The Heart of a Monster: The Complete Series

Chapter 29

Quinn

Before Rollick could respond to my declaration, Crag arrived near the mouth of the cave. It appeared he’d assembled some sort of sandwiches, a little awkwardly with dents in the bread from his broad fingers, which kind of made it more impressive that he’d managed at all. He’d brought a whole heaping plate of them as if I had enough room in my stomach to gulp down five. Or maybe he’d figured all of us would dig in.

“I wasn’t sure what to do with the other food in the kitchens, so I went with this,” he said gruffly, setting the plate down by the lantern. Not even handing it right to me, as if moving that close could somehow damage me.

“Thank you,” I said quickly, shooting him a bright smile even if I couldn’t make it totally authentic when he was so obviously struggling with what had happened earlier today. I sat down by the plate and motioned to him. “Are you going to have one? This is way more than enough for me.”

Crag shook his head with a jerk. “They’re all for you. I wasn’t sure what you’d like most.”

Maybe I could have come up with something to say to make him feel better, but Rollick snapped his fingers, capturing the gargoyle’s attention. “I need you standing watch by the entrance to the valley. I can’t imagine our main enemies would head back this way, but we don’t want any wandering shadowkind or humans stirring up trouble while we’re still here. Tell Torrent he can take a break.” The demon cast a downward glance my way. “And I need to go see about a few things, since my would-be sorcerer is as stubborn as ever.”

My spirits lifted a smidgeon despite the possessive “my.” Did that mean he was seriously considering launching a rescue effort for the little boy?

He didn’t clarify, only stepped into the shadows a second after Crag had, leaving me apparently alone. The demon hadn’t even bothered to tell me not to go wandering off myself—but then, I couldn’t really wander anywhere when I had no way of getting off the cliff without Crag carrying me in flight.

I examined the sandwiches and determined that the gargoyle really had put together a wide variety. One was ham and cheese, another what looked like turkey or chicken along with a few leaves of lettuce, another roast beef with mayo. There was even an egg salad one, from egg salad I had to assume had already been mixed up when he’d found it. I couldn’t picture Crag boiling eggs and then carefully cracking and dicing them.

He must have gone through more than one kitchen to find all that. Working so hard to make me happy. How happy had being with me made him today?

I swallowed the lump in my throat and forced down the sandwich with lettuce after it, since I figured getting a little bit of vegetables in the mix was probably a good thing. My doctors really would not have been pleased with the majority of my recent diet… other than the hotel meals Rollick had provided.

The thought of the hotel brought my spirits low all over again. Our plan hadn’t worked, not really. Rollick had destroyed some minions—great. He hadn’t even gotten the chance to take on the real threat, and they hadn’t slowed him down much. And he’d found us again so easily.

Maybe he’d spent enough time around me that he could track me just by my general vibe now, regardless of the vest. Or he knew how to trace one or more of the men. It would make sense for him to have some secret way of keeping tabs on his own minions.

My brief stint of freedom had only gotten me a little more information that I had no idea how to use, as well as put all three of my boyfriends through various sorts of trauma. Wonderful. I didn’t know if we’d have been better off staying at the hotel, but it couldn’t have been that much worse.

I was just finishing the sandwich when Torrent returned, emerging from the shadows with his usual stiff gait.

“Any sign of trouble?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Not a single vehicle within sight, and no shadowkind came anywhere near while I was out there. I think we’ll be safe enough here for the night. Are you going to get some rest?”

“Soon,” I said. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep just yet with all the anguish churning inside me. I looked down at the sandwiches and thought of Lance’s enthusiasm for mortal food. “Where did Lance go? Maybe he’d like a little dinner too.”

Torrent tipped his head toward the far end of the cave. “He slunk off through the shadows that way. You could take the lantern and go look for him. I don’t need it. It might be good for him to have some company.”

“Yeah.” My throat tightened all over again. I got up, picking up the plate with one hand and the lantern with the other. “There’s plenty to go around if you wanted to eat.”

I wasn’t surprised when he shook his head. Torrent had generally skipped our group mealtimes.

“I’ll be here if you need me,” he said. “Just call.”

He’d already faded back into the nearest patch of darkness before I turned to venture deeper into the cave.

I crept onward cautiously in the glow of the lantern light. The rocky walls veered to the left and closed in until I could barely walk without brushing my shoulders on them. Then the cave widened again into a space about as big as the hotel suite’s living room.

A blanket Lance must have grabbed from the heap near the entrance lay rumpled on the floor off to the side, but there was no sign of the dragon shifter himself.

“Lance?” I said tentatively, holding up the lantern and peering into the shadows. “Are you here?”

His human-like form wavered into being sitting cross-legged on the blanket. He gazed up at me with a somber expression that didn’t look right on his normally eager face.

“Are we leaving?” he asked.

“No, not yet. Not for a while, I don’t think.” I sat down across from him, not sure how close he’d want me to get. He’d accepted the embrace I’d offered him after he’d first become conscious, careful as I’d had to be to avoid pressing my vest against him through my other clothes, but I hadn’t been able to tell whether he’d taken much comfort from it. And then he’d slipped away to come over here, apart from all of us.

I set the plate on the uneven floor between us. “Crag made sandwiches. I’ve already had enough, so I wanted to see if you’d like anything.”

Lance considered the clumsy sandwiches, and a small but sly gleam lit in his violet eyes that sent a surge of relief through me.

“The gargoyle is good for hunting,” he said. “I don’t think we should appoint him head sandwich-maker.”

My lips twitched toward a smile. “Maybe not, but they taste perfectly fine. I’m sorry there wasn’t any ice cream.”

Lance hummed to himself and picked up the ham and cheese. He took a few careless bites, his gaze drifting across the cave as he chewed. Then he dropped the sandwich and shoved the plate away. “I don’t really want this.”

He fixed his attention on me instead. I saw the moment he started studying the bruise on my cheek in the tightening of his stance. “It still hurts?”

“A little,” I admitted. “But I’ve gotten bruised before. I’m used to it. It’ll heal up in a week or so.”

Lance raked his hand through his black curls, which looked even wilder than usual. “Torrent won’t heal.”

I couldn’t lie to him about that. He knew what shadowkind were and weren’t capable of way better than I did.

“He isn’t mad at you,” I said instead. “And neither am I, in case I didn’t make that clear enough earlier.”

Lance let out a sound that was closer to a grunt, as if he didn’t totally believe me. Watching him, I couldn’t help thinking of bodily activities he’d enjoyed even more than eating. I hesitated and then scooted closer to him, touching his cheek with my hand. Maybe this was what he needed.

“I trust you,” I said, stroking my fingers along his prominent cheekbone. “What happened today had nothing to do with you. I know when you want to put your dragon claws and fangs on me, I never have to worry.”

Lance met my gaze again. For a few seconds, his expression looked torn between conflicting impulses while he held perfectly still. Then he reached out and teased the tips of his claws over the bare skin of my lower thigh below the hem of my shorts. “You still like the claws, huh, baby girl?”

A quiver of desire raced through me despite my concern for him—or maybe because of it, seeing how my admission had started to revitalize him.

“Always,” I said, and leaned in to kiss him.

He might have been a little more tentative in the strokes of his claws than he’d normally been before, but he claimed my mouth with total enthusiasm. He grazed the sharp tips up and down my legs and then across my stomach below the base of the vest. I pressed closer to him with a giddy shiver and then eased back an inch both so the metals weren’t so near his body—and so that I could run my hands up under his shirt to explore his smooth skin in turn.

Lance gave an approving growl and vanished for a split-second, which was all it took for him to shed his clothes. He captured my mouth an instant later, flicking his tongue between my lips and reaching for the waist of my shorts.

He might not have been interested in the food, but he was definitely hungry. The furor of his response was getting me all kinds of heated up too. It could be we both needed this, a hasty passionate collision to jolt ourselves out of the melancholy that’d fallen over us.

“My woman,” he murmured, nipping a path along my jaw. “My Quinn. Always.”

I squirmed out of my shorts and panties. Lance fingered the bottom of my shirt with a grumble, knowing as well as I did that we couldn’t risk removing the vest.

To distract him from that minor setback, I clambered right onto his lap, nudging him down onto the blanket at the same time so I could take in his full naked glory sprawled beneath me.

At least, that was the idea. As I straddled him with my hands splayed against his chest, pushing him downward, Lance’s whole body went rigid with a sudden flinch. His own hands shot to snap around my wrists as a hiss that sounded like a deadly warning rasped out of him.

It happened in a flash, and then his grip on my arms was already loosening, though he didn’t quite let go. Anguish filled his expression again.

I scrambled off him to kneel beside him instead, and he released me then. “I’m sorry,” he said roughly.

“You didn’t hurt me.” I showed him my unmarked wrists. An inkling crept into my mind of what the problem might be. He’d held my wrists before when we’d hooked up, though he’d been on top of me then. It’d turned out I liked the restraint, but at first he’d done it because of memories lingering in his head.

The only humans he’d really interacted with before me had been the ones who’d enslaved him.

“You felt trapped,” I suggested. “I know you don’t like that. I should have realized?—”

“No,” he interrupted, with a scowl I could tell was directed at himself rather than me. He shoved himself into a sitting position and pulled me tight against him, heedless of the vest. “I shouldn’t be afraid with you. I know you wouldn’t hurt me. You had nothing to do with those other ones. It just—my body reacted…” He trailed off mournfully.

I nestled my head next to his, pressing a kiss to his shoulder. We were even more entwined than we’d been a minute ago and almost totally naked, but the mood had shifted in a way I wasn’t sure we could get back. But talking this through was more important.

“It makes sense,” I said. “People like me were horrible to you. And you were just reminded of that time in the worst possible way today.”

“They were nothing like you,” Lance snarled, and hugged me even tighter.

I returned the embrace, wishing I knew how to heal the wounds inside him as easily as he could seal the ones I’d taken.

“Will you tell me about it?” I asked tentatively. “What happened back then? Maybe I’ll be better at not stirring up those memories if I totally understand.”

Lance let out a wordless mutter and tucked his face into the crook of my neck. It felt like a refusal, but then he turned me in his arms so my shoulder rested against his chest and his breath ruffled my hair.

“It isn’t a very interesting story,” he said.

“I’d still like to hear it, if you’re okay with telling me. I want to know you as much as I can.”

He made a noncommittal sound, but then he started talking. “I wandered through a rift into the mortal realm. I hadn’t been here before, and it was overwhelming—and then this magic wrapped around me, like it was putting a cage around my thoughts and moving my body for me. The sorcerers must have lived near the rift, watching for beings they’d like to use.”

He paused and then went on. “They kept us in cages. There were four of them and seven of us. All of us higher shadowkind. Those sorcerers were ambitious. But they didn’t want us roaming around when we weren’t following their orders, so, the cages. They would weaken us too. Jab us with silver and iron things. Make sure we were never at our full strength.” He shuddered.

I slipped my hand around his arm and squeezed gently. “That’s awful.”

“It wasn’t even the worst for me. I was the strongest because I was the newest. The others had been through much more. The sorcerers would send us out to take things or kill people… mortals who were always weaker no matter how we’d been weakened… I don’t know what the sorcerers wanted, really.”

“But you got away from them,” I said.

The dragon shifter nodded, his chin brushing my temple. “I thought I would get us all out—all of us shadowkind they’d trapped. We all wanted to leave. The others were older—they had more that they missed—they would talk about it sometimes when they weren’t feeling too badly… They would try to reassure me that I wouldn’t be locked away there forever. They were right about that.”

He stopped for a moment, and I gave him the space to find his next words. He kissed the top of my head.

“The sorcerer who’d put her magic around me—she liked how I looked. Maybe she wanted to know how my claws would feel too. I just knew… I had a little bit of power there. So I pretended that I wanted her too. To get her to open my cage. To let me touch her, when normally we couldn’t. And when I did…” His lips drew back in a snarl, and he lifted one hand away from me to make a savage swiping motion through the air.

“She deserved it,” I said without hesitation. After the description he’d given of his treatment, the knowledge that he’d murdered his captor didn’t bring even a flicker of discomfort.

“Yes. But the others… I got their cages open, and the other sorcerers realized, and they had a strong hold still. Me and one other, we were bound by the woman I killed, and when she was gone we were free, but the rest?—”

He stopped for a moment, his head drooping. “The sorcerers ordered them to attack each other. They weren’t sure who was even under control then, they just wanted us all dead. I tried to kill those sorcerers too, but by the time I slashed the last throat… the other shadowkind with me, they’d torn each other apart.”

Tears had welled up behind my eyes. From what I’d seen, I didn’t think all sorcerers were quite that vicious, but it was easy to understand the shadowkind’s immediate animosity toward them if any at all acted like that.

“I didn’t save any of them,” Lance said quietly. “They all died by their cages. I don’t know—if I’d picked a different moment, or gone after the other sorcerers before letting them out, or—” A tremor ran through his body, and then his muscles stiffened. “Those mortals call us monsters, but they couldn’t let us go even then. They’d rather see us die!”

I reached up to loop my arm around his neck, hugging him as well as I could in our current position. “And you can’t blame anyone but them. You did everything you could—and you shouldn’t have been in that position to begin with. And it was still… It was still helping the others a little. At least they knew someone cared enough to try to get them out. And they didn’t have to go through any more of the torture.”

“Maybe,” Lance muttered, sounding unconvinced. “If I could tear those sorcerers apart all over again…” He growled in frustration.

My earlier guilt congealed in my stomach. “I’m sorry,” I said, my voice faltering.

Lance pulled back far enough to see my face, his eyebrows rising. “You don’t need to apologize. You didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“I know, but—I got you into the situation we’re in now. It’s because of me that you had to go through something like it again, having your self-control stolen from you. Bringing sorcery back into your life.”

“No.” In one swift movement, Lance flipped us. I found myself sprawled on the blanket under him, staring up into his flaring eyes. He braced his hands on either side of my shoulders and his knees by my thighs, gazing down at me. “Never apologize for that. I got you. I have you. I’ve never—you’re the only being—I didn’t know how much I was missing. I would go through all of the awfulness a hundred times over again if it meant keeping you safe and with me.”

My pulse stuttered at the determination in his words. “Lance?—”

“I love you, Quinn,” he broke in. “That’s what humans say when they feel like this, isn’t it?”

I blinked at him, twice as startled as before. It’d never occurred to me to wonder whether the shadowkind could even feel love the way people thought about it. “I don’t know.”

He snorted and leaned in to nuzzle my face with a flick of his tongue along the tender underside of my jaw. “I want to be with you all the time. To hear you talking, to see what you’ll do, to feel you next to me.” He lowered his body so it rested against mine, his eyes peering into mine from just a couple of inches away now, his heat engulfing me. “I would go anywhere and do anything if it helped you. Isn’t that what humans call love?”

I choked up for a completely different reason than before. I suspected that for an awful lot of people, love didn’t extend even half that far. Who was I to tell him what he felt couldn’t be called that?

And an ache had formed around my heart at the same time with the knowledge that I felt the same way. If he’d told me there was something all the way on the other side of the world, through deadly landscapes and past brutal enemies, that could protect him from the influence of sorcery or heal his guilt over the lives he’d failed to save, I would have jumped to get it for him without a second thought.

“I love you too,” I said, almost as surprised by my words as I’d been by his. The emotion had been creeping up over me without my noticing, but the declaration felt so right.

Lance beamed at me, his previous somberness falling away. He lifted one hand to tease his claws along the side of my neck and bared his teeth with his dragon fangs glinting. “Do you? And not just my claws and fangs and?—”

He rolled his hips, the erection I’d only been vaguely aware of before sliding against my sex. A whimper spilled out of me at the abrupt rush of pleasure, but I held on to my voice.

“All that stuff is very good,” I murmured. “But I also love how adventurous you are, and how you can see the fun side of everything, and how you question things instead of just accepting them. You’re brave, and you stand by the people you care about even when it’s hard—not just me, but Crag and Torrent too.”

A rumble vibrated through Lance’s chest. “When they deserve it. You always do. My Quinn. All mine.” He captured my mouth again then, stroking his cock over my clit until my hips canted upward in a plea. Then he plunged right into me, drinking in my gasp, sighing his own satisfaction with a tinge of fire.

As I lost myself in the rising wave of bliss our bodies kindled together, one clear thought penetrated the haze.

I loved all three of my shadowkind men, didn’t I? I wanted to protect them as much as they’d protected me. But what had I really faced, what had I really risked on their behalf?

Lance had said he’d do anything for me, and I believed him. Shouldn’t I be willing to go just as far to save him and the others?