Page 49 of Bearly Yours
Also, he was incredibly observant. This made my skin itch. I always liked it when the villain in the stories was dumb. Smart villains were too much work to overcome. I’d just gotten to the beginning of my happily ever after and I was in no mood to take out some vaudeville villain who was too smart for his own good. The only thing that allowed me to keep my silence was the thought that I had a Roarke and a Clan who would help. And they were...somewhere.
His gaze focused on me again. “You look good, Emrie. All grown up now, I see.”
He didn’t mention the cub in my arms, and I didn’t offer a reason why I was carrying it around. My skin was chilled, even in the temperature-controlled environment of the lodge, and my heart continued to thump against my breastbone with the force of a jackhammer. I waited for him to speak again.
“I knew your mother, once upon a time. Your father too.”
The last statement—about my father—held a world of undercurrents.Darkundercurrents.
It occurred to me quite suddenly then, sitting in the lodge in what should have been a very safe Clan environment, that I was sitting across from my parents’ killer.
And I was very muchnot safe.
There was nothing overt in what he’d said, just some emotional residue from his words that I was picking up. I wondered somehow if this was a natural phenomenon from having a mate who was a dragon? I didn’t know. I’d never picked up on emotional undercurrents before in this way.
I finally spoke. “You killed them.”
He nodded slowly, his words soft. “I did.”
White noise bled through my thoughts and made me deaf for a few moments. My thoughts reeled and my heart shuddered. When I came back to myself, he was mid villain-monologue.
“I loved her, needed her, wanted her desperately, but she chose your father in the end, after I’d given her my whole world, and then they got pregnant with you.” He said the last like I was a tick that had sucked the life blood of my mom, I kid you not. He looked at me in much the same way as well.
I held up a hand, stopping him mid monologue, my heart breaking and aching for my parents, whose lives were cut short because of this madman. “We don’t kill the people we love. I mean, that’s just Kindergarten 101 right there. That’s notlove. That’s obsession. And, I’m not sure you’ve come to this realization yet, but you are aware that you’re clinically insane right?” I checked things off on the hand not cuddling the cub to me. “Obsession with another woman leading to stalking her and hating her choice to be with another male so much that it ultimately led you to kill both her and her spouse. Also, the mind games here, I won’t even go into. Let me just say, they don’t reflect well on you or your poor life choices.” I sat back again. “I’m assuming you’re here to kill me as well? The tick that my mother gave birth to?”
I had no idea how I was managing to keep it together when I wanted to just curl in a ball somewhere and bawl my eyes out. But I had to, and I guess that gave me the strength I needed, because I was not this kind of girl. I was the anxiety-ridden, bury-my-head-in-the-face-of-conflict kind of girl. Definitely not the type to smack-talk a killer.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t jump for joy if Roarke or my Clan showed up suddenly, because my bravado would hold for only so long before I crumbled like a cookie.
The scene faded, as did the shadowy figure, and suddenly I was in the lap of a very ticked off, emotionally unstable dragon. The cub was gone, my Clan and Dice the apothecarist were looking down at me in concern, and colors were once again normal, without a grey tinge in sight.
I looked around frenetically, throwing myself out of my mate’s arms and looking over the side of the bed. “Where did the cub and the shadowy figure go?”
Roarke reeled me gently back toward his lap. “You were asleep,mo chroì.It was just a dream.”
I shook my head, feeling more than a little frantic. I was willing to believe that of the cub—my maternal instinct or something working overtime, but the shadowy psycho that had just confessed to killing my parents? Uh uh, there was no way.
I grabbed Roarke’s shirt in my fists and shook him a little to get his attention. “You don’t understand, Roarke! He confessed to killing my parents!”
At this, my room erupted into shouts and chaos until Roarke brought his dragon out just enough to instantly silence everyone. There was so much raw power in the room that everyone but me, including Alpha Riggs, had their head bowed and their eyes closed. My mate snarled into the sudden silence, “Everyone but Emrie, Dice, and Riggs out.” His skin was warm where I touched it, but I think hot everywhere else. I couldn’t even fathom the amount of control that must have took.
The rest of the Clan left the room. Dice ran her fingers through her hair and sighed. “Emrie, whoever you met in there, they put you in the tainted sleep to begin with, so I’m prone to agree with you when you say you met your parents’ killer. They knew exactly where to find you, and they obviously have a Sandman on their payroll.”
Roarke’s arms squeezed me softly, and I realized his arms were trembling. In anger or another emotion, I didn’t know. “What did he look like, Emrie?”
I shook my head. “See, that’s the thing. He appeared to me as a black shadow. He had form and substance, but little else. I couldn’t make out any defining characteristics. The only things I know about him are that he knew my parents a long time ago, he was obsessed with my mother, he killed her and my dad in a fit of rage because she chose my dad over him, he was aware I’d been born, he’s huge, about the size of you, and if I heard his voice again, I could match it to him because it was that distinctive, but that’s all I know.”
Alpha Riggs sat carefully on the bed, well away from Roarke and I. “It sounds like he’s a shifter. Usually, only our kind have forms that large.”
A fact I hadn’t put together until now.
I looked at the room’s other occupants. “How did you guys wake me up?” I mean, if I had been put in a tainted sleep, I should have slowly withered away and died there. The survivors of tainted sleep were few and far between.
Dice bit her lip, looking the tiniest bit uncertain. “You have to understand, it was a life or death decision.”
That didn’t sound great. I braced for bad news, but what she said next almost knocked me off Roarke’s lap in shock. “Alpha Riggs had to complete the first half of the bond between you and Roarke. It was the only way Roarke could pull you back to him, and nothing elseI’dtried had worked.” Shakily, I looked around me at scattered vials, potions, syringes, books, pestle and mortar, and various other healing things were scattered around the room. My room looked like it’d gone twenty minutes with the heavyweight champion and lost.
I looked at Roarke and he watched me carefully.
