Chapter eleven
Forecheck - Applying offensive pressure in the opponent’s zone.
Theron
I made it to my truck before the full weight of what I’d just done hit me.
Idiot. I was a complete and utter idiot.
I sat in the driver’s seat with my hands on the wheel, not starting the engine, not moving, just breathing through the self-loathing that came from knowing you’d done the right thing in the worst possible way.
He’d leaned in. Dante had leaned in with those dark eyes and that bruised face and all that hope written across his expression like he’d never learned to hide what he wanted, and I’d stopped him. Put my hand on his chest and felt his heart hammering against my palm and said no like it was simple.
It wasn’t simple.
My dragon was furious with me. Not the quiet, persistent argument it had been making for two months—this was active rage, the kind that made my bones ache and my vision sharpen and the copper in my eyes burn hot enough that I was grateful for the darkness.
It knew what Dante was. Had known since the first time I’d watched him skate, had been trying to tell me with increasing urgency ever since.
Mate.
The word sat in my chest like a brand. Undeniable.
Inevitable. The kind of bone-deep certainty that dragons felt maybe once in a thousand years if they were lucky, and I was feeling it for a twenty-three-year-old hockey player who I was supposed to be coaching, protecting, keeping safe from exactly the kind of complications that a mate bond would bring crashing down on both of us.
I’d lost Clara to people who’d wanted to control me through her.
I’d spent two hundred years making sure I never gave anyone that leverage again.
And now my dragon was insisting that Dante Russo—bruised, vulnerable, still healing from what Antoine had done to him—was mine to protect in ways that went far beyond professional responsibility.
Protect. That was the key word. Not claim, not pursue, not any of the things my dragon wanted. Protect.
Which meant keeping distance. Maintaining boundaries. Being his coach and nothing more, no matter how much it cost me to watch him lean in with want written across his face and then watch that want transform into humiliation when I rejected him.
The memory of his expression made something in my chest twist painfully.
I’d hurt him. I’d seen it happen in real time—the hope dying, the walls going back up, the shame that came from misreading a situation and being corrected.
He’d looked at me like I’d confirmed something he’d been afraid of, and I hadn’t been able to explain why I was saying no without explaining things I absolutely could not explain.
I started the truck and pulled away from his building before I could do something stupid like go back up there and tell him the truth.
That I wanted to kiss him so badly my hands were shaking with the effort of not doing it.
That my dragon had claimed him as mine the moment he’d stepped onto my ice.
That keeping distance from him was the hardest thing I’d done in two centuries and I was doing it anyway because the alternative was putting him in danger.
He didn’t need to know any of that. He needed a coach who could help him rebuild his confidence and his game.
He needed professional boundaries and appropriate distance and all the things I should have maintained from the beginning instead of staying in his hospital room, getting in his bed, sitting beside him on the plane like proximity was something I could afford.
The drive to my house took twenty-five minutes through Denver streets that had gone quiet.
I lived in the foothills west of the city, where the suburbs gave way to actual wilderness and property lots were measured in acres rather than feet.
The house had cost more than I wanted to think about, but privacy was worth the investment when you needed space to shift without human eyes cataloging your every move.
It was beautiful, I supposed, in the way that places were beautiful when you’d stopped actually seeing them.
Modern architecture that worked with the landscape rather than against it—glass and steel and wood, all clean lines and open spaces designed to bring the outside in.
Floor-to-ceiling windows in the great room that looked out over the valley.
A kitchen I never used because cooking for one felt pointless.
Three extra bedrooms no one had ever slept in because no one ever came here.
I pulled into the garage and sat there for a moment in the dark, listening to the engine tick as it cooled.
My dragon was still furious. I could feel it pacing beneath my skin, demanding I go back, claim what was mine, stop being an idiot about things that mattered.
It didn’t understand human complications like power dynamics and appropriate professional conduct.
It only understood that our mate had been close enough to touch and I’d walked away.
I got out of the truck and went inside. Dropped my keys on the counter. Stood in the great room with all that expensive emptiness around me and tried to remember why I’d bought this place.
Right. Privacy. Space to shift without worrying about witnesses.
I needed to fly. Needed to let my dragon out before the frustration of the evening calcified into something worse.
The house backed up to national forest land—thousands of acres of wilderness where I could shift and fly and burn off restless energy that came from denying my instincts.
I decided to wait until dark and prowled restlessly for an hour.
Then I stripped in the mudroom off the garage, leaving my clothes in a pile I’d deal with later.
The night air was cold when I stepped outside, sharp with the promise of snow even though it was May.
The mountains rose behind the house in dark silhouettes against the slightly lighter sky.
I walked across the back deck and down the steps to the yard.
The grass was brown and dormant under my feet.
The trees at the property line were dark shapes, pine and aspen and scrub oak that would leaf out in another month.
I could hear the creek that ran through the eastern edge of my land, swollen with snowmelt from higher elevations.
I let the shift take me.
Two hundred years of practice had smoothed out most of the rough edges, turned what had once been an excruciating transformation as a child into something I could manage in under a minute.
My bones restructured themselves with familiar efficiency.
My skin rippled and hardened into scales.
Wings erupted from my shoulder blades in a rush of membrane and muscle.
The world shifted as my senses expanded—colors deepening, sounds sharpening, awareness of air currents and thermal patterns that came with draconic perception. I flexed my wings, feeling the night air catch in the membrane, and looked down at myself in the dim light.
Bronze scales covered my body, darker along my spine and belly, lighter at the edges where they caught what little moonlight filtered through the clouds.
The tips had that golden tint that marked me as a forge dragon—not the bright gold of pure metallurgists, but the warmer bronze-gold of someone whose gifts ran toward practical application rather than theory.
My claws were copper, matching my eyes, which I knew without looking had gone dark with the emotions I’d been suppressing all evening.
I launched myself into the air with three powerful beats of my wings.
The ground fell away beneath me. The house became a collection of lights and angles.
The valley spread out in darkness punctuated by the scattered glow of distant homes.
I climbed higher, following the slope of the mountain, letting instinct guide me toward the thermals that would make flight easier.
This was what I needed. Space. Distance. The particular clarity that came from being in my true form, away from human complications and professional responsibilities and the memory of Dante’s face when I’d rejected him.
My dragon was still angry, but flight helped. The physical exertion of working my wings, the focus required to navigate air currents in the dark, the simple fact of being what I actually was rather than the carefully constructed human version—it all combined to take the edge off the rage.
I flew higher, following the ridge line toward the peaks.
The air grew thinner and colder. Snow appeared in patches, then in continuous coverage as I gained elevation.
I could see Denver in the distance, a sprawl of light against the darkness, and somewhere in that sprawl was Dante in his small apartment, probably still processing what had happened.
I should have handled it better. Should have found words that didn’t make it sound like he’d done something wrong when the only thing wrong was my complete inability to maintain appropriate distance.
Should have explained that it wasn’t about him, that he hadn’t misread anything, that I’d been fighting the same battle he was fighting and had simply lost it in a different way.
But explaining would have required admitting things I couldn’t admit. That I was dragon. That he was my mate. That every instinct I possessed was screaming at me to claim him, protect him, keep him close in ways that would destroy both of us if I acted on them.
I banked left, following a thermal updraft, and tried to focus on the flight rather than the thoughts circling in my head like carrion birds.