The Last Dragon King (Kings of Avalier #1)(65)

I couldn’t speak it out loud; the thought terrified me.

“Dying. I can no longer even partial shift,” Drae finished, and Dr. Elsie’s face fell.

“Well, then you know what you must do. Tonight.” There was an urgency to her voice.

Drae nodded in understanding and then she left us.

It was like a knife to the chest, how quickly she determined that my husband needed to bed another woman.

She’d broken one of our rules without knowing it. A rule that was supposed to keep me sane throughout all of this. I didn’t want to know when.

Now I knew and I wouldn’t sleep. I’d chew off every fingernail. I’d pace holes into the carpet.

Tonight.

“I don’t want to.” His voice was low as his arms came around me, holding me while he breathed down my neck.

The side door opened and Adaline stepped out, completely unaware of what she was walking into, and upon seeing my beloved little sister I nodded. “You must.”

I wouldn’t let Adaline and everyone else die on account of my jealousy.

Spinning, I kept my emotions in check as I kissed his cheek. “I’m going to have dinner with my mother and sister tonight,” I informed him.

He went very still, watching me like an animal watches its prey, trying to see through the fa?ade I was putting on. I wanted to sob, I wanted to slap him, I wanted to make love to him.

I did none of it.

“I love you,” I said, then stepped away from him and beckoned my sister.

My first duty as queen was to save my people. Only the people had no idea, and they never would.





I moved my food around my plate a lot at dinner but didn’t eat. Adaline didn’t seem to notice but my mother did. She frowned, looking at me as my heel bopped on the carpet nervously. We spoke of the weather, the fig trees, and every other boring thing, and after a while I bid them goodnight.

I paced the carpet of our luxurious bedroom and stared at our marital bed. Thinking of the way he bedded me last night made heat bloom between my legs, but thinking of him doing that to other women caused smoke to steam from my nostrils. I walked over to the bed, picked up a pillow, and threw it across the room in frustration. My mother had once told me it was hard to tell when a woman’s good fertile days were, so she advocated daily bedding for the couple trying to conceive. The thought of Drae doing this nightly made bile rise into my throat.

Why did I tell him it was okay? I suddenly regretted giving him permission to do such a thing. I wanted to run down the halls of the palace screaming his name and then attack whichever woman was under him right now. I wasn’t cut out for this, not now, not ever.

Grasping a porcelain teacup, I threw it against the wall with a scream. When it shattered, splashing hundreds of broken pieces across the sofa, I felt no better.

Desperation gripped me. Then the door blew open, slamming into the wall so hard that I jumped. A yelp of surprise ripped from my throat and I spun, my gaze raking over Drae’s shirtless form.

A single tear stained his cheek and he shook his head as he closed the door behind him. A tear, a head shake. What did it mean?

I was frozen in time, locked in my mind trying to analyze the situation. Was he mad? Did I do something wrong? Had the women rejected him?

When he reached me, he grasped my hips. “I can’t. I won’t.”

Four words. Four small words was all it took to deepen my love for him.

“I want a baby with you. I want to be the father of your child, and I want you to be a mother,” he said.

My lip quivered as tears rolled down my cheeks unencumbered. “But… if it’s deformed—”

“I don’t care. I will love whatever child we make together for however long we have with him.”

My heart nearly grew wings in that moment and I feared it would fly out of my chest. A king so consumed with bloodline didn’t care if he had a child with a defect? It was unheard of. The Nightfall queen once killed one of her sons for having a stutter.

“Him?” I quirked an eyebrow.

He grinned. “Or her.”

His hands moved from my waist to my stomach, and I thought about the gravity of the situation. Wasn’t having a child you knew would be born in discomfort wrong? “It’s not right to put a child through pain for our selfishness,” I said.

“One journal entry doesn’t mean every child between that couple was born with an ailment. These things happen. It could have been just the first baby but not the others. They could have had five more healthy children between them.” It was as if the dark cloud that had been following me around all day had parted in the sky.

He was right. My mother told me these things did happen. Cruel twists of fate with no cause. I wished this couple were still alive today to ask them.

A child having a condition didn’t make them any less, and I would love whatever little one we created. It would be half me and half Drae.

“If the child lives for only a moment, does it still strengthen your magic?” I asked.

He nodded. “The moment you get pregnant, my magic will strengthen a bit, then fully at the birth.”

I was suddenly overcome with adoration for this man. He chose me, he chose us, in all our imperfections, and that was pretty perfect to me.





Nine moons later.



“She’s in pain. Do something!” Drae barked to Dr. Elsie.