My very obvious stomach.
I may not recognize the man, but his presence feels like Kalos. His coloring is even similar, though his dark hair is wavy and his golden eyes have a warmer tone.
“Is this your son?” I ask, and Kalos flinches.
The man’s lips compress before he smiles. It’s a friendly, bewildered smile edged with a bitterness I can taste.
“No. Just his godson,” the stranger says.
“Katarina, this is Gage. Gage, this is Katarina…” Kalos trails off as if not knowing how to describe our relationship.
I shrug. “The woman miraculously pregnant with his baby without being mated to him.”
Kalos stiffens under me, and I push out of his lap, standing to offer my hand to shake.
Gage’s eyes widen. His eyes not moving from my belly. He doesn’t take my hand.
“I think—I think I’m going to come back later,” he says. There’s something warring behind his eyes.
Kalos massages the bridge of his nose. “That may be for the best.”
Gage doesn’t waste any time in escaping the room.
“Gage,” Kalos calls out, and the man stops at the threshold. “I’m glad the dagger barely touched you.”
Gage doesn’t turn. He just nods before leaving.
“Apologies,” Kalos says. “He needs time to process.”
I want to curl back up in my dragon’s lap, but sit on the edge of the desk instead, giving us both some space.
“You raised him?” I ask. I want to ask more questions, invasive questions, but Kalos’s shoulders are tight. He’s struggling, and my questions won’t help at this moment. Later I can interrogate him and make him tell me all about his history so I don’t trip over painful subjects like I just did.
Later, I’ll ask about my suspicion that the hole in Kalos’s heart that seems larger than the loss of a mate.
“I—yes. I raised him,” Kalos says, his eyes drop to my stomach. “I wanted to tell him about the youngling before he heard it from anyone else.”
And instead, Gage was met with the sight of my belly.
“I should have let you finish the introductions—” I start, but Kalos shakes his head.
“It would not have mattered. The way you introduced yourself is fitting enough.” There’s something mulling in Kalos’s eyes, and I recognize a partner in guilt. “I was not the father he needed.”
Ah.
“And now you’re being thrust back into that role again…” I shake my head. “We haven’t really discussed how involved you want to be. You don’t have to have an active role in our lives.”
I place my hand on my stomach, and the corresponding movement inside me derails my train of thought and leaves room for Kalos to interject.
“Dragons need a dragon mentor of some sort. There are struggles that are unique to us like controlling our shapeshifting and fire.” The words roll off his tongue as if he were a scholar rather than an expectant father.
I don’t want Kalos to feel compelled to raise a child he didn’t mean to create. I don’t want us to be a burden he takes on out of guilt or honor. “Nothing says that the dragon has to be you. Maybe Gage—”
The vicious sound that comes from Kalos’s throat cuts me off. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. It doesn’t seem to help because he’s standing toe-to-toe with me in the next moment.
“Another dragon will not take what is mine.” His eyes glow gold, full of annoyance and possessiveness.
I swallow my tongue instead of arching my brow and challenging like I should. I try to tamp down the delighted thrill at his words. The man just admitted to being a disappointment the last time he parented.
We deserve better than that.
“Then I guess you have some time to figure out how to be the best parent this baby needs,” I say. “Otherwise, we’ll figure this out. With or without you.”
I don’t know how much time he really has left with the apparent progression of this pregnancy. I rub a circle on my stomach, wanting to feel another movement, but they leave me wanting.
Kalos watches the motion, his jaw clenched. A breath later, he nods in understanding.
23
KATARINA
I PULL BACK a beautiful indigo robe with a gold peacock pattern and look at myself in the mirror. The swell of my stomach is still small compared to the full-term pregnancy photos I looked up. Ben was kind enough to get me a specific moisturizer for the stretch of my skin. I don’t know what Kalos pays him, but he’s worth his weight in gold.
“Rina.”
I jump.
Kalos leans against the doorjamb. He’d stopped knocking when coming into my room. Which doesn’t bother me as much as it did when I was hiding Griffin.
“What are you doing?” he asks. His gaze is on my face, rather than my bared stomach.
“What does it look like I’m doing? Looking at my belly.” My cheeks burn, but I refuse to feel embarrassed. This is a big change in a small amount of time.
Maggie estimates that the baby is probably the same as a little over twenty weeks along in a human pregnancy. Which is terrifying. I went from ten weeks to halfway there in the blink of an eye and the glare from an angry dragon. My body aches a little, trying to accommodate the growth. I’m sure it would be much worse if the pregnancy didn’t have magical origins.
I am focusing on the positives.
I sneak a look at Kalos in the mirror, admiring the breadth of his shoulders and the way his robe gapes to show the muscles of his chest.
The horniness from before throbs hotter now. I don’t know if it’s because of hormones or the moment in the kitchen earlier. It’s probably both.
I want to take off my clothes and throw myself at this dragon, but with the way he carefully doesn’t look at my body, I don’t. He doesn’t seem to be feeling the same heat as I am.
I pull my tank top over my belly and belt my robe over it.
What if he’s not attracted to me anymore? I swallow that thought down. That doesn’t matter and it would probably be for the best. We have a lot of other things to deal with in the meantime.
“Did Stella give you the answers you were looking for?” I ask. He’d done his interrogation over the phone so as not to spark his dragon to anger.
“You were right. She doesn’t have any contact with the family. She’s never been on their compound. She has a tenuous relationship with one brother who refused to join the family business. She gave us the phone number he uses, but he’s a globetrotter of sorts, and she has no idea where he is. She said I should just burn the rest of them to the ground.”
I raise my brows at Stella’s bloodthirstiness. I knew she didn’t like what was done to her mother, but her emotions seem to cut much deeper than what she revealed to me.
“How would getting in contact with her brother help?” I ask, leaning my hip against the bathroom counter. Griffin jumps on the counter and meows at me to pet him.
“The whole compound is keyed to blood ties. If we could get him to turn against his family, he could simply walk out with the figurine, and we’d be done with this business.”
“That would be convenient.” I scratch under my cat’s chin, and he starts purring.