again, closing the door gently behind me.
Once in the hallway, I pressed my palms to my cheeks, trying to steady myself. I wasn’t shaky. Not exactly. My legs just felt lighter than usual, my chest tight in a way that had nothing to do with stress and everything to do withhim.
He respected the book. He respected the work. He respectedmeenough to follow every preservation rule without hesitation. He’d fucking saved my life.
And I was supposed to go back to my desk like this was a normal day at work?
I took one steadying inhale—careful not to let it turn into anything obvious—and forced myself to walk toward the front desk.
I was calm. Professional. Completely unaffected.
None of which were true.
But I pretended anyway.
8
ARTHUR
I put the book on the padded table and forced myself to breathe evenly and remain focused.
A near-impossible feat with Artemis Ripley in the next room.
Her presence was a warm current that practically flowed through the walls. My senses tugged toward her with ridiculous insistence, as if some part of me had decided she was now the center of gravity in this building.
She should have been resting. Humans required recovery after shock. And yet she was functioning after her ordeal. I didn’t know what to do with that.
I would insist she rest after this.
The thought arrived uninvited—and deeply inconvenient.
It was absurd. She was mortal. Ahuman. And I was an alpha dragon with political obligations and a dwindling magic supply threatening my entire people.
Yet my heart hammered harder when I thought about her than it did when I thought about what I might find in the book I was holding.
Pathetic.
I dragged my attention back to where it should be.
Page after page of human commentary. Human stories. Human interpretations of draconic lore that were—to put it mildly—simplistic.
I flipped to another section, my frustration rising. “Nothing,” I muttered under my breath. “Not even a whisper.”
Maybe it was foolish of me, but part of me had expectedsomething. A clue of some sort. A faint trace of magic. Instead, all I found were diagrams of medieval farming practices, and a surprisingly long anecdote about a poet who may or may not have been drunk for twenty years.
My father would have scoffed at this. Proof, he would have said, that humans could catalog but not understand. That letting them near our history diluted it. And yet it was a human who had protected this volume. A human who had noticed it was missing and set out to find it. A human who had nearly been killed because she was helpful and understood that knowledge was important.
And through all of it, the pull toward Artemis only grew stronger. Her soft, earnest voice drifted faintly through the doorway. Her scent—something like tea leaves and hope—lingering in my lungs.
I ground my teeth. This was absurd. I could not let a woman—ahumanwoman—distract me.Not now. Not ever.
My father would have been furious to know how acutely my attention bent toward her, how easily my focus fractured.
