Was he really going to just sit there, looking not unlike a lightly dusted Christmas tree as the snow continued to fall on him?

Farrah stared in consternation, trying to decide what to do.

Every few minutes, he would brush irritably at the snow on his jacket and backpack, and then he’d go back to standing stoically with his legs spread in a warrior stance, eyes pinned on the horizon, unless he was making a slow scan of the entire area.

A hint of pity began to penetrate the icy wall of self-preservation around her heart as Farrah thought she could see he was shivering. Or perhaps she was just imagining it.

Weren’t shifters supposed to be larger than life? Strong, impervious to the elements?

As a dragon, he should be more impervious than most, right? He had scales, right? Then why had his skin looked so… normal. So… touchable.

She shook her head as pain waved through her. No more touching. Not ever again. She’d been touched enough for a lifetime. She just wanted to forget all that and settle into a quiet, regular life in her small town, get back her job at the big hospital in a neighboring town, and let life pass by like the snowflakes fluttering past her window.

It was dark and isolated enough out here that she felt safe, despite what she’d just been through. Already, the time at the lab was feeling like a distant memory. Or was that just her coping mechanisms? What was the point of thinking about it anyway? She felt her heart trying to push all of that down as deep as it could into a dark well where it could rot at the bottom.

She wrapped a soft blanket around her shoulders and sighed as she watched “Nic” shake off another wave of snow.

She’d been treated cruelly. Could she really do the same to another? She exhaled shakily, hearing her heart pound again at the idea of letting a stranger into her house, but what choice did she have?

She’d been captured and destroyed by monsters, but that didn’t mean she had to become one herself. At least she could let him explain what he’d done at the portal. And let him warm up. Maybe give him some blankets or refer him to a hotel or something.

She felt guilty at that thought, knowing the only reason she’d been sent back here was because she’d agreed to let him watch her. Still, she thought, taking a sip of the hot chocolate she’d set on the side table next to the window, she didn’t owe anything to anyone in the shifter world.

She’d never been meant to be caught up in their affairs, and in doing so, she’d lost nearly everything.

She set down the hot chocolate and walked through an emotional barrier that felt like a black wall of pure fear as she put her hand on the doorknob and turned it slowly, deliberately.

When it was open, the man—dragon—looked over his shoulder, appraising her sharply, his glittering green eyes clear even at this distance. She picked up her mug with one hand and straightened her shawl with the other. Then she waved quickly for him to come closer.

The way he walked was so like a shifter, so purposeful and sure of himself, that she wanted to change her mind right there, slam the door, run away, beg the oracle for any other options.

He walked onto the porch, and she felt even guiltier as she looked over him. His clothing was frozen into stiff folds, and his nose and cheeks were reddened. His eyebrows and eyelashes had gathered crystals.

But his gaze was the same as when she’d first seen him, striding into the prison main hall, ready to obliterate anything in his way. Cold. Hard. Calm. As if he saw everything through an impenetrable mask of reason and never stepped outside it.

There’d been rage emanating from him when he’d rescued her, but it had only been a feeling in the air, nothing in his expression, which had been blank and implacable as it was now.

“Did you need something?” he asked, and she realized that despite his attempts to stifle it, he was definitely shivering.

But apparently, she wasn’t the only one who could be stubborn, and he wasn’t about to admit he needed her help.

“I’d…” She’d been ready to attack him, yell at him about the portal, tell him why she didn’t want him inside, but watching the big man shivering, covered in ice crystals, chin lifted haughtily as he sought no quarter, she wondered if she hadn’t encountered a creature maybe even more pitiful than herself.

At least when it came to trusting others.

“I’d… feel safer if you were inside.”

His expression changed, melting from hard pride to one of confusion, which looked a bit hilarious with the icicles on his brows. “Why do you say that? Don’t you fear me?”

She chuckled slightly. “Not so much now.”

He raised to his full height, clearly ruffled, and she resisted the urge to full-on laugh.

Perhaps it was just being back in her house, with her blanket and her hot chocolate, but she was feeling slowly as if life was seeping back into her.

“Why is that?” he asked stiffly. His dark, silky-looking hair was matted with snow. She wanted to reach up and rustle all the snow out of it, take him inside, and warm him up.

But he reminded her somewhat of herself. A wounded animal that had to be approached carefully.

“I just… If you wanted to break in, you already could have done so. If you were bad, like the other shifters,” she said, initially trying to convince him but realizing as she said it that it was true.

He relaxed slightly, and when his face wasn’t hard and defensive, and his normally narrowed eyes softened in confusion, he looked almost… beautiful?

In that exotic, male way and only if you ignored his hulking, cut body.

Pure shifter.

A little shiver of fear went through her again, but she pushed it away. After what she’d been through, she wasn’t sure anything could scare her like that again. Except the thought of being forced to go back there. And this man would make sure she didn’t have to, hopefully.

“D-definitely. I w-will,” he said, shivering slightly as a new gust hit them. Then his eyes widened, and he cursed, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I will not read your mind again. I am a bit… befuddled by the cold and had forgotten to put the block up.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she said, grabbing him by the arm, surprising herself with her willingness to touch, and pulling him inside the house.

He was surprisingly solid, and he resisted at first, but then, almost as if he was afraid of hurting her tiny human grip, he acquiesced and came inside the house, shutting the door behind him.

She rushed to a nearby couch and grabbed a thick wool blanket and threw it over his shoulders, reaching up on tiptoe to do so. Then she pulled him over to the couch and sat him down, rubbing the blanket over his head to remove the snow as he sat there quietly.

“You shouldn’t be taking care of me,” he said firmly. “It should be the other way around.”

She sighed. “I can’t help it. I’m a nurse, after all.”

“Ah, a female doctor?”

She squinted at him. Was he mocking her?

“I’m sorry. This is my first foray into the human world. I still may get things wrong.”

“Nurses can be male or female, and we assist doctors,” she said. “Comfort and care for patients, do the dirty work, as it is. Most of the work to be honest.”

Arsenic nodded. “Sounds like a noble profession.”

“One second, I’ll get you some hot chocolate.”

“Excellent,” he said, his voice firmer now, though still wavering slightly. “I enjoy hot chocolate. Not when I make it, but still…”

He was relaxing into the couch, making her living room feel much smaller with his presence, when she came over to him with an oversized mug of steaming cocoa.

He took it gratefully and sipped it as he studied their surroundings. He was quiet for a moment, then spoke up. “Are all human dwellings small like this? It’s quite cozy.” He nodded to himself. “And no room for more than one dragon, which I approve of most highly.”

She snorted. “You speak so differently sometimes.”

He wrapped his hands around the mug as if absorbing the heat. “I am still adjusting to this world.”

“That’s right. The oracle said you came from another planet, and…” She trailed off, remembering that she didn’t want to know any more about these dragons than she had to.

Because she was going to forget all of this.

He watched her intently, waiting for her to continue her hanging sentence. All snow had melted off of him, leaving him with the look of someone fresh out of a particularly bleak shower.

His hair was wet and waved slightly in tendrils around his handsome face, and those curious eyes that held almost an innocent quality to them studied her as if she were the most interesting thing in the universe.

“I admit I wish I could read your mind right now, although I agreed not to.”

“Good,” she said, folding her arms and taking a seat in the chair by the window where she could still keep an eye on things. She had a hyper-awareness now that she felt would never leave her. “If I want you to know something I’m thinking, I’ll tell you.”

Arsenic gave her a nod and went back to innocently sipping his cocoa.

Innocent? She let out a scoff. She’d seen him take down a few dozen dangerous wyverns and werewolves, some of them with his eyes literally closed. How had he done that?

“Do you really feel safer with me here?” he asked, setting the cocoa on a table by him. “If not, we can call someone else in. Perhaps a female dragon, like Marina, though she’s very busy, and her mate would have to come anyway… and he’s much worse than me personality wise.”

“No, it’s okay,” Farrah said. “You’ll do.”

He raised an eyebrow, and his tone was wry. “Oh. Well, thank you for saying so.”

She’d ruffled him again. She tried not to laugh but failed, having to lift her cup for another sip to hide it.

He still looked over sharply. “What is so funny?”

She set aside her mug again and rested her hands in her lap. “You’re just nothing like I thought.”

“What did you think I was?”

“That you’d be like… like the others.”

“How so?”

“That you’d… force me to do as you wanted, push me around, treat me like I’m worth less than you, like I shouldn’t have a say in anything that happens to me because I’m a human.”

Nic snorted. “Never. I am here to serve you, not the other way around. If anything, shifters have the highest regard for humans. For the most part, you seem to be good-hearted.”

“That is a very naive way of thinking about it,” she said. “Humans can be awful, too. They just don’t have as much power.”

“Perhaps I have been biased, in that the only humans I have met are the mates of my dragon brothers in the Drakkaris guard. They have been kind, wonderful women.”

“Mates?” Her heart shuddered at the word. She’d heard Crios use it often… as a threat.

“Do not worry,” Nic said solemnly. “The oracle has stated already that you cannot be a dragon’s mate. She has stated that you want to erase your memories and want nothing to do with the shifter world.” He raised an eyebrow. “Though, I’m not sure I would agree with such a notion.”

“It’s not for you to agree with,” she said snippily. He didn’t have her dreams, her nightmares, the feeling of something burning under her skin any time she remembered her captivity.

“If we forget the past, are we doomed to repeat it?”

“You think I’ll manage to randomly get kidnapped by evil shifter scientists when they are trying to capture someone else again?” She sipped her cocoa and put it back. “I doubt it.”

He crossed one leg over the other, leaning back nervously. “I suppose I simply can’t imagine giving up any of my memory. Losing any data points that might help me in the future is untenable.”

“Well, when you have been through what I’ve been through, maybe you can say that.”

He cocked his head, eyes narrowed. “And what have you been through?”

She was suddenly angry at his presumption. She’d let him in, helped him, talked to him and been willing to not treat him like the monsters who’d hurt her, despite him having more in common with them than her.

And here he was thinking he could judge her, her wants and needs, her decisions based on her experiences.

Screw him. Him and anyone else who ever thought they could make decisions for her or even have any input on them.

“Listen,” she said, crossing over to him while still keeping a safe distance. “If you’re going to stay here, you don’t get to invade my privacy. You don’t get to ask invasive questions, and you don’t get to judge what I want. You don’t need to know me, and I don’t need to know you, because despite what you think about ‘data points,’ I don’t think there is anything useful in what I’ve just been through. And I am going to forget it as soon as I can.”

With that, she whipped her blanket tightly around her and headed for the stairs. “You can have the couch.” When she was halfway up the stairs, she sent him a glare over her shoulder. “And don’t bother trying anything, because I’m locking my door. And I… I’m sure the oracle will be watching if I scream for her.”

He gave her an appraising look, his jaw jutting slightly, the expression in his eyes cold and hard. “You may not believe this because of your low opinion of shifters, but I have never been anything but honorable every single day of my life, and I don’t intend to change that now.”

Looking into his solemn green eyes, God help her, she believed him.

“Okay,” she said. “Then I will see you in the morning.” She paused, putting her hand on the bannister. “And thanks… for coming with me, Nic. I appreciate it, even if I’m… hard sometimes.”

He nodded in acknowledgement, but she could tell that deep down, he was still pissed.

She supposed he had a right since she’d just insulted him, told him that she didn’t trust him and didn’t want to know him and would forget him.

But what did it matter if she did? He was just a shifter, a part of a world she was never meant to collide with.

A world she would soon not know existed at all.