Page 81 of The Ice Prince's Fated Mate
But I didn’t hate it.
“Sorry,” I said, fully returning from the brink.
“What was that? What happened to you there?” she whispered, searching my eyes for an answer.
“We all have our darkness,” I said, not ready to explain everything to her. Not yet. But soon. That day was coming. “Come on. You can wait here.”
I guided her across the street to the storefront that would allow her to see down the alleyway from between the racks of hanging rugs and woven wall art. “Stay here. I’ll be back. Okay? If you don’t make it too obvious by sticking your head between the rugs, they won’t see you if they look. But I have to go in there, Ella. I have to see what Andrik is doing. It might be the best evidence we get against Mirko. Wait for me here. I’ll be back.”
Ella looked around unhappily, but I knew she couldn’t protest much. The street wasn’t a main thoroughfare, but people were still passing every couple of seconds. Not thirty feet away was a pair of guards.
I didn’t like leaving her, but no way was she was going inside, even if she’d been okay with it, and Ihadto enter.
“I won’t be long,” I said, kissing her briefly and taking the taste of her sweet lips with me as I went to interact with the worst the kingdom had to offer.
I was going to find the quarry. If it was Andrik, I would get the information I needed. Regardless of what I had to do to get it …
Thirty-Eight
Ella
The rug twistedin my hands as I watched him go.
It was Dirk, but not Dirk. The way he walked, the body language, something was different. I had seen it as he stared over my head down the alley, where the Hunter had long departed in the opposite direction.
A darkness.
There were parts of Dirk I didn’t know, and he hadn’t let me in. I’d gathered enough to know it was painful and something he’d not totally let go of either. Much like me.
Perhaps it was time we moved beyond that and opened up fully to one another. Could I tell him the truth of my past, of what had been taken from me and now from us? The thing I could not give him?
I wasn’t sure.
Come back to me, Dirk. Don’t let wherever you went in that moment consume you. You’re a better man that that.
My mate.
The stress grew as I stood and waited for him to return, my nerves fraying by the second, though not for myself. I didn’t feel vulnerable. As Dirk had pointed out, the city guard post wasright there. At a run, I could be in front of them in under ten seconds if I needed to. The shop was empty up front, the owner chattering away somewhere in the back with an employee by the sounds of it.
I was worried about Dirk as I waited for my mate to return to me. The man had, unknowingly, helped me put the pieces of my life back together. For the first time since I’d been broken, I actually felt somewhat whole again. All because of him and his caring.
Maybe that was why telling him my past scared me. If he knew the truth, he might reject me, consider me broken and unworthy, despite all the things he’d said so far.
I couldn’t survive being shattered again.
I saw movement in the alley. I perked up, peering through the slats of the hanging rugs, but it wasn’t Dirk. He was still in there. I sighed, leaning back.
“Wait a minute,” I murmured, looking closer at the hooded figure. At his nails, as they clutched a package to his side.
It was him!
Andrik, or so we suspected. His hood was still pulled far forward of his head, obscuring any real facial features for me to identify him with. Even if it wasn’t Andrik, I was positive it was still the same person we’d been following. The perfectly fitting navy blue pants, the black top. It all matched. But they were alone, and they didn’t look all that worse for the wear.
Dirk hadn’t caught up with them.
I looked at the size of the package tucked under his arm. Only one thing he could have gotten from that type of market would fit in such a package, perhaps a foot each side, but only an inch or two deep.
It was a heart scale. The central link on a dragon’s chest. Torn from the corpse of a freshly killed dragon, they could be preserved. When adhered to the flesh of a non-dragon, they would imbue that individual with its powers, including the ability to assume a dragon form.
