Hoarded by the Dragon (Monstrous Matches, #4)

“I’m sure it helps with your work.”

I try not to wince. “Not exactly. It’s a different skill set for me entirely. It made it easier to learn how to make forgeries, and that has contributed the most to being able to restore.”

“Did you make many forgeries?” he asks.

“Some,” I allow, not really wanting to get into it. The pieces I forged and then switched with the real thing on display are what I can never hope to make right. The original works were sold and changed hands so long ago, and the cut I got from the process was too small to ever hope to buy them back.

As if he senses my discomfort, he changes the subject. “Do you like to draw everything?”

“I love portraits but could do without buildings. Sometimes I’ll sketch things from my dreams. It’s why I started to draw in the first place, to capture the images in my head that didn’t make sense.”

Kalos frowns, so I explain.

“I have two skills that are, for the most part, useless. Getting past wards and sometimes I’ll have dreams that come true. There’s no way to change the outcome, and most of the time they are too confusing to make heads or tails of until they happen.” I shrug.

“Prophetic dreams,” Kalos murmurs. “That’s unusual.”

“I don’t think about it much. It hasn’t happened in a while.”

“Those don’t sound like witch talents. True, there are some witch lines that have dreams, but bypassing wards, no.”

“You don’t think I come from witches?” I and everyone around me just assume I’m a witch because my aura apparently feels enough like one. I figured I didn’t have any craft-oriented abilities because I hadn’t been trained. Witches are usually taught how to practice their craft by family, strengthening their natural abilities and branching it with developed skills.

Kalos shrugs. “There is really no way to know unless we were to track down your biological family. It’s possible that you have some fae mixed with a witch line far back in your family tree.”

I frown. “You looked into my background?”

My upbringing hadn’t come up in the short amount of time we’ve spent together.

“Some,” he admits but lacks any guilt. I suppose if I had a thief living with me, I’d do some digging too.

The dragon waits for me to continue the conversation patiently, and I bite my lip before answering his unspoken question about my biological family.

“I don’t want to find them.”

Kalos raises a brow.

I clear my throat. “The baby will be a dragon, right?”

He pauses before nodding. “Most beings will breed true when breeding with witches, and with how hungry for heat this impossibility is, they are definitely a dragon.”

My cheeks heat at the word “breed” even though it lacks the context of lust. “So it wouldn’t really help to know where I come from, would it?”

“Unless you wanted to.”

The silence now is full of expectation. This isn’t a topic I like to discuss, and why am I being so open with this dragon who has ignored me?

The answer to that question comes easily. It’s not like he’s going to reject me, he already has. And maybe it’s an old wound of mine that still aches. Maybe it would do me good to talk about it.

“No one came for me,” I say. “They would have known I’d have unexplainable abilities. There are Council-run orphanages, they didn’t need to put me in the human system, but they did.”

“Is that why you ran away?” he asks, voice soft.

“From the beginning, I knew that something was different with me. Humans aren’t sensitive to things, but it must have been obvious enough that no one ended up adopting me. I always imagined running away, finding somewhere I belonged. At first, I wanted to run away to the circus.” I laugh at the memory. It’s a sad laugh.

“And what would your act have been?” Kalos asks, not making me feel nearly as pathetic as I was.

I hum. “I wanted to work with the lions and tigers, but assumed that’s what everyone else wanted to do too, so I made sure to practice being an acrobat as a plan B.”

His lips twitch. “Ah, the origin of your tumbling skills.”

“Guilty as charged.” I shrug. “Anyway, some kids at school burst that bubble. They said that circuses like that didn’t exist anymore, and the ones that did exist wouldn’t take a kid anywhere.”

“What assholes,” Kalos growls.

I raise a brow at him.

“There was no harm in letting you believe what you did.”

My smile is wry. “We live in the real world, and I was too weird for the real world. I knew things were going to happen before they did and wasn’t always careful enough when talking about it. I didn’t know anyone like me.” I bit my lip before continuing. “So the first time I met someone who was also too weird for the real world, I was hooked.”

The words flow easier now. “I had a dream that I was positive wasn’t going to come true about meeting a man with gray skin and pointed ears. Then I stumbled upon him in the backroom of a coffee shop while trying to find the bathroom.”

“I was shocked.” I snort. “He was shocked and definitely not human, so I started peppering him with questions. He gave me his card and told me I was special and if I wanted to know more, I should relocate to the city. That there were more people like that there. And if I needed anything, I should give him a call.”

I swallow. Half expecting Kalos to laugh at how gullible I was, but he says nothing.

“I packed a bag and took the first bus there. I was only six months from turning eighteen, but I couldn’t stand to wait any longer than a few days.”

Kalos’s hand on my stomach tenses, his talons catching on the fabric of my shirt. “He tempted you out.”

“Yep,” I say easily. “I thought he was being helpful for the most part. What I didn’t know was that there was a ward on that room to make sure the business being done wasn’t disturbed, which is why he was unglamoured. I was rather lucky that I had walked in after his clients had already left.” My laugh was breathy. “It would have been so much worse if it was just five minutes earlier.”

I was stupid. Innocent in a way that I didn’t think I could be after being bounced from foster home to foster home. But stopping the story here would feel like lying, only showing the parts to Kalos I’d rather he see.

“I had a hard time when I got here. I didn’t want to call the guy right away. I already knew how to look for the strings attached to the things people offered, and nothing he was going to give me would be free. So I tried to get people to talk to me about magic. Tried to find paranormals. I thought I was going to show up…” I trail off.

“And find people like you,” Kalos says.

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