A Shade of Dragon 2(12)

My eyes tipped to Lethe. I’d thought my childhood had been difficult—watching my parents’ marriage fall apart, listening to their accusations and counters bleeding through my bedroom wall—but I had never been abused. I couldn’t even imagine hunger. Even on the occasions that they forgot to prepare my lunch, there was plenty of food in the kitchen. I’d quickly learned to prepare my own sandwiches and drinks.

Lethe’s eyes shifted toward me and he froze. “What?” he asked.

My own gaze darted back to the pages of the book to evade his.

“Nothing,” I lied.

I glanced back at Lethe to see that now he, too, was scrutinizing the book in my lap.

“I told you not to read that while I was here!” Lethe sprang up and grabbed the book off of my lap and clung to it.

“Lethe.” I reached a hand out and he flinched from it, glaring at it. I wondered if anyone had ever touched him with gentleness. “Lethe—you don’t need to be ashamed. I’m not going to judge you. I’m your friend.”

“Ice dragons don’t have friends.” Lethe still clutched the tome to his chest. “We have accomplices, and nemeses, and patsies, and henchmen, and on occasion—rare occasion—lovers. But never friends.”

“Well, I’m not an ice dragon. I’m a human being. And we do have friends.”

Lethe just continued to stare, his frosty blue eyes flashing at me.

I took a tentative step forward and touched the book at his chest. His nose curled, a warning.

“It doesn’t matter to me what’s written here,” I promised him, trying to make eye contact. That icy armor that kept the world at bay was still between us. “When I was a small child, my parents forgot about me all the time. I made my own breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. My mother became embroiled in the pursuit of catching my father in an affair—and after three years of fighting, and silence, and rifling through his pockets when he got home at night… she finally got what she wanted, and they separated, with me caught in the middle. Limbo.”

Lethe nodded. “I know that pain. The ice dragons are a notoriously unfaithful people. My mother…” His eyes closed momentarily. “She’s gone now. She was murdered during a brutal season on the Obran peninsula—during which we all suffered the ill effects of cabin fever. But… during her life… she sought constantly to root out the women with whom my father had his dalliances. And she was quite successful. She ordered the executions of at least a dozen different women, and I was only a boy at the time.”

I grimaced.

“So you see?” I reassured him, letting my fingers creep to the outer edges of the book and grasping it, gently prying it away from his grip. “There’s nothing shameful or weak in having a difficult childhood. It only means that you’re stronger now because of it.” Lethe’s grip on the book loosened, and he allowed it to be returned to my grasp.

“Do you really think that?” Lethe asked. His eyes seemed to increasingly open into deeper and darker shades of blue, as if something inside of him was melting.

“That children shouldn’t be ashamed of what their parents have done to them? Absolutely.”

“No.” Lethe took a step closer to me, and I turned my face upward to gaze at his. “That I am strong.”

I frowned, not truly understanding the importance of validating him in that respect. But then, the ice dragons had a very different culture from the human society in which I had been raised. “Well, of course. Of course you’re strong—”

One of his icy hands wove into my hair and roughly pulled me close. I dropped the book, and it thunked to the floor between us. Lethe advanced forward, descending on me, stomping over the book and closer to the fireplace. The stones of the hearth pressed into my shoulder blades—I’d run out of places to go—and Lethe’s cold lips pressed hungrily onto mine. My mouth opened in a gasp, but that only sufficed to allow entrance to his wintry tongue.

Unlike Theon, Lethe moved forward at a breakneck speed. One of his hands tangled deeper into my hair, and the other bunched at the lacework of my dress, pulling it open for his hands to explore my body.

I moved my head in the slightest, as he was locking me into place with his clutching fingers, and dragged in a shuddering breath.

“Lethe,” I began, uncertain of how to gently reject an emotionally fragile kidnapper who seemed to have developed Lima syndrome: the exact opposite of Stockholm syndrome.

I planted my hand on his chest to give myself more space still, but then I felt the hard shard of crystal—the pendant—against his sternum. Of course!