Page 27 of Dragon in Denial
She gritted her teeth and glared at him.
“Now, let’s go down to the bar to talk. I think we need to get out of this room before we do something we’ll regret.”
***
“Better?” he asked when they were seated across from each other at a booth in the hotel’s bar, each with an icy pint of Abita in front of them.
“I am never going to live this down,” she said after taking another cooling drink.
“Sure you are. Just don’t ask me to sleep with you until you are 100 percent certain that’s what you want to do.”
“Why? Don’t you do one-night stands?”
“I have, yes. But I won’t with you.”
“How many?”
“How many what?”
“One-night stands.”
“Are you seriously asking me how many women I’ve slept with?”
“Are you telling me every woman you’ve ever slept with was a one-night stand?”
He shook his head and tipped the pint glass to his lips. “We clearly need to talk, but I don’t think either one of us is ready right now.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions.”
“Am I?”
She should tell him, prove to him that he was, in fact, making ridiculous assumptions.I’m not a freaking drug dealer!
“Why did you leave, Ketu?”
He blinked several times and then said, “I told you. I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t realize back then…”
“Realize what?”
He wiped his hand over his face. “I was lost, too, you know. After they started messing with my dad, I wanted to kill the lot of them. Destroy the whole damn colony and start over from scratch, even though it’s probably a small portion who are truly bought into this drug trade. I think the rest of them are just doing what they’re told. A dragon colony isn’t exactly a democracy, and the reeve’s son is pretty much untouchable. Unless you want to leave, you do what you’re told or you look the other way.”
“That’s not how it should be. And if you wanted to kill them, leaving wasn’t the right way.”
“Exactly. Which is why I did. I could barely function, surrounded by all the grief here. It was like I was out in the swamp, my head underwater. I couldn’t breathe. And I was making stupid decisions. If I’d stayed, I’d probably have gotten myself killed, and I couldn’t do that to my parents. They didn’t deserve to lose two children.”
“It felt like we lost you when you left.”
“Yeah, but at least I was alive.”
“Ketu, I—”
“Does the reeve even realize his son is dealing drugs?”
Antoinette frowned. “He wasn’t at the meeting,” she mumbled. “The last colony meeting I attended.” It’d been probably five years ago. By that point she’d begun her vigilante destruction of Darius’s dealers, and she’d been worried someone might ID her, so after that evening, she’d stopped going.
“Who? Darius?”
"No. The reeve. Darius was running it on his behalf. I think he said his dad wasn’t feeling well. You know what’s weird? No one questioned why they went ahead with the meeting when the reeve was feeling so sick he couldn’t attend. It wasn’t an urgent meeting. Nothing was on the agenda that couldn’t be put off.”
Ketu drained his glass then thumped into onto the table and slid out of the booth. “I gotta go.”
“What do you mean? Where are you going?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Actually, I do.”
He shook his head. “I’ll be fine, Antoinette. I promise.”
