Liquid-dark eyes pore over my face, surveying me like I’m an image on canvas to be studied and dissected.
Something cracks in his armor, and I’m given a peek inside him.
His focus lands on my mouth and stays there, fixed, like he’s never seen a woman’s lips before. With a slow blink, as though emerging from some faraway place, he steps back, evidently requiring distance from me. “It’s enough,” he declares, his voice low and deep—absolute, a decree not to be disputed.
“It’snotenough.” My voice shakes out of me. “It’s not enough and don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re doing me a favor.”
His gaze sharpens and narrows, his eyes glittering black, and I sense his frustration with me, his anger, because I feel it rising inside me, too, eclipsing the fear. But it’s better.
Better to burn with anger than tremble with fear.
I inhale, and the unique, heady scent of him—wind and leather and loam—fills my nose. For some reason it just makes me more annoyed. It would be easier if he was always the dragon. Always a monster. Never a man who smells so good I want to bury my nose in his chest.
Then I would never forget what he was.
Then the hate could come easily.
Instead, he has to look this way: young, virile, and handsome...awareof me in a way no one has been for such an unbearably long time. It’s a tricky matter, drawn to the thing that also repels you.
It’s wrong and confusing, and it has to stop.
Lowering my head, I feign submission, but my attention strays, sliding back to the shadowy tunnel that leads outside to the promise of freedom.
“Get some rest,” I hear him say before he leaves me.
I listen to the receding fall of his steps before I stretch out on the bench, a pillow tucked beneath my head and the blanket pulled up to my chin. I’ll sleep. Rest.
For now.
24
A Magic Touch
They put me to work...theircaptiveguest.
I’m grateful to be preoccupied—to keep my mind and hands busy. It helps the time pass, and I need that, need the winter to drop away.
Sometimes as I’m washing laundry or filleting fish for dinner, I even forget that I’m a prisoner, so focused on my task.
Until I look up and catch Danhy’s or Cyphus’s hostile stares.
Until I breathe in and I’m reacquainted with the damp, loamy scent of my surroundings.
Until I stand and move through the pervasive mist, feeling its tickle on my legs.
Until a burst of throbbing cold finds its way in the cave from the outside.
Then I’m reminded of whattheyare—whatIam—and that those around me wish me gone or dead.
They don’t keep me informed or enlighten me on matters of dragonkind. Such kinship doesn’t exist between us, but I quickly learn they only ever transform into dragons at night, under the cover of mist and darkness. This is when they stretch their wings and take to the skies.
Sometimes they hunt on their nightly forays, but mostly they scout the surrounding areas, always on guard against the skelm and other dragons. There are other prides, groups of dragons not nearly as violent or dangerous as the skelm. None of this I’m told directly, but I piece it together over the days like a puzzle spread outon a table before me. They cover great distances in the air, while also monitoring human activities. Enemy dragons aren’t the only threat. Soldiers from Veturland and Penterra cut through the Crags on their quests, and they require a watchful eye.
Sometimes when they return home in the mornings and sit at the trestle table to break their fast, eating gluttonously as though starved for days, I can smell the smoke mingling with the ice on their skin and I wonder if they flew south on those occasions and walked the ruins of other ravaged villages. Did they stand in the charred rubble and survey the destroyed lives? Did it make them think of me, the woman they’d plucked from the wreckage and brought home with them?
Viggo is the one who assigns my tasks. Tage avoids me. Mostly.
A week ago, days after they’d uprooted me from the rubble, he had just returned from the outside, entering the cavern in an icy gust, the wind chasing him, mist coiling at his ankles. It was still night, hours after we had eaten. His cheeks were wind-flushed, his eyes as bright as polished marbles, and he was naked...which made me flush hot despite the winter cold pervading the cave.
