17. Quinn
QUINN
THE VIEW FROM A DRAGON'S BACK
The ride back into the city was nearly silent.
Max was passed out in the back of the van, stretched on his side with one paw twitching every few minutes, probably dreaming about fields, stolen branches, and successfully tackling a billionaire dragon shifter into the grass.
His exhaustion was complete, and I envied that.
I, on the other hand, sat beside Rafe with my hands folded in my lap, pretending I hadn’t recently asked whether he had ever dated anyone seriously.
It was a normal question people asked all the time after picnics in enchanted-looking clearings where dogs rediscovered youth. What wasn’t normal was for men with impossible cheekbones to admit they had never made room for love because they took it too seriously to do halfway.
Great. Wonderful. Very breezy.
The city gathered around us again, traffic thickening, buildings rising closer together.
Moonlight slid off glass and brick. Rafe sat beside me, quiet and composed, his jacket folded over one knee, his gaze turned toward the window, watching the road and not also thinking about every word we had said in the grass.
I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to apologize or ask fifteen follow-up questions and request a diagram. My body was tired in that deep, sweet way that came from sunlight and fresh air, but my mind kept returning to the careful honesty of his answer.
My life has never felt arranged to make room for someone who didn’t already belong to it.
It should have been a warning. Maybe it was. Rafe Virelli had just told me, in the most precise and devastating way possible, that he didn’t do casual attachment. He didn’t drift into romance because the timing was nice and the lighting was good. He thought love meant rearranging a life.
And I, a woman currently rearranging my grocery budget around Max’s joint supplements, should have found that intimidating enough to back away.
Instead, I kept thinking what it might be like to belong to the life he rearranged.
It was a terrible thought. Horrifying. Bad use of brain space.
When the van stopped in front of my building, Max raised his head, blinked at the sidewalk, and gave a disappointed huff.
“Come on, handsome,” I murmured. “Back to reality.”
Rafe walked around and opened the van door before the driver could, then offered me his hand.
I hesitated for half a second, because I wanted to take it and not let go. I took it. His hand closed around mine, warm and steady, and he helped me down. Then he released me. Rafe had the emotional discipline of a monk and the timing of a man personally committed to ruining my peace.
Max descended carefully behind me, shook himself once, and leaned against my leg.
“He’ll sleep well,” Rafe said.
“He earned it. You should sleep well too.” I looked up at Rafe. “Some of us were tackled by a senior citizen today.”
Rafe’s mouth moved. “I let that happen, thank you very much.”
“He trusts you,” I said, the words coming out before I had fully considered them.
Rafe looked at Max, then at me. “Does he?”
“Yes.” My voice softened despite me. “He doesn’t play like that with people he doesn’t trust.”
Something passed across his face, too quiet to put a name to. Whatever it was made my chest feel strangely tight.
We went inside.
The lobby door latched behind us with a satisfying click, and I tried very hard not to notice Rafe noticing it. The repaired door had become a tiny, humiliating monument to his thoughtfulness. A hardware-based threat to my emotional stability.
The stairs felt steeper than usual after the day.
Max made it up slowly, pausing once on the second landing while I rubbed his shoulder and told him he was a champion.
Rafe stayed behind us, close enough to help if needed, not close enough to make me feel crowded.
That also got to me. He was learning the shape of care around me instead of just bulldozing the room and calling it help.
When we reached my door, I had convinced myself the evening was almost over.
Then I unlocked the apartment, nudged the door open, and heard myself ask, “Have you ever flown with someone on your back?”
Rafe stilled beside me.
I turned slowly, because apparently my mouth had decided to run its own independent legal practice today. “In dragon form. Obviously. I’m not asking if you’ve given anyone a piggyback ride, although now that I’ve said that, I do have follow-up questions.”
His gaze stayed on mine. “Yes.”
My pulse jumped. “Yes to which part?”
His mouth lifted at one corner. “Dragon form.”
“Right. Good. Naturally.” I swallowed. “Who?”
“My father, when I was younger. My mother, a few times after the Fog took her flight but before it made it difficult for her to tolerate altitude.”
The image was so unexpectedly tender that I forgot to be embarrassed for a second. Rafe carrying his mother through the sky. His father trusting him enough for flight. The Virellis, all that severity and devotion, lifted above the world together.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s lovely.”
“It was,” he said simply.
Max nudged my hip, reminding me that the door was open, and he had a strict post-adventure routine that involved water, dinner, and collapsing dramatically near my bed.
I stepped inside, then turned back to Rafe. “Would you fly with me?”
The question landed in the space between us, and for one long moment, he only peered at me.
I’d surprised him. Truly surprised him. I saw it before he smoothed it away: the slight lift of his brows, the stiffness in his shoulders, the way his attention sharpened on my face, checking whether I meant it.
“Yes,” he said.
The word was low. Careful.
My heart thumped stupidly.
“Now?” I asked, smiling despite myself.
This time, he didn’t answer immediately.
The hallway went very quiet around us. Somewhere below, a door shut. Max stepped into the apartment and looked back at both of us, deeply unimpressed.
Rafe’s gaze moved from me to my dog, then to the narrow hallway and my open door.
“Now,” he said.
I smiled before I could stop myself.
Then reality arrived, carrying a clipboard and several concerns. “I need to get Max settled first.”
“Of course.”
He followed me inside, and my apartment had never seemed smaller.
It wasn’t bad, I reminded myself with almost aggressive loyalty.
It was clean and warm. It was me. Books stacked neatly under the front window and tables because shelf space was imaginary.
A thrifted chair by the radiator, reupholstered by Octavia after I found it on a curb and insisted it had “good bones.” The tiny kitchen had two mugs drying beside the sink, one chipped bowl, one pot on the stove, and Max’s medication organizer arranged beside the fridge with more precision than pretty much anything in my own life.
Still, with Rafe inside it, the space felt like it had been translated into a language with too many class markers.
I couldn’t read his face, which made my stomach drop.
“It’s not much,” I said quickly. “But it’s home.”
His attention came back to me at once. “You’ve made it lovely.”
He didn’t say it like a rich man being kind about exposed brick and old radiators. He said it as if he had noticed the lamp, the books, the clean hooks by the door, the framed print above Max’s bed, and the careful order I had made inside a place where nothing had been handed to me polished.
I hated how much I needed that to be true.
“Thank you,” I said, and turned away before my face could become too honest.
Max went straight to his water bowl. I filled it, then washed my hands and measured out his dinner, adding the supplement from the blue-lidded container and a few pieces of fresh beef I’d picked up from the butcher that morning.
Rafe stood near the doorway, watching without making me feel watched in the wrong way.
When Max finished drinking and came over to lean against my leg, I rubbed his ears and checked his paws for grit or burrs.
“You always do that?” Rafe asked.
“After big runs, yes.” I lifted one of Max’s paws and inspected it. “He’ll keep going past his limits if he’s excited. It’s my job to notice.”
Rafe said nothing. When I looked up, he had that look again. The one I couldn’t quite place. It made me feel seen in a way that wasn’t simple or safe.
I cleared my throat. “I’ll be right back.”
I changed into jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers, then grabbed a hair tie from the dresser and paused with my hand on the drawer.
I was about to fly over New York on a dragon. On Rafe’s back. At night.
This wasn’t a normal Saturday.
This wasn’t a normal life.
I looked in the mirror and found myself grinning. Whatever decisions I had made, the consequences could wait until later.
When I came back out, Rafe was crouched beside Max, one hand resting lightly on the floor near him. Max had stretched on his side, already halfway asleep. His eyes opened when I entered, then closed again.
Traitor.
“I gave him a little more water,” Rafe said.
“Thank you.”
He stood. “Ready?”
Absolutely not. “Yes.”
The roof access was technically not supposed to be used by tenants unless there was an emergency, but in our building, rules were more like decorative suggestions.
I had been up there a few times to watch fireworks or breathe when my apartment felt too full of my own thoughts.
We climbed the last flight of stairs in silence, the air cooling as we neared the roof.
I pushed open the metal door.
The roof spread out under the evening sky, the city rising around us in lit windows and rooftop tanks.
Manhattan hummed below and beyond us. Car horns and sirens beat through the air.
Music drifted through someone’s open window.
The constant, living noise of millions of people refusing to stop being busy.
Rafe stepped past me and looked around.
“This will do,” he said.
I chuckled. “You’re about to turn into a dragon on the roof of my rent-stabilized building, and your review is ‘this will do.’”
“It has sufficient space.”
“Just don’t crush Mrs. Nguyen’s basil pots,” I said.