For a second, her heart dropped, wondering if that was why Adrien wanted her. Why this was all too good to be true. But her heart went back to those moments last night when Adrien was staring into her eyes, telling her he loved her. No, that couldn’t be wrong. His feelings were real, even if the situation was hard to comprehend.
She’d just have to wait for his explanation.
“Oh, isn’t that sweet?” he said. “So faithful. So tragic that he won’t ever get to see just how good you are.” His eyes glared at her. “And yes, I can read your mind. I assume Adrien hasn’t, as his kind thinks it’s some kind of violation of privacy. Too bad.”
She stared at him helplessly, wondering how to fight back.
“Don’t bother,” he said. “I could crush you with one hand. The only reason I wasn’t more violent when I came here disguised was that I wasn’t ready to make anyone more suspicious than they had to be. I swear I could have gotten Adrien to react if you hadn’t shown up. He was getting more and more impatient, and I knew the oracle would give up on him and lock him up if he lost it on a human woman.” He shook his head. “It would have worked if not for you coming to the rescue.”
She hated him more than she’d ever thought possible.
“Don’t bother,” he said. “I neither care about your hate nor enjoy it. Anyway, I found another option through Robbie. See, someone just had to tip off her old pack that she was in this city, and I was able to do that anonymously. I was even able to wait outside and watch you take a cab to the shopping center and give them an idea of where to go.”
She stared at him mutely.
“Robbie is a wolf, you see. A powerful one. Of course, she uses masking agents, due to female alpha wolves being high in demand and because she didn’t want to be tracked. But now I’m sure she knows it’s time to go home, now that she probably revealed herself to Citrine and the others. Plus, she doesn’t want her pack to come here and hurt her friends. So she left, and I knew do-gooder Citrine would go chasing after her, leaving his friends defenseless.”
This damn bastard.
He threw back his head and laughed. “It’s so rich. Other shifters don’t know about dragons, and most dragons don’t know about alpha wolves using masking. So they’ve been sitting here keeping secrets from each other the whole time, and now I’m benefitting from it.”
Date-A-Dragon. They were actually dragons. Images of him saving her that night in the alley and then beating up Bernard all came together in her mind, solving a puzzle she hadn’t even known existed.
He was a dragon. But that didn’t change that he was hers. If she could believe a man like him could change her whole life and make amazing love to her, capturing her careful heart in only a few days, then believing in dragons wasn’t that hard.
He stroked her cheek again, and she cringed, trying to pull away. “I like the way you think. So faithful. So willing to believe something outside your normal human world. Maybe I should keep you for myself instead of killing you. Which do you think would hurt Adrien more?”
But before she could answer, the door to the office burst open and Adrien came in followed by Sever.
“Get your hands off her,” he said, eyes burning with anger.
Mercury just laughed and then pinned them with a sharp glare. “Oh, good. Two collared dragons.” He let go of Kelsey, and she fell back with a gasp. “This is going to be fun.”
Nineteen
No words could express the unfettered rage burning inside Adrien the moment he saw his mate being threatened by Mercury.
“What on earth are you doing here?” Sever interrupted Adrien’s thoughts.
Mercury glanced at the tallest of the three of them, then poised his gaze back at Adrien, grinning disgustingly as Adrien counted the ways he would kill the bastard for showing his face here.
“Revenge, obviously. After that idiotic iron dragon bested me, I just had to wait for the right time, which happens to be now.”
“I’m tired of hearing his voice. Let’s end this,” Adrien said, cracking his knuckles as he advanced on the gray-haired maniac.
But before he could even raise his fist, Mercury cleared the distance around the desk and crashed into him from the side, punching him with his fist. Adrien felt the impact of the hit before he could even register what was happening and was thrown off the ground by the sheer force of it.
A split second later, he heard wood and plaster shattering as he was sent exploding through what had once been the wall of the office and into the main club room of Date-A-Dragon, where he hit the marble floor and rolled a few times before stopping.