Page 94 of Dragon Gods

CHAPTERTHIRTY-THREE

FOX

Fox felt when Sofia finally drifted off to sleep, her muscles giving out between one breath and the next. He didn’t know what he had been thinking when he reached over and pulled her to him. And he’d thought perhaps if they just gave in, he could shake her from his bones and rid himself of the ache he felt every time he looked at her. But it didn’t feel like that now. He could still taste her on his tongue and he wasn’t sure he’d ever forget the feel of her core clenching around his fingers as her body writhed with the pleasure he had given her.

Fox wanted to scream. The feeling that curled itself through his body and lodged itself into his chest was more than lust and that was too dangerous a game to play right now. He needed to stop. But it felt like driving a blade into his own chest.

Her tangled curls moved with his every exhale, a mere inch from his face. He could just barely make out the scent of her hair, coconut and florals from the oils she’d put in it a few days prior before the military and a dragon had torn apart their small oasis in the rainforest.

Their time at the camp with the others couldn’t have lasted, even if he hadn’t thrown a fit when he’d realized they were shifters. He was always going to go back to Suvi and she was always going to go back to the resistance. Yet somehow, he felt like he might miss his time out here. He’d grown to appreciate the beauty of the rainforest. The colors were more vibrant out here, the sun softer, and the scents better than anything the breeze brought into the manor.

And he knew even the sewers on his side of town smelled better than the slums of Suvi or the drowned quarter. You’d think if the streets were constantly being washed, it would sweep away the scent, but the stench of low tide only tangled with the human waste and garbage, embedding itself into the stone.

He’d been to the slums only a handful of times on various orders, but he’d never stayed long. He knew that some of his colleagues spent time at the Wall’s Inn when they were off duty, but he could never feel comfortable even on the edge of the slums. He found his pleasures elsewhere with women his father would approve of. He’d spent his entire life doing what his father would approve of, begging for scraps at his feet like a dog, as if he might finally recognize Fox as a son rather than a disappointment.

Hecould never be his brother. His brother couldn’t even live up to the pedestal his father had placed him on. His father never knew that his brother talked of peace and compromise with the Dragonborn, that when his back was turned, his words spit on the king and his spoiled son. When Fox was at his worst, after his brother died and his father had none-too-subtly stated he was disappointed that Leon had sacrificed himself to save Fox, he’d wanted to shout out the things his brother had told him in confidence in the dark of night. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not for his father’s sake, but for Leon’s. He would never betray that trust.

And the longer he lay against the ground, the scent of Sofia’s hair drifting through the space between them, the more he wondered, not for the first time, if his brother might have been right. The kingdom’s treatment of the Dragonborn had only worsened over the last few decades in reaction to the resistance. But the violence against them wasn’t shutting their movement down, it was only fanning the flames. What would it take for the tension between them to finally snap, and how many would die in that explosion?

He’d joined the army to avenge his brother and prove he was worth something to his father. And yet, all he had done was grow more bitter and lose sight of what his brother had believed in.

He was brought back to the present as Sofia shifted against him, and he became aware once more of how perfectly her body fit with his. He tried not to shift; he didn’t want to wake her.

He closed his eyes and focused on the sounds of the forest at night. The soft chorus of crickets, cicadas, and moon wasps lulled him in a way the silence of the royal quarter never would. He drifted into sleep slowly and painfully, never quite losing awareness of the movement of Sofia’s breathing or the warmth that crowded the small sliver of space between them. And in his last moment of wakefulness, he admitted with a raw ache that he’d miss Sofia when he returned to Suvi.

* * *

Fox woketo Sofia stirring against him, hips and shoulders shifting as she let out a soft groan. They were fitted together, their breaths moving as one, even as he felt her waking. Last night had been a fluke—a stolen moment to be forgotten immediately. They both knew that, yet neither of them moved, as if they could both convince the sun to sink back down beneath the horizon and extend the night.

At last, she pulled away, the cold morning air rushing to fill the space between them. Fox shivered.

Neither spoke as they stood, and he realized that Sofia was avoiding his eyes just as much as he was hers. They weren’t going to talk about yesterday and he was perfectly content to play along.

They packed and split their bedrolls and supplies in silence, agreements made with stiff nods and nudges rather than eye contact. Fox, for his part, simply was unsure of what to say. Ignoring the awkwardness of the morning, he was still saying goodbye to the woman who had kidnapped him—to a known and proud member of the Dragonborn resistance. And he wasn’t even considering arresting her or double crossing her.

The thought of this made his gut twist in unease and distrust. She said she wasn’t planning on capturing him to return him to the others, but who was to say she was a woman of her word? They’d known each other for just over a week, and pretty lips made the sweetest lies.

When at last they were packed and ready, they stared at each other. She was likely as wary of his word as he was of hers, and the tension in the air didn’t release. If anything, it grew thicker and heavier with every breath.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Sofia asked after a moment.

Fox pointed at the sun, low on the eastern horizon. “South. I should hit the scouting regions before nightfall easily.”

She nodded. She wouldn’t have asked if she planned on attacking and capturing him. He tried to tell the muscles in his back to relax, but they ignored his plea.

“Right,” he said, when neither of them moved. He didn’t want to turn his back first, despite what he was trying to tell himself.

Suddenly her hand shot out and he gave the smallest flinch before realizing what she was doing. She was offering him her hand to shake. He took it, wondering if she could feel the sweat on his palm or the nervous flutter of his pulse.

And then she turned, marching away with a false confidence he saw in the rigid set of her shoulders and the tilt of her chin. She was listening to see if he’d try to follow. If he was going to attack her. He didn’t move, watching her until she disappeared into the thick foliage ahead of him, toward the southwest. Even then, when he turned to move south, he did so carefully, veering to the southeast for the first few minutes to make sure she wouldn’t be able to find him immediately if she turned back.

But after thirty minutes of walking, the sun’s heat beginning to warm the forest air, he knew she wasn’t following. The forest was anything but quiet, the birds singing their morning trills and a family of monkeys seemingly fighting over their breakfast somewhere to the west, but the sounds of humanity were absent through it all. He had learned what her footfalls sounded like, even when she was moving with stealth, and he didn’t pick up anything as he walked. He kept his own steps soft, a skill he had been gaining over the past few days. It wasn’t something they were trained for in the army, which made him laugh now. Of course Sofia had been able to capture him easily before. He’d been stomping around, a beacon in the forest. Stealth in the trees was going to be one of the first changes he implemented when he returned. He’d have to bring it up with the chief commander.

His father never listened to him or cared for his opinions, as useless as he saw them. But the chief commander was different. Even when his brother was alive and the glowing star of the army, the chief commander still asked for Fox’s opinions and listened to him as if he cared. It was one of the reasons he felt confident enough to join the military after his brother’s death. His father thought it was a suicide mission, but Chief Commander Harlow had faith that he could become a strategist one day.

He was the one who would listen if Fox had ideas—or questions. Like who had gotten hold of a live dragon and trained it to attack its own worshippers and if the chief commander knew what was going on. That would probably have to be a question he approached gradually.

Fox went over the arguments and approaches in his head over the next two hours, trying to figure out the best way of accusing the chief commander of hiding dragons without immediately getting called out for treason and being beheaded. They rarely publicly executed Dereyans, but he still might be flogged or sentenced to life on the farms—which was as good as a death sentence when the conditions usually left people dead within a few cycles. He’d seen the true wretchedness of the farms during his time at the base with his brother, before the bomb.

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