Page 49

"If you wanted to…" he starts slowly. "If you really wanted to. I would… I could… no one would be happy about it, but I could… bear it."

The way he says it makes it sound like it would be the same as me dying.

"Would they…?" I reach around, slide my hands under his loose shirt, trace the welts there with my palms. "Would they do this to you again?"

Instead of answering, Dav slides his face against my neck, tucks in close, inhales.

We shuffle off the bed. He wraps his arms around my waist.

I wrap mine over his shoulders.

Someone starts swaying and somehow, ridiculously, we're dancing in slow circles, swaying in our bare feet to the memory of tonight’s band.

Miserable and desperate.

"Doesn't matter," Dav says. "I'd make them leave you alone. That's what's important. When you go."

" If I go," I correct with a pinch to that beautiful bum of his.

"If you go," he says, but he makes it sound like it's inevitable.

"Hey, can you look at me?"

Dav lifts his head slowly. At first I think he's going to lean back, but he simply slides up until our foreheads are touching. Eyes closed, he inhales again, gentle, and then leans down and finds my mouth on the first, blind try. We kiss, a slow slide, like how we dance. I imagine Dav asking me, with each soft kiss, if I’m alright, if I’m happy, if I’m still his.

I reply with teeth and tongue that I’m annoyed, and shaken up, and absolutely don’t want to think about the fact that the act of kissing him is actually mutating my DNA right this very moment, s o keep me distracted with making out, thank you .

Only then does he pull back and meet my gaze.

"I'm not going," I tell him, and it's true. "I may never go. But I also don't know how to stay yet."

"I've waited this long. I can be patient," Dav insists. "Until you're ready."

"Ready to be owned by you?" I ask, and yeah, it sounds bitter.

"Ready to find a way to be equals in a dynamic that's trying to prevent us from doing so. Ready to… to fight, if we have to."

"Ever the soldier?"

"You're mine, Colin," Dav says fiercely, cupping my head in his hands. "And in all the ways that matter, I am yours . And if I have to tear down everything so they understand that, I will."

"You hopeless romantic." I won't lie, it's swoon-worthy.

"No," Dav says, and suddenly the determined expression on his face curls up into something predatory and dangerous. In a good way. "You're the romantic. And it’s not hopeless."

His strong fingers slide down my throat, and in one quick push, I'm up against the wall.

There are hands on my thighs, the sound of his knees hitting the carpet, and then everything stutters and the rest of the world beyond his hot mouth ceases to matter.

I get my hands into Dav's hair, knuckles tight.

"Stay," he moans, before he opens his mouth and does his best to take away my ability to ever walk anywhere ever again.

One of the nice things about having staff is that you don't have to yank on your pants and careen towards the door whenever the bell rings. But it also means that you can't dramatically slam said door in an unwanted visitor's face, either.

I wonder if dragons have the ability to sense each other's presence.

Because when we're fetched downstairs mid-morning grind by Sarah, Dav isn't surprised to see Lt.

Gov. Dipshit sitting on the antique sofa in the fussy parlor, sipping tea.

Simcoe's in another black suit, white shirt, subtle lapel stitching. Dignified. Boring.

For all that he's just sitting there, elegant and patient, the sight of Simcoe under this roof feels like a hard punch right against my sternum, knocking the air out of me. It feels… wrong, somehow. Violating. Challenging.

Just plain bitchy.

Dav had pulled on dress pants and a button down, and now I realize what had looked off about them.

He's drab, too. Also dignified. Also boring. I stop in the doorway, and flatten my hair, trying to make it look like my boyfriend (husband? Owner?) wasn’t in the middle of railing me into the mattress when Simcoe arrived.

"Alva," Simcoe says, setting aside the cup and saucer, but not rising to his feet.

Bitchy.

"Your Excellency." Dav nods formally.

Simcoe's eyes cut to me, and I only offer Simcoe an unimpressed grin —as sassy as I dare right now—as I stride into the room, and flop into one of the chairs. This man got in the way of an orgasm. I'm not bowing.

Listen, I'm a half-ass student when it comes to things that bore me, like math and history. But stuff I give a shit about? I read like crazy. And in the time Dav was missing, I did a lot of reading about the dragon who took him away from me.

The Simcoes were Family Compact hoity-toities, who believed that their name and status meant that they were more equal and more important than everyone around them.

Simcoe the elder had already been centuries older than Dav was now when he was asked to take on the leadership of Elizabeth Regina's Canadian interests.

He conquered French Canada for Britain, abolished slavery in the colonies, made deals and purchased land from the Indigenous dragons, founded York, laid out order of rule, and established the legal system.

That's good stuff, if you're a white British dude. (Less so if you’re one of those Indigenous dragons he screwed, and whose human children were scooped into residential schools. Bastard.)

And all that time, Francis was at school in England, learning how to be a good little soldier and statesman. Then Napoleon got too big for his britches. Francis, like many young patriotic men, joined Wellington to trounce him.

Then Francis was shot in Spain.

That he lived at all, apparently, was due to his draconic nature.

The action had been fierce enough to kill every human in his unit.

While Francis recovered, the war spilled over into North America, so the elder Simcoe recruited Dav from that same school to take what should have been his son's place at his side.

After the war, Simcoe the elder returned to England to get treatment for a mysterious nerve illness, and Francis took custody of Upper Canada in his absence.

And when it became clear his father wouldn't recover, Francis made his goodbyes, and took over his father’s Canadian territories full time. Sounds noble, right?

But by every interview I'd watched on YouTube, and every newspaper profile I could get my hands on about the guy, he's obsessed with procedure, precedence, and the superiority of dragons—specifically European dragons.

The ultimate colonizer, he waltzed in and was all "hey, the way we do stuff is better than the way you do stuff, so do it the way we do it or else," and that's some bullshit right there.

Now I see how his control-freak crap extends to the dragons of Upper Canada—and the humans they own (slavery is only bad when humans are doing it to each other, I guess).

I help myself to a cookie from a tiered tray on the little table in front of Simcoe. Simcoe makes a face like he'd like to make a sour face, but thinks it would be impolite. He's proper, and it rankles the hell out of him that I'm not.

Fucking good.

"I've come to apologize for the... unseemly display last night," Simcoe says, when it's clear neither Dav nor I have anything to say to him. "It is such a shame a commotion was caused."

Excellent use of the passive tense to shift agency and blame away from you.

Dav waves it away, as if the traumas of yesterday were nothing more than a minor inconvenience. I crunch through the cookie, glaring.

Simcoe does a double take, appalled. "Alva, surely there are more appropriate—"

"He doesn't want appropriate," I interrupt, shocking him. "He wants me."

Simcoe looks to Dav for permission. For something. Dav, with a head bob, grants it. Shit.

I sit up, feet flat on the floor, ready to… ready to what? Duck a backhand? Jump away from a jet of flame? No, Dav wouldn't let Simcoe hurt me. But then, he'd let himself be flogged, so who knows what dragons think is acceptable.

But Simcoe only folds his hands on his knees, meets my eyes—his are darkly orange compared to Dav's—and says, "And you want this ?"

Oh good. It was only permission to talk to me. Maybe after this incredibly uncomfortable conversation, I can get Dav to revoke it so I never have to listen to the self-important asshole again.

"I want him ," I correct, brushing away crumbs. "And if that means it has to come with…" I gesture around us. "Well, then that's what I deal with."

"How magnanimous," Dav says softly, the amusement clear in his eyes, if not his tone.

Simcoe cuts a narrow look between us and I get the feeling that we’re playing with fire. I don't care. I'm not spending the rest of my very long life scraping and kowtowing to the man who is, as far as I can tell, single-handedly responsible for making Dav crunched.

Begin as you mean to go on, Mum would say.

Simcoe narrows a calculating gaze at me. "Do you understand the honor of your position? Your responsibilities as a Favorite? Especially in the house of Tudor?"

" Barely within the house, please," Dav says gently.

My boy's got his hands folded behind his back, his shoulders loose but his fingernails digging into his palms. No, not fingernails—the tips are black, hard.

Talons. Maybe Dav's feeling it too, the way there's something off about Simcoe being here.

Like a whole-ass thunderstorm has been boxed in between these four walls and has nowhere to go but through our skin, into our cells, to make our insides crackle.

Now Simcoe stands. "His impertinence is wearing off on you."

"Or perhaps I am less inclined to be ruled by traditions that are of no benefit," Dav says, and I choke back a gasp because fuck that's bold. I'm being a little shit on purpose. But Dav's taking it a bit far.

I stand, partially because they're already talking over my head, and it doesn't need to be literal.

But also because I want to literally be standing in solidarity with Dav.

I'll be in the shit with you . I'm not going back on that.

Not now that we're fighting to be happy, when everyone and everything around us is determined to force us into some definition of a relationship that fits like a flea-infested suit, three sizes too small.

I lay my hand on the small of Dav's back, and he twists his talon, unseen by Simcoe, to hook our pinkies together.

Lt. Gov. Jerkface doesn't do anything so uncouth as look back and forth between us, but his eyes narrow further, and then land on the lapel pin hanging heavily and awkwardly on the collar of my wash-thinned shirt.

"Tradition matters," Simcoe hisses. At the corner of his jaw, the skin becomes dark brown scales.

"Not in the way it used to," Dav counters, just as forcefully. "Now it's all just celebrity gossip and tabloids."

"You think my work, the work of my family—"

"And what work is that? Your father created a beautiful colony, but a colony nonetheless.

" Dav cuts his free hand at the window, palm up, indicating the tightly manicured facade of control and opulence the world gets to glimpse through iron bars, never knowing the charm of the higgledy-piggledy working mess of barns and baby animals out the back.

"There are different ways… better ways."

"Your idea of what this place was before we made it right is a fantasy ," Simcoe snaps. "With the privilege of your birth comes expectations."

"And what contributions have been allowed?" Dav sneers.

" Ef yw'r dewis anghywir ," Simcoe replies.

Okay.

What the fuck language was that?