21. Arthur #2
She spoke aloud sometimes, when the wind was kinder, and sometimes through that careful mental channel she had discovered by accident and then mastered with enthusiasm.
She puzzled through the journal, flipping between languages, tracing symbols with her finger, occasionally stopping to tease me with half-formed theories.
“If this symbol is meant to represent convergence,” she said, “then it’s not about place. It’s about alignment. That would explain why the map looks wrong.”
“You’re seeing things the author expected someone like you to see.”
She laughed, the sound carried back along my spine. “High praise from a brilliant alpha dragon.”
The last twenty-four hours pressed in on me all at once. The museum. The attacks. The cottage. Her steady hands as she tended my wounds. The way she had looked at me like I was worth the effort. The kiss.
The kiss I should have waited for.
I replayed it often. The softness of it. The certainty in my body that had come before my mind could catch up. I had wanted it to mean something to her before I ever allowed myself to want more. I still did.
She deserved clarity. She deserved to make the choice.
And I was failing her already by not telling her the one truth that mattered most, even though I had a good reason. I didn’t want her to be influenced by the bond. I wanted her to fall for me all on her own.
Her thought came again, quieter this time, threaded with curiosity rather than excitement. “Arthur, why do you think we can hear each other like this when you’re… like this.” A pause. “You said before it wasn’t typical.”
My heart constricted, and my wings faltered for a fraction of a second before instinct corrected the motion. It was as if she knew I was thinking about this very topic.
I had prepared myself to tell her, eventually. Not here. Not hundreds of feet above the ocean with nowhere to land and nowhere to look but forward.
I couldn’t lie to her.
Perhaps this was right. Perhaps she needed the space. The wind. The distance to feel what she felt without my face in front of her, without my hands close enough to sway her.
“We can hear each other,” I sent carefully, “because you are my mate.”
The silence that followed stretched impossibly long.
I held our course steady, every sense tuned outward while my thoughts stayed fixed on her, waiting.
The wind roared around us, and still Artemis said nothing. She didn’t pull away, but her thoughts had gone quiet and contained.
My first instinct was to review everything I had just done. The timing. The wording. The choice to tell her here, now, with no ground beneath us and no easy escape from the truth. I wondered if I had mistaken the steadiness of her presence for readiness.
I searched for signs of distress the way I would search a battlefield. A shift in her weight. Tension in her grip. A change in her breathing. There was none. She remained balanced against me.
That did not mean she was unshaken. It meant she was processing.
I had learned, quickly, that Artemis did not react loudly to something important. She went still. She gathered information. She built internal order before allowing anything out.
Still, the possibility remained that I had fumbled and broken this fragile connection between us by naming it too soon. The thought settled heavily, unwelcome but impossible to dismiss.
Then the compass screamed.
Not audibly… not exactly. I could feel it wrench against her grip with violent intent, the metal vibrating with a force that traveled straight through my back and into my bones.
I adjusted instantly, banking hard as the pull locked into a single direction. The sensation was unmistakable now. Demanding.
“We’ve found it,” I thought, and felt the truth of it settle deep.
We descended through thinning clouds, the ocean giving way to something unexpected. A speck of land rose beneath us, so small it barely deserved the title of island. Dark stone. Jagged edges. A crown of wind-bent greenery clinging stubbornly to the rock.
Confusion stirred through me.
Atlantis was meant to have been a booming civilization that sunk deep beneath the ocean. This piece of rock did not look meaningful at all.
And yet the compass was certain.
I circled it once, committing the terrain to memory. No structures. No ruins visible from above. Just stone and shrub. I thought I caught the quiet hum of something old buried deep beneath the surface, but maybe that was just wishful thinking.
I landed near the center where the ground flattened slightly, claws digging in for purchase. Artemis slipped off me, and I shifted instantly. The world snapped back into a human scale that always seemed a little too small afterward.
Artemis was already exploring, journal and compass in hand, completely absorbed. She knelt, turning the compass, aligning it with the map, muttering softly to herself.
I tried to focus on the island. On the impossibility of trusting a relic to bring us here. On the enormity of what we might have just found.
Instead, I watched her.
There was no hesitation or fear in her posture. She was in her element when she had to find meaning in patterns. She bloomed with life, which was both thrilling and terrifying to witness.
I pulled my phone from my pocket out of habit. No signal, as expected.
Artemis’s head snapped up.
Her gaze locked on the phone like it had personally offended her.
“Oh,” she said, flat and horrified all at once. Then her face changed. The shift was instant. “Oh no.”
I took a step toward her. “What?”
“Your phone,” she said, already on her feet, pacing once. “We should have ditched your phone.”
I frowned. “Ditched it?”