The Reaper raised both his arms, aiming at the belly of the dragon as it soared above it. The beast didn’t stop but flew in Ravyn’s direction, intent on grabbing her before she could take that last step off the roof.
In a blast of white hot fury, the Reaper engaged his weapons, discharging a barrage of sizzling hot death bullets, just as the dragon swooped down to grab Ravyn. She shook her head and dodged its clawed feet, taking the leap into the flames below. The dragon roared, fire spewing from its throat in thick flames as it watched her fall. But with its orange eyes, the dragon noticed that the woman falling into the flames wasn’t Ravyn at all.
Instead her hair was a fiery red and hung long and curling down to her waist. Her voice was more high-pitched as she screamed, her pants and top the same bronze color as his dragon’s skin, her eyes a piercing reddish-orange hue that belonged to the Nightguild clan—Steele’s Drakon-blood family.
Opal.
Steele’s human body shot up off the bed, his eyes popping open, heart thumping loudly. Remnants of the dream floated through his mind while doom, hurt, fear and disappointment swirled in his chest.
This wasn’t like any dream he’d ever had. It was like a combination of his worst nightmares and he had no clue why it had come to him.
The cool touch of her hands rubbing along his back jolted and steadied him at the same time. This was why, because she was here with him. Because he’d given the Reaper another soul in place of hers and because of that damn dagger. Everything had shifted, so that the dreams that usually depicted the future were now somehow giving him a different message. In this dream, the Reaper hadn’t mentioned Steele pulling a switcheroo on him. It had remained focused on Ravyn. But the dagger had been in this dream, and Opal, who had been dead for over a hundred years. Things had definitely changed and Steele needed to figure out why and what he was supposed to do next.
“It was just a dream,” she whispered. “You were just having a bad dream.”
He pulled his legs until they fell off the side of the bed and he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs as he tried to regulate his breathing. She moved with him, wrapping her arms around his body and laying her face against his back.
“I used to have bad dreams as a child and every night I woke with the night terrors, I wished for someone to hold me like this.”
Ravyn was talking. She was alive and she was here with him at the Office. Reality oozed like a thick white sludge over the blackness of the dream in his mind—shifting the scene, his father had told him that was called.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Her voice was so soft and welcoming it made him ache.
“No.” He couldn’t keep doing this. Talking to her, sleeping with her, getting closer and closer to something he couldn’t have.
She didn’t push him but eased back a bit so that her hands were again rubbing over his back.
“How did you get these scars?”
Don’t tell her. Keep quiet. Get the hell out of here!
His mind screamed directives while the beast had curled into itself, remnants of the dream still plaguing it, because once again it felt helpless.
“I was in a dark place,” he began. “Mentally fighting a darkness inside me and physically fighting those who thought to control me.”
She sighed. “I was mentally abused. Words have power, not only in the instant they’re spoken, but for all the time they can be recalled.”
Her fingers moved over the jagged scars at his back. They’d come from the nails of a lycan shifter. The deeper slashes he’d endured across the front of his chest were from a denounced member of the fae who’d been forced into the Abyss and spent its only day there terrorizing everyone he saw. Until he’d run into Steele.
“Scars can be covered,” he said.
“Is that what the tat is for? To cover your scars?” He nodded his answer, hating any memory of the time he’d been so hurt and lost in despair that he’d purposely ventured to the place between life and death, lingering there for twenty years before Magnum had finally found him.
“I’ll get more until they’re all gone,” he said, even though it had been years since he’d been inked. He hadn’t thought about why he’d suddenly stopped going, but now that Ravyn was looking at the scars, touching them so lovingly, they disgusted him all over again. The point in his life when he was weakest being witnessed by someone who didn’t need to know about his past.
Hell, she didn’t need to know about his present or future either. And that was precisely the point. Ravyn was never supposed to learn of the Drakon or the Office or anything that didn’t fit into her world on the Human Realm. She wasn’t like him and she didn’t belong here. There was no way she could fight off preternatural beings, so he’d constantly be more worried about her getting caught in the crossfire than he was about whatever dark entity they had to fight. It just wouldn’t work. Steele knew that, and he also knew what needed to be done to ensure she would continue to live her life the way she was supposed to live it.
“But you’ll still have the memory of how they came to be,” she said. “Memories don’t fade, no matter what you do to get rid of them.”
The quiet pain he heard in her voice kept Steele still when he knew he should have stood to do what he’d been instructed to do where she was concerned. He turned then, causing her to back up a little so that she sat half at his back and half at his side and he could now
