Page 56 of Firedrake Betrayal
It would be the easiest thing in the world to reduce him to a pile of ash and bone.
I hold back for the same reason that I didn’t incinerate the wolf when I could have so easily.
Jade.
She would know it was me, and I would lose her forever.
I step around him.
“You’re dead, you know that, right?” Patten calls out in a singsong voice. “It’s only a matter of time before one of us does it.”
I push my way inside.
He grips my shoulder.
I look at his hand and then up at his face. “Take your hand off me.”
His grip tightens.
Before I can remove it, Shep grasps Patten’s wrist and pulls. “Let him go, Patten.”
Patten doesn’t immediately release me. “She isn’t yours.”
I step into the living room. “That’s where you’re wrong. Jadeismine.Iam the father of her child. You can’t compete with that and you can’t get rid of me.”
Patten’s voice trails me through the living room and to the staircase. “I don’t give a fuck who you are, that you can breathe fire or whatever the fuck else you can do. Hurt Jade again and I’ll kill you if it’s the last thing I ever do.”
I’m at the bottom of the staircase when Shep’s soft voice stops me.
“She went back to save you. She pushed and pushed to rescue you. Even knowing it was dangerous, she refused to leave youbehind. And instead of helping her dad, you kidnapped her. Have you even apologized?”
I walk up the stairs.
I’ve just reached the top when Jade steps onto the landing.
“Shep? Is that…” Her eyes connect with mine as her voice trails off.
She’s wearing Shep’s T-shirt and her hair is as sleep-tousled as Shep’s was.
I recall the moans she was making last night in the kitchen.
It should have been me. With her. It should have been me.
Twenty years I was locked up in a cell. Before that, I was alone. No family left, nothing but an impossible hope I might eventually find another of my kind. And I found her in the most unexpected place, my neighboring cell.
But she isn’t free.
“I can give you more than they can,” I tell her.
“You see,” she says quietly, “I don’t think you can.”
Then she steps back inside the room and closes the door.
16
PATTEN
Iflick off the TV and toss the remote on the couch before crossing over to the small round dining table that separates the kitchen from the living room. “Now I fully understand why the collector would want to live in the ass-end of nowhere.”
