Andrea smiled, took a selfie, changed the brightness and contrast a bit, tried six filters before settling for one, then sent the picture to silfr_eldr. She didn’t know his real name. All she knew was that he was a dragon-shifter, a dragon-shifter who was really interested in her. She bit her lower lip, her eyes sparkling with glee when his next message appeared on the screen of her smartphone: “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen…”
“Damn right I am,” she whispered. Instead, she typed: “Aww… thank you ^_^”
She set her phone aside and switched back to her laptop so she could type better. She rolled her eyes when her roommate sighed in annoyance and turned on the other side, the bed creaking under her sudden movement. Jade was such a killjoy! Yes, Andrea was aware it was 2 AM, and her long, red fingernails made a lot of noise when she typed, but what she was doing was important. Chatting all night with Mr. silfr_eldr was way more important than getting a good night’s sleep so she wouldn’t skip the first two or three classes in the morning, something that had been happening a lot in the past two weeks. But Andrea didn’t care. In fact, she was doing what she was supposed to be doing: finding herself a shifter husband.
Jade sat up in bed and glared at Andrea.
“Would you please, pleeeaaase stop making so much noise?”
Andrea looked up from her screen and cocked an eyebrow. Jade looked funny in the dim moonlight sweeping through their tall window. Funny and sexy, actually. Natural blonde-reddish hair, freckles all over her pale skin, blue eyes that were throwing daggers in Andrea’s general direction… Oh, and she was curvy in all the right places, just like Andrea was. That was why the two girls had bonded so easily when they arrived at Alma Venus the same day.
Jade sighed.
“Can’t you just use your phone?”
“You know it’s impossible to type fast on the phone.”
Jade huffed and threw herself back on the pillow.
“What in God’s name do you talk about, anyway? You’ve been at it for hours!”
Andrea was silent for a minute while she typed something in the chat window.
“You know,” she eventually answered. “Stuff…”
“Stuff. You can’t talk about ‘stuff’ for hours and not get bored. Honestly!”
“Look, I’m sorry about the noise, but at least I’m doing something, okay?” Andrea typed “BRB” and turned her attention to her roommate. “This guy is really interested, Jade. I can’t afford to lose him. I have no intention of spending another month here, and if that means chatting with him until morning every day, then I’m up to it.”
Jade sat up in bed again and faced Andrea. She was dead tired, and all she wanted to do was sleep. The fact that she had to wake up at 7:30 to make it in time for the class on the culture and traditions of dragon-shifters didn’t help the current situation.
“You’ve been at it for two weeks. Does it really take this long for someone to decide whether they want to marry you or not?”
Andrea shrugged. “He doesn’t want to make a rash decision, which tells me he’s a calculated guy. That’s a good thing.”
The truth was that Jade was right. Andrea had been asking herself the same thing for a couple of days now, wondering whether she should take it as a red flag or not. Thinking about red flags… that wouldn’t have been the only one. No, it was better not to think about red flags.
“Why are you so fixated on him, anyway?” asked Jade. “He’s not the only weredragon who’s showed interest in you.”
“Yes, but he’s the only one with whom I have so many things in common. I feel like I can tell him anything.”
“All right. Fair.” Jade tried to think of something else. Yes, she wanted Andrea to find herself a husband and do all the things she wanted to do, but at the same time, she just wanted her to stop typing so damn loudly for hours on end. If this nightmare didn’t cease, then she’d have to talk to Miss Delacroix, the manager of Alma Venus, and ask her to move her to another room.
“I’m sorry,” Andrea finally said in a low voice. She hated saying those two dreaded words. “He’s very busy during the day and we can only talk at night.”
“Yes, my dear, but he’s a dragon-shifter! We’re humans! We need sleep!”
The exasperation in Jade’s voice made Andrea chuckle. Who would have thought she would ever want to marry a shifter? Not just get married to one, but become a mail-order bride and coming to Alma Venus to learn how to be a proper mate for one?! What she had been doing during the past two months was crazy. But it was fine. It had long been due for Andrea Evans to make a tough call and change something about her life. This was good. What was happening right now was insane, but good. She had made the right call.
“Why is he so busy, anyway?” asked Jade. “What does he do?”
“Err… Owns a lot of businesses? Runs a publishing house and a newspaper, I think.”
Jade’s sky-blue eyes widened in disbelief.
“You don’t even know what he does?”
Andrea glared at her.
“I just told you.”
“But you don’t sound very sure.” Jade made a pause, then asked carefully: “Andrea, do you really know this guy? I mean… do you know facts, real facts, about him?”
Andrea stole a glance at her screen. Mr. silfr_eldr had just typed “I can’t wait to meet you.” For a second, she wanted to type “I can’t wait to meet you, too.”, but then she changed her mind. Jade was right, as always.
“I know he’s a very wealthy dragon-shifter and I’m the first Alma Venus girl he contacted.”
“Seriously? And you believe that?”
“That he’s wealthy? Yes. Aren’t they all?”
“For Pete’s sake…” Jade rubbed her temples.
“All right, all right.” Andrea sighed. “He told me he’s been checking the House Dracones catalog for half a year, but none of the girls caught his attention until I came to Alma Venus and got my own page in the catalog. I don’t know… My instinct says he’s not lying.”
“Your instinct…”
“I know it’s weird…”
“It’s more than weird. Do you even know his name? You’ve been sending him selfie after selfie, and God knows what other pictures, but has he sent you pictures of himself?”
Andrea bit the inside of her cheek. “Err… no.”
Jade threw her hands in the air, as if there were no words to describe her indignation.
“I know how this sounds, okay?” Andrea tried to defend herself. “He’s taking things slowly.”
“Honey, no one ever takes things this slowly. There’s something fishy about your dragon, and you don’t want to admit it because you’ve made some sort of obsession for him.”
“Did not!”
“Have you asked him for pictures?”
“Just once…”
“And?”
“Well… he said he’d rather remain anonymous for a while.”
“Anonymous?! This isn’t a dating app, it’s an agency for mail-order brides! Everything is safe and legit. What the hell?!”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s really important, or something.” Andrea mumbled. “You’re right, everything is safe. If he has access to the Alma Venus catalogs, it means Miss Delacroix knows him. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Oh, but there’s plenty!” Jade started counting on her fingers: “You don’t know his name, you don’t know what he looks like, you don’t know exactly how wealthy he is, or what he does for that money. If this silfr_eldr guy asks you to marry him and you say ‘yes’, as I know you will because you want to get out of here as soon as possible, then you might be in for a surprise. Doesn’t that scare you a little?”
Andrea sighed.
“It does. Okay? It does. But he’s the most interesting guy I’ve chatted with since I came here, and I trust Miss Delacroix and her clients… err… so to speak. They’re not really clients, are they?” She thought for a second. “Nevermind. Alma Venus is the best mail-order bride agency in the world! I wouldn’t have come here all the way from New York if I didn’t trust its reputation completely.”
“True…”
Jade couldn’t argue with that. She had chosen Alma Venus for the same reason. Ten years ago, when the social and political scene looked entirely differently, Alma Venus had been the best boarding school for shifter-brides. The headmistress, Monique Delacroix, had adapted it to the new changes, and when the Council of the Six Factions amended the clause regarding shifter-brides in the peace treaty, she turned her establishment into an agency that helped shape-shifters find human mates who actually wanted to marry shifters, become hybrids, and give them heirs. Now, young human girls from all over the world were no longer forced into marrying shape-shifters because they didn’t have any better solutions. Now, women chose their own destiny, and becoming mail-order brides for shifters was their decision alone. But ten years ago, this couldn’t have been an option. Turning a human into a shifter was illegal then, and it was illegal now. Because shifters lived for 200 years at least, they needed more than one mate and, under the law, the Human Faction had to provide these mates constantly. Now, the discovery of the antidotes for the five types of shifter venom allowed human females to become hybrids, which was a sort of middle ground everyone agreed to. As hybrids, they gained the long lifespans of their husbands, their shifter speed, strength, and amazing senses, but kept their ability to have children, an ability which shifter females lacked for some strange, still unexplainable genetic reasons. Ten years ago, the women who were raised and educated to become shifter-brides came from the streets, from orphanages, or were sold by their parents directly to the boarding schools. Today, the women who chose to become mail-order brides did it because they genuinely liked shifters, which was rare, really, or because they had been disappointed one too many times by human boyfriends or husbands, and they wanted to try something new and different. The latter was Jade’s case. Andrea’s case was a bit different.
“I just want you to be safe and happy,” said Jade.
“I am. I will be.”
“Good. Now, will you let me sleep?”
Andrea smiled. “I’ll chat on the phone tonight.”
“Praise all the gods!”
Andrea laughed at her roommate’s theatricals, then turned off her laptop and grabbed her phone as Jade plopped back onto her bed and covered herself with the duvet up to her nose. It was late autumn, and it was a bit chilly in the room.
“When do you think we’ll meet?” Andrea typed.
While waiting for silfr_eldr’s reply, she browsed through all the pictures she had sent him in the past two weeks. Her long, black hair looked soft and shiny in all of them, and her big brown eyes looked innocent and curious. Needless to say, there was nothing innocent about Andrea Evans. She knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it. When she had realized one thing the dragon liked about her were her curves, she made sure her deep cleavage was very much visible in all the pictures. And yes, Jade had guessed right: she had sent him some pictures in black, sexy lingerie. She was using every trick in the book to keep him interested, to hook him for good. She was dying to see him, or at least learn his real name, but, at the same time, she wasn’t sure whether it was a good idea to insist. She was playing a complicated game in which she was trying to seduce him, but keep cool as to not come off as desperate.
“Soon,” he typed back.
Andrea sighed and furrowed her brows. Her fingers were itching to type: “I want to see you now. How about a pic?”, but she fought the urge. He was an Alpha dragon-shifter. If he said something, then she had to respect it. At least until they were married. Andrea was anything but the submissive, dependent type, but she knew she had to play her role well if she wanted to score a shape-shifter who could give her the things she needed. She comforted herself with the thought that she wouldn’t have to do it for long.
She typed a smiley face, then asked him about his day. As expected, he was vague, avoiding to give her too many details about his job, his businesses, even the members of his clan. Andrea didn’t even know where he lived. Dragon-shifters loved ridiculously large and expensive palaces, and they were known as the wealthiest shifter race in the world. It made sense: they had had thousands of years at their disposal to gather riches and hide them in the caves and catacombs underneath their gaudy homes.
While they chatted for another half hour, Andrea thought about how lucky she was to have been sorted in House Dracones. When she had taken the personality tests the day she had arrived at Alma Venus, she had tried to cheat, but she had soon realized it was impossible. She couldn’t figure out which answers would ensure a place in House Lupi or House Dracones. She had wanted to avoid becoming a mail-order bride for a fox-shifter, a bear-shifter, or an eagle-shifter, as these three factions were more focused on family life than on business, social and financial status, and gathering riches and fat bank accounts. What Andrea needed was a rich shifter, a husband who had so much money that he wouldn’t notice when some of that money mysteriously vanished.
She smiled to herself as she typed sweet nothings into the chat window, and told silfr_eldr how lonely she had been in New York, and then at Alma Venus before she met him. When he asked about her past relationships, she happily told him about how much her exes sucked and how she had never been lucky in love. She wasn’t even lying this time. It felt good to be honest, but she couldn’t indulge in it all the time. Being fair and honest had never gotten her far in life, and she was determined to change that. She was willing to make the sacrifice if it meant she could finally have the life she had always wanted.