Page 50 of The Death King
I never finished the sentence, just picked up my fork again to eat.
After a moment of silence, he spoke again. “Concubines, mistresses, and whores are unremarkable. You are not. You’re a dragonian, with the blood of dragons in your veins, with their fire in your eyes. How could I possibly want them once I’ve looked at you?”
My eyes remained on my food to reject his words. I felt the heat of his emotions hit me in the face like the smoke from a warm fire. It infected my lungs and squeezed them tight, cutting off my ability to breathe. I’d lost my virginity to my tormentor and had been tied down and forced for an entire year…but Talon spoke about me like I hadn’t been soiled and defiled.
I could still feel his stare on my face. Like the hot sun on a cold winter day. “I’m a dragonian like you are. So what does that mean?” I pushed his desire away like a boulder up a hill before I looked at him again.
Silence passed, his eyes locked in place like he wanted to focus on the conversation I wanted to avoid. If he thought a private dinner in his chambers would open my legs, then he was an idiot. He probably had no idea how to woo a woman because he’d never had to do it before. Women were given to him. They were never earned.
“We aren’t going to fuck, so let’s move on.”
His eyes didn’t show disappointment, but he finally broke the contact and drank from his wine. “It means we can fuse with dragons—and we have the strength of dragons. Ordinary men fall to our swords in battle. Once I train you, you’ll fight beside me.”
“Fight whom?” I asked with narrow eyes. “You won the war you brought to our shores. You usurped our king and enslaved our people. There is no one left to defeat.”
He stabbed his fork into the piece of chicken and took his first bite, the muscles of his arm shifting with the simple movement. The cords from his neck to his wrist were like rivers on a map, long and winding. “I’ll teach you the blade. You’ll fuse with a dragon. And then you’ll fight by my side.”
Fuse with a dragon? I didn’t focus on anything else he said because that statement was all that mattered. “Fuse with a dragon? But there are no dragons…”
He moved his elbows to the table and ate over his plate, his eyes on me as he chewed his bite.
“If there are dragons, where are they?”
He didn’t answer me, and I suspected that was intentional.
“Where are they?”
He continued to eat.
I knew I wouldn’t get an answer. He would guard that secret with his life.
“I’m not much of a fighter.”
“You’re wrong.”
“I mean in a traditional sense. I’ve never wielded a blade against an opponent.”
“You will soon enough.”
“I’m not interested in killing people—especially my own people. I’m not going to serve you like General Titan and make innocent people work in the desert until illness or age claims their bodies. I won’t serve the dictatorship that destroyed my life.”
Once he finished chewing his bite, he stared at me and ignored his dinner. “You won’t fight your people. You won’t supervise prisoners. You’ll fight my enemies—the evil that took everything away from me.”
The food in front of me was forgotten as I stared at him, feeling time slow down as reality came into a sharper focus. A hand gripped my heart and squeezed for a second, stopping it from beating before the hold loosened. “Who are your enemies?”
Now his eyes were hard on me, just as they’d been in the beginning. Piercing. Hard. Angry. Always angry. “Serve me, and in exchange, I’ll grant your freedom.”
“Who are your enemies?” I repeated.
He stared hard like he wouldn’t answer.
“How can I agree when I don’t know what I’m up against?”
“If you don’t agree, then you’ll never be free. There’s only one choice to make.” He continued his hard stare. “I ask for your alliance. I ask for you to watch my back while I watch yours. I ask you to use your abilities to right the wrongs of my past. It’s a fair request, considering what I saved you from.”
“You’re the reason I was there in the first place.”
“Not by my hand. You’re the one who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Don’t blame me for that.”