Chapter Eleven
BEN
By the time I left the bathroom, hair still wet from my shower, the house was quiet. I winced at the floorboards creaking beneath my feet as I made my way along the landing, doubtless disturbing everyone’s sleep.
I’d briefly considered going up to the castle in the dark and shifting to look at the markings the way Evelyn had asked, but I didn’t feel comfortable being there in dragon form without a Bedwyr there to vouch for me.
Dominic had disappeared the instant supper was done.
Anyway, it was one thing for this afternoon’s invitation to have spilled out.
Another entirely to seek him out and ask him for a favour.
I’d thought about asking Phoebe, but perhaps I should work up to inviting her to accompany me to a dark, lonely castle in the middle of the night. Evelyn’s request would have to wait a day or so longer.
The door next to mine opened, and Rae stood there in a dressing gown. Teddy was clutching her hand tightly, his face blotchy with the unmistakable signs of recent tears.
“Oh, sorry,” I said, stepping back to give them space.
“You’re all right,” Rae replied softly. “Bad dream,” she added, glancing down at Teddy, who scowled at the floor.
“I’m not a baby,” he muttered.
“No,” she agreed. “But even grown-ups have bad dreams sometimes.”
That seemed to mollify him, because he looked up at me, eyelashes still clumped from crying. “I’m having hot chocolate,” he informed me, as if this was an important development.
“Then you’re clearly winning,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Rae’s lips curved faintly as she steered him gently past me and down the stairs.
The quiet settled back around me once they’d gone, and I was glad to close the door of my room behind myself. I didn’t know how this house managed to turn even silence into a threat.
As I drew back the covers and climbed into bed, I found myself thinking about Teddy. Seeing him had brought back the memory of Dominic crouched beside him, listening to a lecture on pine cones as if it were a matter of genuine importance.
When I set that against the memory of Dominic at the castle, it made no sense. He’d shrugged out of his shirt with the intention of shifting and tearing down a section of medieval wall in broad daylight simply because it would be quicker.
And yet he’d been patient with Teddy. Gentle, even. I realised how quick I’d been to dismiss him as arrogant and spoiled when, in fact, I didn’t understand him at all.
Turning off the bedside lamp, I let my head drop onto the rather thin pillow and absolutely did not spend time trying to impose some kind of order on the impressions Dominic Bedwyr left in his turbulent wake. I had no interest in understanding him.
Which would have been a far more convincing argument if I hadn’t, quite clearly, been thinking about him anyway. I turned onto my side and firmly diverted my thoughts back to supper. To the long table, the restrained conversations, and the way Rhodri’s presence had dominated everything.
It was normal for a head of family to command deference and respect, but there was something else at work here. A constant awareness and anxiety, as if everyone was quietly measuring what they said and how they said it. It seemed like an exhausting way to live.
And Dominic… I frowned into the darkness.
Dominic had sat within arm’s reach of his father for most of the meal, yet there’d been no interaction between them at all.
It hadn’t seemed like deliberate avoidance, because that would have implied awareness of one another.
It was more as if they occupied entirely separate spheres.
Instead, Rhodri had directed his attention towards the two older dragons seated to his left, both of whom had the look of long-established authority about them.
White-haired, composed, and evidently accustomed to being listened to.
The conversation there had been low-voiced but steady, the kind of exchange that suggested seriousness rather than polite dinner-table talk.
An inner circle, perhaps, offering counsel to Rhodri. Or, at least, an audience for whatever he was planning. If that was the case, then Dominic was conspicuously absent from it.
I turned over again, more restlessly this time.
It wasn’t my concern. The power structures of another family, particularly one under the authority of someone like Rhodri, were not something I had either the right or the inclination to involve myself in.
And yet, Dominic was his heir, and his absence in Rhodri’s inner circle was significant.
There’d been something in his reaction earlier, when I’d told him about the revelations at the Moot. Not just anger, but as if being cut out of things by his father mattered to him.
I rubbed at an itch above my eye. If that were the case, it cast rather a different light on his behaviour. I’d taken his constant provocativeness for a kind of careless arrogance, a tendency to unsettle people simply because he could. But perhaps it wasn’t as simple as that.
And because I was thinking about him, my thoughts chose to take a completely unhelpful turn, revisiting in excruciating detail the moment when he’d stripped his shirt off at the castle.
I hadn’t meant to look. Not properly. There’d been more urgent concerns at the time—such as preventing him from breaking every dragon law in existence.
That hadn’t, evidently, prevented me from noticing. The memory was irritatingly clear, showing me over and over the play of muscle under his skin as he moved, his careless lack of self-consciousness about it. He was used to drawing attention, to everyone looking at him.
That didn’t mean I had to be one of them. I wasn’t here to catalogue Dominic Bedwyr’s more… distracting qualities. I had work to do, and a finite amount of time in which to do it.
The fact that I was currently lying in the dark, replaying his shirtlessness over and over, rather undermined that position.
I turned over again, pulling the covers with me as if that might help.
It didn’t.