The Dragon’s E-Mail Order Menage

Chapter 10

Maggie’s head was spinning. She had a pounding headache and a stomach churning with upset. She couldn’t tell if she was going to double over and throw up her whole fancy dinner from one step to the next. Normally that would have been enough to stop her in her tracks, but not tonight. Tonight she didn’t think there was anything that would stop her. She felt compelled to keep on moving and she would listen to the voice telling her to do so until she felt less confused, less afraid.

And one of the things that was most confusing to her, out of the whole scene that had just played out, was why she was so terribly angry in the first place. She couldn’t understand it. Sure, there was the fact that he had lied to her, and what she had said was true; this was not his first lie by omission, he had done it before he had ever even met her.

But this time it felt different, more personal. This time he knew her, claimed to care about her, and still he could lead her into the lion’s den without any real warning of what she was getting herself into. It seemed so selfish to her, so thoughtless. But was that enough to explain why she was so shaken up? She didn’t think so. So then what?

She was angry with herself. She was angry at herself for letting the baggage from her past so negatively impact the life she had chosen for herself. There was that, and then there was the fact that she was afraid. She was afraid that she had left one life that had already been planned out for her only to head straight into another version of the same damn thing.

And the legend, she was afraid of that, too. Her mother had led her to believe that it was not completely insane to think that she might be the fire queen and Hudson and Levi her prince of dark and light. Levi’s mother mentioning that she wanted a grandchild, and soon, only brought that legend back to the forefront of her mind. The entire purpose of the shifters in that myth was to make the dragon people strong again, some of which would be done through the children they would have.

Well, that was all well and good in theory, but when the idea of actually getting pregnant came up, and so quickly, she could feel herself starting to panic. She panicked and then she got even angrier at herself for allowing that panic to take root and before she knew it she was stumbling along the streets of Santa Fe with tears in her eyes and no clue where it was she was going. In short, she was a complete mess. That was what made her so much more vulnerable than she would ordinarily have been.

She wasn’t paying even the slightest amount of attention to what she was doing or where she was going and so she never saw the silent threat stalking her until it was upon her, until it was too late. She turned a corner in the dim, fading light and felt terrifyingly strong hands grip her wrists so tightly she let out a cry of surprise and pain. Not a second later she felt cold steel and heard the dull click of handcuffs closing tightly around her wrists.

“Hey! What?”

“I would keep real quiet if I were you, real still. Don’t want to make a scene, do we? Don’t want to make a big fuss in the city where your new boyfriends live.”

Damon. God help her, it was Damon. She didn’t know how and she didn’t know why, but he had found her here in Santa Fe and now that he had, he intended to—what? He intended to do what with her? Through the haze of her stress and slight drunkenness, she couldn’t begin to imagine why he would do a thing like this. Damon had always been so sweet, so harmless. She knew that he had been heartbroken when she had told him that marriage was not in the cards for them but it had never occurred to her that he would try and harm her, let alone stalk her. And yet here he was. She didn’t need to see him to know it was him. She would know that voice anywhere. He had been her other half for years.

“Damon, please. These handcuffs are so tight. You’re hurting me.”

“Am I? Su*ks, doesn’t it? You’ll live. Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll be stronger in the end. Isn’t that what people say to someone who’s going through a tough time?”

“But why do you have to keep them so tight?”

“So you can’t shift. Why the hell do you think?”

“What do you want, Damon? Will you just look at me and tell me what you want?”

He spun her around and she quickly realized that looking at him wasn’t necessarily better. She had gotten it into her head that if she could get him to make eye contact with her she could reason with him, appeal to him on a different level. But when she looked into his eyes she could see that the ability to reason was long gone for him.

What remained was hollow, frightening to say the least. He looked like a crazed person, nothing like the man she had been with and loved. She had no idea how she was going to get out of this because he was right; these cuffs had her arms far too tightly bound behind her back for her to be able to shift.

“What do I want?” he spat angrily in her face, causing her to recoil involuntarily. “I want what I was promised. I want what’s mine.”

“Do you mean me?”

“What else would I mean?! Of course I mean you! I was supposed to marry you, Maggie, not those freaks you’re shacked up with now. It was supposed to be me.”

“But Damon,” she said softly, keeping her voice as calm and even as she could manage to given the circumstances, “sometimes things just don’t go the way you plan on them going. Sometimes people change. It just can’t be helped.”

“Bullsh*t! Bullsh*t. I don’t buy that. I don’t accept it. You just got confused, that’s all. You got confused and now I’m going to fix it. You’ll see. Everything will go back to normal. Everything will go back to the way it used to be and we’ll belong to each other again like we’re meant to.”

She wanted to keep him talking, felt desperate to do so, but she didn’t get the chance. Maybe some part of him was too smart to allow her to do that. Maybe he knew that if she could keep the conversation going she would either buy enough time to get rescued (maybe by Levi? Jesus, why had she told him not to follow her?) Or manage to convince him to change his mind.