“What did she say?”

“Hello to you, too,” I grumbled as I closed the door. “What’s the point of having my own room if I can’t get a minute’s peace in it? I come back and you’ve spread out like it’s yours.”

“I was waiting for you,” Gate replied.

There was an open book on his lap. A thick one. Academic. He’d been out that morning, I could tell. There was a bookshop a few blocks from the hotel.

“I don’t have much to share,” I admitted, sitting on the edge of the bed to remove my shoes.

“She didn’t have anything?”

“Oh, she has a ton,” I said, shaking my head with a sigh. “The girl hauls her research around in a suitcase, for God’s sake. She’s dedicated. I give her credit for that.”

“And? Did you ask her out tonight?”

“Of course. Didn’t we decide I would?” I couldn’t help but hate myself a little for it.

It would’ve been much easier if I didn’t like her so much. And if my goddamned dragon would shut up already. I could hardly hear my human thoughts throughout my time at the library, thanks to him.

“She said yes?”

“Yes.” I stretched out on my back, hands crossed behind my head. “We’re going out tonight while the two of you go exploring. And I’m not happier about it than I was before.”

“At least she’s cute, right?”

Cute. That was a word for it. He had no idea, but that was partly by design. He didn’t see her the way I did—the way the dragon did. Anybody with eyes could see she was beautiful, and that she’d be stunning with clothes that didn’t hang off her like a shapeless potato sack. She didn’t care much for things like that. More interested in her work.

The dragon saw her on an entirely different level. He saw the depths of her eyes, the delicate arch of her brows, and the curve of her lips. The planes of her cheeks, the slope of her shoulders, the delicate skin of her throat. The way her pulse throbbed there, the way it picked up speed whenever she got excited.

He saw all of her, and wanted to see more. He’d spent the entire morning in the library urging me on to get things moving between us. She was interested, that was clear. The pink in her cheeks whenever I caught her looking at me. The way her eyes held mine a little longer than they needed to.

Her hand. The way she’d touched me with so much tenderness.

He ignored my silence. “Anyway, we’re hoping to find something real tonight. You know, something that’ll tell us what happened. We just can’t risk her going back there, is all.”

“I know that.”

“You don’t have to sound so pissed off about it.”

“I’m not pissed off. I do wish I could be there with you. It’s why we came all this way, after all. I didn’t join in because I wanted to play babysitter to an academic.”

My dragon roared, pissed that I hadn’t made a move on her. Pissed that I didn’t tell my brother that she was my fated mate.

I shook my head to shake away the dragon’s urging. I clenched my fists against it. She was a nice girl. I didn’t want to ruin her life by revealing who I was—who we were. No matter how much I wanted her, I didn’t want to destroy everything she’d worked on by telling her we were really a clan of dragons. And that she could never tell anybody.

Though the time would come. It would come, and I would have to at least break the news that nobody could know about the research she’d done. She had worked so hard.

“Part of the clan broke off roughly two hundred years after we left.”

That got his attention. “They did? Who? Where did they go?”

“I doubt they took a census,” I muttered. “They went to Wales and disappeared soon thereafter. There’s no way of knowing for sure who went or what happened, exactly.”

“It could’ve been any of them.”

“Yes.”

“The girls, even.”

“Right. I’ve been thinking about that.” Our sisters. Sorcha, Kirstine. The thought of harm coming to them…

“Who would’ve done it?”

I shrugged. “Perhaps the same who’ve done whatever has been done now. It only took them several centuries to find the rest of us.”

“We still don’t know what’s been done.”

“No, but I think we can agree that something has happened. Something’s been done.”

He didn’t reply. He didn’t need to.