Page 1 of The Dragon’s Stormwoven Bond (Dragon Flight Academy #2)

Pep

“You should strive to be early for everything. Every meeting you have to attend, every lunch, every appointment. Your first day, you should arrive at least thirty minutes before everyone else.” This was neither the first, nor would it be the last time my father gave me this “pep talk” as he called it.

As strict and blunt as he could be, he found himself very funny.

Not wanting to encourage him to elaborate, I nodded along as if I didn’t already know these things.

Although, as much as I “knew” all of this, the first-day thing sounded wild to me.

What would it matter if I was thirty minutes or five minutes earlier than everyone else?

Also, why was I arriving at everything early.

Shouldn’t being on time be the goal when you give a set time?

“Dad, I promise that I know how to behave in a professional setting. This might be my first job, but it’s not my first time ever attending anything.

I managed to make it all the way through college without you there telling me how to do things.

” I didn’t mean for my words to come out harsh, but I was already an hour into this lecture.

It had started well before we ever sat down for dinner. Good times.

“I understand that, but you’re trying to make a first impression.”

Why did I say anything? Now he was going to keep rambling on.

“A lot of the people don’t even understand what your job is,” he continued, just as predicted. “You want to make sure that you’re showing the academy that you’re a valuable asset.”

That was not my fault, but I wasn’t going to bring that up to him. I’d already said more than I should. And really, how would it be any different than the last time we had that argument? It wouldn’t. Best to let it go.

My father was a lawyer for the clan, specializing in estate planning, which was incredibly valuable with how long-lived dragons were.

He made sure that our assets remained within the families and also that humans didn’t get suspicious about our existence.

The last part was the hardest of them all, in my opinion.

He loved his work and for a long time waited for the day I would join his side. That day hadn’t, nor would it ever come. I had no desire to go into law, much to his dismay. My career was focused on technology, a foreign concept to my five-hundred-year-old dragon father.

He couldn’t understand why his twenty-five-year-old son even liked computers.

If something didn’t exist for at least a hundred years, my father did not have interest in it.

He liked to tell anyone who would listen how he hadn’t even installed a phone in the house until ten years ago, like it was some badge of honor. It wasn’t.

And that was a landline. He still wrote letters to some of his oldest friends—not even email, not even text messages.

Real, actual physical letters that he sat down and wrote by hand.

He used a ballpoint pen, but that was because “ink for his quills was hard to come by.” And don’t get me started on anything entertainment related.

“Eryx, leave him alone.” My mom was the only one who ever spoke that way to him, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t give me some joy to hear it. “Your son is going to do just fine. He doesn’t need you breathing down his neck.”

“Thank you,” I mouthed to my mom, Katrina. I knew better than to say it out loud.

I really needed to get out of here and move into my own house, or at least move into the faculty housing the academy provided. But I loved my family. I liked being close to them. Despite the current conversation, my dad and I got along quite well. We had far more in common than I cared to admit.

Rhythe, my clutchmate and twin, was enjoying this entire conversation entirely too much.

He sat there, pretending not to listen and shooting me looks designed to aggravate me.

He wasn’t being mean, not really. In his mind he was teasing me, as siblings do.

But also, this “teasing” had gotten me in a lot of trouble over the years thanks to my inability to ignore it as well as I should.

Thankfully, my father took my mom’s suggestion and moved on to a discussion about the new raspberry bushes my mother had planted.

Gardening was her thing, and she gleefully filled us in on every detail, from the acquisition to the area prep to the planting and future care that would need if she was going to get a good crop next year.

I listened to every word, asking questions when it was appropriate.

Anything but going back to a “pep talk.”

After dinner ended, I helped clean up. Rhythe and I were on dish duty, although he was currently glued to his cell phone rather than paying attention to what we were supposed to be doing. Pretty much the same-old-same-old.

I elbowed him hard in the ribs. “Are you going to help or not?”

“Just a minute, I’m texting.”

“Yes, clearly I can see that. Can’t you text later?” He rolled his eyes and went back to it.

“Boys,” Dad poked his head into the kitchen, “tomorrow you mother and I have plans for dinner. Feel free to make yourselves scarce. My friend Valen is coming over for dinner.”

“You have friends?” Rhythe said, and I laughed.

My dad shook his head. “More friends than you do, currently. It’s a Friday night and where are you right now? Oh yes, at home with your parents.”

“Boo. Burn. Dad, you got him good.” I flicked water at Rhythe, but then it dawned on me that I too was home on Friday with my parents.

“Can you two be serious for a moment? Valen is one of my oldest friends.”

“We’ve never met him?” I asked. I couldn’t always remember the people my father introduced us to. He knew a lot of dragons, and honestly, I didn’t really try too hard to keep track of them all.

“He’s the traveling sort.” He shook his head. “So no, but actually, he’s starting at the academy this week as well—as a flight leader. So I’m sure you’ll see him around.”

I doubted that I would see much of the flight leaders and flight teams. I’d be stuck in the library doing most of my work.

The games were cool and all, but I still preferred being among the stacks.

That was another thing that my father and I didn’t quite see eye-to-eye about.

He had hoped that at least one of his kids would try out for a flight team.

“Seriously, though, Dad, how have we never met him if you are such good friends?” My brother put his phone back in his pocket, suddenly interested in something other than the screen.

My dad shrugged. “You two are still very young, you know.”

In the human world, we were grown adults, but to dragons, twenty-five might as well still be infants.

“Heck, I haven’t seen Valen in person for nearly a century. I think he’s been in Australia for a good chunk of it. He just moved stateside again.” My father was a homebody who loved the idea of traveling around the world far more than actually doing so.

“Yes, he has to move continents frequently because he runs out of omegas quickly.” Mom set her teacup on the counter.

“Bit of a himbo, is he? Is that why you don’t want your two omega sons around?” My brother wasn’t sugarcoating a thing tonight.

My father let out an exasperated sigh. “That’s quite enough. Yes, Valen has traveled around a lot, and yes, he is a bit of a serial dater or whatever the kids call it these days.”

Mom snorted. “That’s a polite way of saying he fucks anything that walks.”

“Mom!” both my brother and I shouted. While I fully understood that my mother was an adult woman with an adult vocabulary, she was still my mommy, and when she talked like that, it always caught me off guard.

“I’ll be sure to have other plans,” I said. I didn’t want to be there for a dinner party with someone who was like that, friend of my father’s or not.

“Me too,” Rhythe agreed.

Dishes done, I was about to head back to my room and get lost in a good book, but my phone rang. My friend Drayden’s name flashed across the screen. For a second I considered ignoring it and calling him back in the morning, but knowing him, he’d keep calling back.

“Hello?” I answered.

Loud music blared in the background.

“Are you coming out tonight?” Drayden shouted.

I groaned. “No, I didn’t really want to.”

“Craig is here with his new boyfriend.”

“I don’t think that’s the motivation you think it is for me to leave my house.” As if I ever wanted to see my ex-boyfriend with his new boyfriend—the one he cheated on me with.

“At least come out and show him that you’ve moved on.”

“I don’t owe him anything, least of all any demonstration that I’ve moved on.

” Because in reality, I hadn’t. How could I?

Craig had been my first boyfriend. He had almost been my first anything.

Thankfully, we had not quite made it that far—which might’ve been why he cheated on me in the first place.

Or at least that was the sorry-ass reason he gave.

Rhythe plucked my phone from my hand. I scrambled to grab it from him, but he was too quick. “We’ll be there in five minutes!”

Argg.

If the two of them were working together to get me out of the house, I might as well just cave. Besides, once I started working full-time, who knew how much time I would have to hang out with friends? I could ignore Craig for one night, right?

“Fine, I’ll go. But we aren’t staying out all night.”