Forbidden Honor (Dragon Royals #1)(44)

Caldren snorted. “That’s a question I thought only people who weren’t dragon shifters asked.”

“I never expected to be one,” I reminded him. “So I have a lot of questions about the whole system. How did you become such an expert on dragons, anyway?”

I kind of expected him to give me another glib answer. But he gave me a long look instead. “Time to shift. As a dragon, you’re just as strong as Lynx and Branok. Maybe stronger, if my guesses are correct. So if you want Lynx and Branok to stop kicking your ass in the training yard, we need to work on your skills as a dragon.”

“Happily.” I sheathed my sword, then poked him in the chest with the tip of the sheath.

He paused, his hands in his pockets, raising his eyebrows as the two of us regarded each other.

“Answers, Caldren. I am very worried that I’ll accidentally roast you if you can’t prove to me that you know how to protect yourself.”

My voice was soft, but he must have heard the steel in it.

“I trust you. You’re not going to roast me.” He met my gaze, then gave up, blew out a slow breath.

“Not on purpose. But I don’t feel like I’m exactly myself when I’m a dragon,” I confessed. “It makes me a little scared of what I could do.”

“I don’t feel exactly like myself when I’m a wolf. But I like to think we’re all a little bigger and stranger than the self that we’ve known all along.”

“That’s a lovely philosophical point,” I said, “but it doesn’t make me feel any better about the possibility I might burn you alive.”

“It should. Usually people find philosophers unbearable. Just trust yourself,” he assured me, “and if you can’t do that, just trust me. I won’t let you hurt me.”

I prodded him with the tip of the sheath. “How?”

He cursed as he grabbed the sheath from me, but I didn’t let go, so the motion brought us close together. His chest rose and fell as he gazed down at me. “Can you stop that?”

“How do you know so much about dragon shifters?”

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and made no motion to move away from me. “I was supposed to be one. I come from a family of dragons.”

“So you spent your whole life expecting to be a dragon shifter?”

“I did. And now I have to try to make sense of being something else. Someone else. And that someone is a huge disappointment to my family.”

His tone was cool and level, the way it always was except for when he talked about Jaik.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m only a disappointment to my stepmother. And I don’t really care that much about her opinion. But if I disappointed my little sister…”

My worries that I’d fail her, that I’d abandon her in that house instead of spiriting her away to Posselbaum’s, rose and fell again, driven away by the pain written across Caldren’s face.

“To be honest, I don’t know exactly how I feel about my family,” he admitted. “Not my parents anyway. And I have pretty complicated feelings about my brother at the moment.”

“What are they like?”

“My mother is beautiful. She always wants things to be a certain way. The right way—beautiful and sparkling as she is. She can’t handle anything else.” His lips pursed ruefully. “Including little boys’ bloody knees or tears when we were growing up. Including broken hearts and dreams now.”

“As for my father, well, you know the dragons. They’re arrogant assholes, but they’re our best protectors against the Scourge. And somehow that makes it okay to treat everyone around them like shit.”

“Like calling them undragons.”

“Exactly like that.”

It struck me how hard it must be for him to be one of the undragons. “I’d really like to ban that phrase.”

“It wouldn’t change the feelings underlying it.”

“I think it would make a difference. The words people say impacts how they feel more than I think we admit.”

He smiled down at me, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “All right. I’m certainly not going to use the word undragons. You’ve convinced me.”

The two of us were so close together, he smelled of pine and snow, and his lips looked inviting. I was tempted to kiss him. I didn’t even know where that rogue thought came from.

I didn’t feel the same mad pull toward him I felt with Jaik and Talisyn. There was something tender there, something more tentative, like a bud unfurling in soft soil. But I felt a strange lightness in my chest when the two of us were close together like we were now.

“Well, I hope someday your family stops disappointing you.”

“It’s all right. I can defend myself. I’m not convinced it’s worse to be a wolf shifter than to be a dragon. Even if I felt that way for a long time, when I first had to reconcile myself to a different identity, a different future, a different family.” His lips quirked ruefully. “Well, maybe someday, when I get to make my own family. I’ve been disowned by the dragons.”

My heart ached for him. “You deserve better, you know that?”

“I don’t know. I tell myself I deserve better, but I’m not sure I really believe it yet. I’m trying.”