Chapter Thirty #2
“So much for a nice, quiet flight,” he said, pulling his jumper over his head. “How much of a dent did you leave in that hillside, by the way? You hit it with some force.”
“If it didn’t want to be hit, it should have got out of the way,” I said, and found myself smiling at him. Dear Ben, always so steady and understated.
Except for when he’d thought he was protecting me earlier. Then, he’d been wild and fearsome, restraint something for other dragons. If he’d actually breathed fire, I thought I might have come on the spot. All at once, I wanted to get back to the house for an entirely different reason.
Unfortunately, that thought was swiftly superseded by another—I didn’t know when the four reprobates would be heading back, and if Rhodri was still up, I’d need to ensure they didn’t cross paths.
Because if those four gave something away and Rhodri discovered what I’d been doing up here, the fights I’d organised, even the slim possibility of avoiding exile would be gone.
My treasure would probably be forfeit as well. And that would kill me.
The thought sat heavy and cold in my gut all the way back to the house.
Thankfully, the place was in complete darkness. Everyone tucked up and asleep like good little dragons, no doubt.
Satisfied that disaster wasn't lurking behind any nearby doors after all, I headed for the stairs. By the time we reached my room, I was beginning to think I might actually get away with it. The thought should have been reassuring. Instead, it left me feeling vaguely uneasy.
I shut the bedroom door behind us and leaned against it for a moment. Ben was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching me with a look that suggested he was waiting for something.
“Fine,” I said. “Ask.”
“Fighting?”
I groaned, but there was no way out of this. Crossing the room, I dropped down beside him on the bed.
“Right,” I said. “Well. Welcome to the part where you discover your boyfriend may have accidentally founded an underground dragon fight club.”
The problem with explaining a terrible idea out loud was hearing it properly for the first time.
Ben stared at me. “Accidentally?”
“Yeah?” Even I wasn’t convinced by that.
“So that’s why you weren’t surprised by the fact they were fighting. But what was that about the Gruffydds?” He looked at me, and somewhere behind the horror was resignation. “Oh, God. Please don’t tell me you’ve set it up to fight another family.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, why not?” Then I held my hand up. “No, do not list all the reasons why not. But the point was, it just kind of happened. At first, anyway. Just me and Heath and his brothers, and it wasn’t—it wasn’t anything organised, or that could hurt anyone else.”
“It could hurt you,” he said.
I shrugged. Because that had kind of been the point of it. Which maybe wasn’t sounding quite so healthy right now.
“And did anyone get hurt?” he asked.
“I mean, I clawed Heath once, but it wasn’t on purpose. Other than a few bumps and bruises, not really.”
“Not really isn’t no,” he pointed out.
“Fine. Heath shredded one of my wings, but that’s all.”
The silence was somehow very loud.
“And there were a few cracked ribs, but by accident.”
“Dominic.”
“But nothing worse than that. We said from the start, no flaming. It’s the rule, just like only fighting one-on-one. God, I can’t believe what a bunch of fucking muppets they are.”
“You do have rules, then?”
“Course. Soon as we let anyone else in, we had to make sure to keep them safe.”
Again, as soon as the words were out, I heard them. So did Ben, judging by the way his lips tightened.
“I thought they’d be okay if they followed the rules. They always were,” I added.
But now I was wondering. Was that luck as much as judgement? I’d always thought that so long as I was there, if anything looked like going bad, I could stop it. What I’d never expected was that they’d go off and do this without me. They knew better than that.
Except, apparently, they didn’t. Which made no sense because Josh was bloody quick on the uptake. Megan, too. Dafydd sometimes gave a convincing impression of being five minutes behind everyone else, but then, he was always the follower, never the leader.
“Have they done it before?” Ben asked. “I mean, on their own?”
And fuck, that left me winded. Because my first thought had been of course they hadn’t. This time had been because they’d wanted to fight and I hadn’t answered Dafydd’s text, had been too caught up in my own shit with Rhodri to pay them any attention.
But I didn’t know, I realised. Hell, for all I knew, they were out there regularly, putting themselves in danger, and I wouldn’t know.
I’d introduced them to this, the thrill of being reckless and risking everything.
And I’d never thought that they might not understand the possible cost. That rules weren’t there just because I could put them in place, the way Rhodri did, but because they were necessary.
It'd been as if I'd given Teddy knives, taught him to juggle with them, then left him alone. With the knives.
Fuck.
I flopped back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, not wanting to follow that thread.
Because maybe—maybe—Rhodri’s extensive list of rules wasn’t what I’d thought it was.
I’d felt perfectly able to pick and choose which ones to obey and which ones to flout.
But maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe some of those rules had reasons behind them that I didn’t understand.
Which made it his fault, still, for not explaining.
That thought lingered unpleasantly. Because I hadn’t explained the reasons for the rules to my dragons at the fight club. I’d thought they were so bloody obvious, I didn’t need to.
“God, my family is a bunch of absolute muppets,” I told the ceiling.
Ben leaned over and kissed the tip of my nose. “Not all of them,” he said mildly. “I’m a Berstow. I’d never fall in love with a complete muppet.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I told him, but it worked. I was smiling.
He snuggled down beside me. “So what happens tomorrow?” he asked.
I sighed. I still hadn’t worked that one out. I wanted to ream them out for risking their lives for no reason other than that they were bored, but that wouldn’t tackle what lay underneath. They’d just make sure I never found out in future what they were up to.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Make sure they understand why it was so dangerous, I suppose.”
For years, I'd wanted Rhodri to trust me with responsibility. What nobody had thought to mention was that responsibility meant worrying about what other dragons were getting up to when I wasn’t looking.
And now I’d started worrying, it seemed I couldn’t stop.