Chapter 23 The Solution
The Solution
“You will cease this action.”
Orpheus… Fenrir Prime… stood there staring down at me with those glowing green eyes.
Suddenly, the heat—well, it didn’t totally disappear. But it ratcheted down several notches. Like someone had turned the dial from “burning me alive inferno” to “three fire emojis followed by an eggplant.”
My mind cleared, just enough for me to barely think. And for the picture of what I must look like with my core streaming slick into Diarmuid’s lapping mouth and my hand closed around Aengus’s spent length, like I’d been planning to tear it off and jam it inside of me.
“Leave us,” Fenrir Prime said to the variants.
And to my absolute horror, Diarmuid raised up from my sloppy core, and Aengus pried my fingers from around his dominant length.
Without any hesitation or protest, they moved toward the cavern’s wooden interior doors like the automatons they claimed not to be.
Leaving me alone with the one dragon I had specifically forbidden from touching me. The only one, as it turned out, who could end this.
I panted after Aengus and Diarmuid. Maybe I could…
“Do not Reverence them, Dorie. They obey my orders because they understand what you do not. Variants do not issue viable seed. Only I can get you pregnant.”
I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“I am your prime,” he repeated slowly, “and therefore the only one who may satisfy your heat.”
“No… no!”
Panic fluttered in my chest.
“Have you noticed that your heat cycle has calmed enough to allow us this conversation?” His expression remained a cold mask in the wake of my denial. “That slight abatement is because of my presence. On a primal level, your flame is registering the match of mine.”
Panic morphed into rage. “Was this your plan all along? Wait until I was so desperate I’d have to give in to becoming your breeding experiment again?”
His expression hardened, but then something behind his eyes collapsed, and he said, “This is entirely my fault.”
He reached into the pocket of his god tech pants. When his hand came back out, there was an object in it.
No. My whole body seized when I saw the black disc.
It looked exactly like the one he’d used to render me unconscious the first night in my cavern prison.
Why did he want me unconscious? What would he do when the Reverence Pause wore off?
“Don’t touch me,” I cried out, scrambling into a seated position.
The reasoning part of my brain screamed at me to run. But the heat had rendered my limbs too weak to even get out of the bed.
“Dorie, it is not what you think.” He held up both hands, the black disc glittering under the light. “I have no wish to hurt you.”
“Really, Knifey McFenrir?” I tilted my head with a disbelieving look.
And he hung his head to concede, “Anymore.”
Then lifted it again to say, “I am only asking that you listen to me. Let me explain.”
Well, “explain” hit me in my journalist kryptonite.
Instead of ordering him to leave, I gave him a reluctant nod. Also, I now understood that making him vacate the room would bring the horror-holo version of my heat cycle roaring back.
He dropped his hands. Then came around the bed to lower himself onto the floor beside it.
Even with him kneeling and me partially sitting up, we were nearly eye to eye.
But he bowed his head like a supplicant and said, “Treasure, you honor me. May I speak? Tell you my story—our story?”
A dragon geneticist, nearly eight feet tall and powerful beyond belief, kneeling on stone. To me. Asking for permission.
I nodded. Too curious about this story to worry that this was some kind of trick.
“Before this…”
His own breath caught, and a curl of steam released from his nostrils.
“Before this, I have always been the one to catch you,” he continued. “Every lifetime, when you fall through the portal, I am there. I bring you back to these rooms. I reintroduce myself to you. And I fight anew for your love.”
Dragons don’t need to blink. Aengus had told me that. But Orpheus’s eyes hooded, lowering to the floor as he spoke.
“You asked me why you would agree to be with me, even with a decreased appetite for mating. It is because something in you remembers.”
He raised his green gaze to mine. “I have loved you, and you have loved me back, for hundreds upon hundreds of cycles. In every lifetime. And with each arrival, it has taken less and less time for us to become what we are to each other.”
He paused. Then said the next thing like it was fact. A formula as irrefutable as gravity. “We are soul mates. Twin flames that burn across millennia together.”
Soul mates? He believed we were truly fated in ways that went beyond his alien fertility matching portal?
My mouth fell open. And for once, the urge to interrupt and ask questions was nowhere to be found. I could only hold my breath, hanging on to each word as he continued.
“And in every lifetime, that love has increased. Each cycle, I have loved you more than the last. I did not believe that was possible, and yet it has proven to be true, nine hundred and ninety-nine times.”
His eyes burned with emotion—only to suddenly go dark. Like something behind them had been snuffed out.
“But then I lost Dorie 999.”
He stopped. And I watched a dragon who’d been nothing but cold to me prior to these moments struggle to speak.
“Her loss was… beyond what I could endure. And the Widower’s Madness that followed was like nothing that came before it. A piercing hole in my being that sent me directly to the lake, unable to remember the promises I’d made you.”
“Promises?” The question slipped out, despite my decision to stay quiet.
“Yes.” He reached for me, but came up short, hands jerking back like they remembered my order not to touch me, even if he did not.
But he continued on anyway.
“I made you two promises. Not just to love you across every lifetime. But to bring you back so we might have another chance to do so. One promise I kept. For I could not stop loving you, even when I wished to kill that love as one kills a wounded animal. But the other… I broke that promise when I didn’t come out to catch you, when I chose to end you rather than ever suffer your loss again. ”
His bare chest did something strange. The scales started flaking away from it, like shimmering blossoms being carried away by an invisible wind.
“You are so brave, my treasure.” His voice became rougher. More glass than smoke. “You are always so very brave, every single cycle. But I have been a coward. Too afraid to remind you of our love. Leaving to my variants what should have been my priority from your first day in my realm.”
This was…
Somehow exactly what I hadn’t known I wanted to hear.
My heart softened, my usual rage dissipated. And I hated it because I didn’t want to be swayed. Believing the wrong person again could cost me everything.
“I don’t know how to believe you,” I whispered. “Or why I want to.”
My voice cracked. “You called me brave, but I’m afraid. I’m afraid that you’re only telling me what I want to hear so you can breed me like the last 999 Dories.”
“I would like nothing more than to attend to your need.” Again, he reached out to touch me.
And again, my order for him not to effing do that brought his hand up short.
Instead of touching me, he reached back into the pocket of his god tech pants. “This disc proves that I no longer desire for you to carry my seed.”
I blinked. “What? How does knocking me out prove anything?”
“Dorie, no. This disc will not sedate you.” He shook his head.
“I have synthesized a new formulation of what you call heat control. If applied, it will signal to your body that conception has already occurred—even if you are already in the grips of a new heat. Your heat will subside. And when that happens, we are free to love each other through this lifetime, without the danger of birth.”
“I don’t understand.” I glanced down at the disc, then back at him. “You’re a geneticist. The last of your race has been stranded here, and mating with us is your species’s only hope of continuation.”
I shook my head. “You’re giving up on your experiment? Your main dream in life—really, lifes, as in plural?”
“Understand this.” He stilled, his green gaze burning into mine. “You are my dream, Dorie. Getting to keep you for one last lifetime is the only thing that makes living worth all these cycles of pain.”
I stared at him. Just stared at him for moments on end. Then I growled, “Hold out your hand. Let me see that disc you’re claiming will end this nightmare heat and make it so I never have to have sex with you ever again. That’s an order.”
A pained wince crossed his face, even as he held the disc out to me in his open palm as commanded. “Dorie, it is not my intention to—”
“Listen, Fenny Prime, I do not care about your intentions,” I informed him. “Only about mine.”
That declared, I snatched the disc out of his hand.
I did not inspect it. I did not ask how it worked. I did not ask a single diagnostic question like any decent holoscribe would.
I just pressed it directly into my own forearm.
Then yipped a little when spikes bit down like teeth into my skin.
“Dorie!”
The heat evaporated. Not slowly, not in stages. It just… stopped. Like a choking hand releasing from around my throat.
My entire body unclenched, and I collapsed against the pillows, breathing hard like I’d just done four laps around the bog.
Then… I finally looked up at him with sharp, clear eyes.
He stared back at me, his own eyes flared wide.
I let out a chuff of laughter. First at his expression, then when I looked down at myself.
“I’m a mess,” I announced. “On so many levels. Metaphorically, mentally, chronologically, and…”
I indicated the mess Aengus and Diarmuid had made of my sex, letting the “physically” speak for itself.
His gaze darkened with heat when he saw the state of me. But then he caught himself.
He turned his head away. “I will retrieve Omicron to carry you to your bath. If you wish, you may remain here, and I will sleep in the gallery—”
Okay, well, I guess my interrupting cow skill was totally back online because I had to stop him right there to ask, “How much of a walking-red-flag emoji would it make me if I commanded you to claim me, even though I’m no longer in heat?”