"You said it was a long story…" I fished.
He ran his hand through his hair. "Zyn."
Reluctantly, I patted the spot next to me on the bed. I wasn't sure if he would think the gesture too intimate, but my mind was going crazy. I needed to know. "Will you tell me now?"
The hammering inside my chest increased. I didn't know what to make of this male. He claimed I was his mate, but if that were true, why did I wake in a glass shrine, far from the city? I didn't want him to see my apprehension, though. If I was going to figure out what was going on here, who I was, who he really was, I had to gain his trust. That much I knew.
He hesitated, hand still tangled in his hair. The light caught on the silver at his temples. For all his strength, he suddenly looked… tired.
But when I patted the bed beside me, he didn’t flinch or question it. He just sat, slowly and carefully, as though he thought the mattress might break beneath him.
Or I might.
“Zyn,” he said at last. “It's a long story.”
I waited.
We both knew he was stalling, but I didn't push. I waited for him to find the words. "Where do you want me to start? How we met, or how… it ended?"
"Let's start with why I woke up in that shrine," I decided, ignoring the shudders running through me. But the glimpses I remembered from the dream were enough not to ask about how we met, how we got mated. For now, I wanted to know why I needed to see this Myccael. What was so special about him? Why did I feel the need to see him and not Mallack, who claimed to be my mate?
He exhaled through his nose and stared at the floor for a moment. “More than twenty rotations ago, you gave birth to our child."
He lifted his head and looked at me. There was so much grief in the dark pools of his orbs that I instinctively reached out and took his hand. The contact was like an electrical jolt. I forced myself to keep my hand there. I started this. Pulling back now would be… if not rude, cowardly.
At the contact, a spark moved through the obsidian darkness of his eyes, and a slight smile tugged at the corners of his full lips. It was as if his entire body sighed.
"The entire time during your pregnancy, you believed the child you carried would be a girl." With his free hand, he rubbed the back of his neck, something like regret mirrored on his expression.
"You are a vissigroth?" I already knew that, the Kiss of the Dragon, the scales on his shoulder and arm didn't leave any doubt about that, but somehow, I needed to hear him say it.
"Zyn. Do you know what that means?"
"If we were mated, as you said, then as your vissy, I would have given birth to a son. That's how it's always been." I said, having not the slightest idea how I knew this. But he nodded.
"Zyn."
If he was telling the truth, and I had no reason to believe otherwise, by all accounts, I would have been carrying a son. That's how it has always been on Leander. The union between a vissigroth and his vissy produced male heirs. Males, so that the dragon could choose which one would be the next vissigroth. Only vissigroths and their concubines, if they had any, produced girls. And only girls. It was a well-known fact.
So why would I have been convinced I carried a girl?
"Because at the time, you were the only human vissy there ever had been," Mallack said as if he could read my mind. "You believed it was your destiny to call in a new era by giving birth to a girl." A faraway smile passed over his lips. "You kept saying you would give birth to the first female vissigroth in all of the Fourteen Planets."
"What happened?" I asked, breathlessly caught up in the story now as if he was talking about someone else, not me.
"You gave birth… to a son." He stated.
"A son." Why didn't I feel anything at his words? Only… a deep melancholia? If I had a son, he would have to be over twenty rotations old now. Shouldn't I feel some kind of longing?
"A son," he nodded. I didn't understand the ghost of regret moving over his features; it was deeply edged and clawed at my heart. "I should have believed you."
He closed his eyes and took my hand that was still lying on top of his and wrapped it into his much larger hand, bringing my knuckles up to his lips, kissing them. Shudders of pleasure raged through me. Absolutely inappropriate, and yet undeniably blissful. They vibrated through my body, humming, like fragile wings beating against a giant bell, trying to bring it to life. An impossible task. And like a giant bell would remain unmoved by the wings, so did whatever they tried to bring back to life inside me. It was a futile effort at best. Yet, I feltsomethingunder the onslaught. Something that, just like the dream, hovered right at the edges of my mind, teasing, tantalizing, but elusive.
"Believed me?"
He nodded grimly, "You were the mother, you were my mate, I should have believed you when you accused the midwives of switching our daughter."
Suddenly, my heart began to speed up as if I were running. Which was exactly what I felt like doing. Getting up on my feet and running. Running away from this male, from what he was telling me. But I sat frozen, listened to the words coming from his lips, each more devastating than the one before, listening as they brought the story to a point I didn't… I wasn't sure I could bear hearing.
