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I got to my feet before he could start examining me and retrieved my clothes. By the time I had my sweats on, Max had found his own, although he was watching me with the particular expression that meant he was deciding whether mentioning my ribs was worth whatever response he’d get.

Something about his expression softened watching me, and I ignored it because there were already enough things happening inside my chest without adding whatever the hell that look meant.

Then I remembered his face in the clearing.

Not when he’d shifted, but before that. The terror I’d seen when he stood there waiting for me to look at what he really was.

“I still can’t believe I could hear you,” I said as I pulled the sweatshirt carefully over my ribs. “I mean, turning into a dragon was obviously the headline, but hearing your voice inside my head might actually have been weirder. You should’ve seen your face when I answered you. Or whatever the dragon equivalent of your face was, because I could still tell you were shocked.”

Max stopped fastening his jeans.

It was a tiny change, nothing anyone else would necessarily have noticed, but I’d spent too long watching this man when I was pretending I wasn’t to miss it.

“There’s more, isn’t there?”

He looked at me for a moment before nodding. “Ash, the telepathy wasn’t simply because I’m a dragon.”

“What does that mean?”

“Humans can’t normally hear us when we’re shifted. They can speak to us and we understand them, but the communication only goes one way. Touching a dragon doesn’t change that.”

I thought about the clearing and the instant my hand had touched those impossible scales, when Max’s voice had appeared inside my head as clearly as if he’d been standing beside me.

“But I heard you, and you heard me. So what happened?”

He hesitated just long enough to make my stomach tighten.

“Because you’re my mate.”

For several seconds, I simply stared at him while my brain tried to fit the word around everything that had happened that morning.

“Your mate as in Ignatius and Doryu?”

“Exactly like Ignatius and Doryu. The telepathy only happens between a dragon and their mate, so the moment you touched me and I heard you, there wasn’t any room left for doubt.”

Something warm spread beneath my ribs that had absolutely nothing to do with the bruising.

“So you knew before that?”

“My dragon did. He’d been considerably less subtle about you than I was for weeks, but there was always enough uncertainty for me to question whether I was interpreting him correctly. This morning ended that.”

“Your dragon has excellent taste.”

“My dragon also purrs, apparently, so his judgment is questionable.”

I laughed, and for a few extraordinary seconds, everything was ridiculously simple. Max was a dragon. Apparently, I was his mate. Neither of those things frightened me as much as they probably should have, which might have said something concerning about how completely my standards for normal had collapsed since joining this team.

Then I looked at Max again and realized he wasn’t laughing anymore.

The warmth inside me cooled almost immediately.

“There’s more.”

This time, Max looked away before he answered. “There is.”

Why couldn’t it ever be easy? “How much more?”

“The dragon wasn’t the part I was afraid to show you.”