Page 49 of Dragon Kissed

Lirien: Please do not leave.

Nica: i have to

Lirien: You are safer here. And he is worse without you.

Nica: that’s not my problem

Lirien: It will be. It already is.

He did not tell her everything. That was the answer. Nica had spent the last hour hoping he’d prove her wrong, and he didn’t, and the hoping had cost her more than the disappointment.

Demetri stood near the windows while dawn grayed the ocean behind him, the light coming up cold and colorless over a sea that had swallowed a whole night’s violence and given no sign of it. He’d pulled on black trousers but no shirt, and the wound beneath his ribs had vanished, leaving unbroken skin where an enchanted sword had nearly killed him hours earlier — and that unmarked skin, more than the photographs, was the thing she couldn’t stop looking at. Her laptop showed seventy-eight years of lies — Andrei Vasiliev, Nikolai Vasiliev, AntonVasiliev, men with the same face, the same shoulders, the same habit of standing slightly apart from everyone else, as if a part of him had always known he’d outlive the room — and Demetri did not deny any of it. He simply refused to say what he was.

“I told you my age,” he said.

“That isn’t enough. You told me elves exist. But you can’t tell me what grows scales and claws and heals from a sword wound?”

“No.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Both.”

Nica laughed; her chest hurt too much for anything else. “You keep sayingthe law.What law?”

“The law that governs every hidden species on this earth. Made by the Draquonir king and the imperial council.”

“What are Draquonir?” Demetri’s entire body went still, that total predator stillness she’d learned to read as the sound of a door closing.There.She’d found the edge. “Something you can’t tell me.”

“Yes.”

“Are you one?” He looked at her. No answer. Enough. Nica stood, and Demetri did not move toward her, and that hurt too — the discipline of it, the way he held himself back even now, when everything in his face said he wanted to close the distance. “You knew from the first day that I was walking into this blind. You knew when you questioned me about the book. You knew when you brought me here. You knew when you slept with me.”

His jaw flexed. “Yes.”

“Did you know I was connected to you somehow?” Silence. Nica’s heartbeat accelerated. “What does that mean?”

“I cannot tell you.”

“Stop.”

“I am sorry.”

“Stop apologizing while you keep doing the thing.” His face changed. Pain. Good. She wanted him to feel some fraction of what she did, wanted the ache in her own chest to have a match somewhere in the room so she wouldn’t be carrying it alone.

Nica crossed to the chair where her clothes lay folded — Lirien must have collected them during the night, laundered and pressed them, set them where Nica would find them; even now the house cared for her in a hundred small wordless ways, and that made leaving harder than any argument could have. She dressed. “I’m leaving.”

Demetri closed his eyes once, and when he opened them the cold discipline had returned, sealing over everything, and she hated that she’d learned to tell the difference between the mask and the man beneath it. “A car will be ready.” The answer hollowed her out. “That’s it?”

“What would you have me do?”

“Fight.” The word escaped before she could stop it, and Demetri’s control cracked. He crossed the room and stopped inches from her, close enough that his heat reached her, close enough that her traitor body leaned a fraction toward it. “You want me to fight you?”

“I want you to fightforme.”

“I am.”

“No.You’re protecting your secrets.”