14. Erik
Erik
One second Vick’s fist is in my shirt.
The next it’s gone, and I’m trying to catch up.
Her scent hits me before anything else. Close, too close.
She was at the table.
Why isn’t she at the table?
Then I feel her back against my chest. Her shoulders squared, feet planted on the kitchen floor like she grew out of it.
Vick is stumbling backward.
Vick.
I watch it happen and my brain refuses to believe it.
His boots scrape against the floor, one hand still half-curled around the shirt it lost — a man I have never once seen off balance, catching himself against nothing.
I’ve been half afraid of that man my entire life. We all have.
Five boys who learned to read his silence, his expressions, the words he chose, because his temper was the one thing none of us ever tested twice. He is one of the strongest dragons I have ever known. Buildings move before Vick does.
There has to be another explanation. Has to be.
But the guys are scattered around the room and not one of us in our right mind would touch him.
Which leaves the woman standing in front of me, breathing hard.
She moved him.
Holy fuck.
That’s not possible. I know it isn’t.
Then again, possible stopped being the standard the day I met her.
Three years I’ve known what she is.
Knowing it and watching her embrace it are two completely different things.
Because she’s growling.
It’s low and steady. Rolling out of her like the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard and she has no idea that she’s even doing it.
The woman making that sound still thinks she’s human, and her dragon is done pretending.
Vick straightens and fixes his coat like it’s the problem. He looks down at her and I don’t like what I see on his face.
“Move.”
She doesn’t.
She doesn’t even flinch. Her head is still tilted up at him and I know she’s staring Vick dead in the eye — all five feet and some change of her. Holding ground in front of a dragon older and stronger than any of us — and her growl never wavers.
I have to lock my knees when I realize what this means.
She thinks he’s a threat. To me. She’s got five minutes of Vick, and he spent almost all of them with his hands on me. She’s decided he doesn’t get a sixth. She doesn’t know he’d never hurt me, that this is as far as this was ever going.
She doesn’t know what this means either.
The growling.
Stepping between us.
And she’s standing there anyway. Ready. Defending what’s hers without one clue that I’m hers to defend.
No one besides the men in this room has ever done that for me.
And now her.
I can’t move. I don’t want to. I want to memorize her like this — breathing heavy, watching Vick the way a predator watches, every part of her saying try it. I have never seen this side of her before and I fucking love it.
Vick’s head tilts.
He breathes in. Slow. On purpose.
I know exactly what he’s doing, because I did it too. He’s double-checking his own senses.
“What the fuck is going on here?”
Nobody answers him.
“Why the hell does she smell like—”
He stops.
I watch all of the anger drain out of his face and his jaw fall with it.
“No.” He says it to the room. To himself. “That’s… not possible.”
“It’s possible,” Rayner says from the window. Almost cheerful. He’s proud and I can’t say I blame him. I feel it too.
“How can that be?”
“We don’t know.” Leif steps forward — one measured step, putting himself in it. “That’s what we need to figure out. But she doesn’t—”
Vick looks at me. At her back. At me.
I see it click into place. He’s finally realized she’s growling at him. But it’s the why that kills me when he finally figures it out.
Vick’s whole face changes.
Everything the anger was covering comes up, and what shows up on his face is a look I’ve never seen before. His eyes come off her and land on me, and he grins.
Vick. Grins.
“You have a fucking mate.” Wider now. Centuries of pressed collars and measured words, grinning at me across a kitchen. “I am so fucking proud of you.”
Her shoulders come down a fraction. The growl thins under it because I know her mind is spinning and I use the only second I’m going to get.
I shake my head at him. Small. No. Not like this.
I’ve been waiting years to tell her. I’ve dreamed about it, hell I’ve mapped it out more times than I can count in my head. She deserved to find out the right way, like it was something to celebrate. Something to cherish, to…
“No?” Vick’s brows come together. Subtlety has never once survived contact with this man. “What are you talking about, Erik? You’re back, and you’ve brought yourself a mate with you.”
The word lands in the room a second time, and this time it lands on her.
“Erik,” Elara says.
“…Uh-huh.”
“What the fuck is the crazy man talking about?”
I catch the anger rising up Vick’s neck again because there’s no one in this realm or any other that would ever call him crazy to his face except—
“Ella—”
“Don’t call me that.”
Still mad, then. Noted.
“Elara.” I keep it even. “Maybe we shouldn’t call him that. Yeah?”
She looks at Vick. Back over her shoulder at me and she huffs.
“…Fine.” She turns back to him and gives it everything she’s got. “What is THE MAN talking about?”
The man. She puts enough weight on it to crack tile. It is, technically, a correction.
“Better,” Vick says.
And then it’s my turn, and every version of this conversation I have ever rehearsed — her couch, her hallway, coffee, all the time in the world — is gone. And what I’ve got is—
“Uh.”
“Yeah.” Gunnar, off the door, the smirk arriving before he does. “Tell her, Erik.”
Rayner chuckles.
Traitors. All of them.
Elara turns — a full sweep of the kitchen, taking in every last one of us, and the exasperation on her face has been building since the crossing and has finally landed on me.
“Why is it that everyone knows everything before I do?”
Nobody answers. Which is its own answer, and she hears it.
“I think it’s about time you all tell me what the hell is going on.”
And Vick stares at her.
Longer than a man like Vick looks at anything.
He walked into this kitchen looking at a woman standing where she shouldn’t be.
He is not looking at a woman anymore. He’s looking at a bedtime story that moved him off his feet and growled at his temper.
Who is now demanding answers with her hair messy from sleep.
He grins again, looking at all of us then back to her.
“Well,” he says. “I’ll be damned.”
That makes two of us.