Page 38 of Dragon’s Ending

“Oh, they can go,” I said. “In fact, they should go, so that no one in the future has to go around the same loop we did.” We. I immediately wanted to bang my head on the table. “But would you make a list of the titles, just in case, before you remove them?”

His eyebrows rose, and belatedly I realised I was ordering him about. But that didn’t seem to be what he was concerned over. “Don’t you ever do anything without thinking three steps ahead?” he asked.

I froze, because that hit a little too close to home. We’d split amicably, me and Will. He’d met someone else, and he’d said that he was sorry, but it was just the way it was. And though I missed him, it hadn’t exactly been a soul-wrenching loss. Which seemed to upset him a little. He hadn’t blown up about it, but he had turned passive aggressive. Spontaneity, Ben. It’s a thing, you know.

Yes, I was well aware of that fact. But spontaneity and historical archives did not go well together. In fact, they ended up in the kind of mess this records room started off in.

“I’m assuming you have a possible outcome in mind rather than you just want to read them later,” Dominic said, gesturing at the books, and I realised I hadn’t answered him. Instead, I’d retreated into a little hurt place inside me that I’d hardly remembered was there.

For once, he wasn’t teasing. He’d been asking a serious question, but coming at it sideways so that he didn’t betray his ignorance. Which was very Rhodri, now I thought about it, not showing any kind of vulnerability. And then I remembered Dominic’s expression at breakfast. Unlike Rhodri, he was still a work in progress when it came to hiding vulnerability.

“A list will be helpful just in case it turns out Glenys was mistaken and we later need to find the books again,” I said at last, and he nodded.

“Knew there’d be a historian’s reasoning behind it,” he said.

The weight that’d descended onto my shoulders melted away, and I found myself almost smiling at Dominic. Somehow, Will’s parting shot had stayed with me, though I didn’t think he’d intended it to—he’d simply been hurt himself. I’d come to think being careful was a shortcoming. But Dominic didn’t seem to think it needed defending.

“And these butt-ugly statues? Please say you need me to smash them all to check for secret letters hidden inside,” he added, picking one up and staring in disgust at the lovingly sculpted gilt-speckled ballgown.

“Don’t let me stop you, but they might be worth something.”

He turned it upside down and examined the maker’s mark on the base. “Doubt it. Maybe Teddy would like them for target practice for his pine cones.”

“I think he’s collecting them, not chucking them at things,” I pointed out.

“Kid doesn’t know what he’s missing. I once took down every single tulip in the garden with a catapult. Best day of my life.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the glee in his voice. God, the man was impossible and yet irresistible. Thankfully, before my mind went too far down that path, he put the figurine to one side and knelt down to drag the books off the bottom shelf. I’d just returned my attention to my court case when he stood up again.

“Bloody hell, this is ridiculous.” He turned around and left.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. It fitted with his habit of simply arriving and leaving without fanfare, but that had been a bit abrupt even by his standards. And disappointing.

Determined not to keep thinking about Dominic, I instead turned my attention back to the closely written twelfth century law case. In Latin, just to make it even harder work to read.

This particular quarrel was over the ownership of a peregrine falcon, and I was wondering why on earth a dragon would have a bird of prey when the door opened again. I twisted round in my seat, and Dominic brandished something triumphantly at me.

“I got Glenys to give up the good stuff,” he said. When he stopped waving it around, I saw it was a hand-held vacuum cleaner. “Get rid of some of that mountain of dust.”

“You’re brilliant,” I said, and he just shrugged, as if he already knew. Which he did. Except he shot me a sideways look full of laughter, and I knew he didn’t mean that seriously. Well, not completely seriously.

The noise the vacuum made was annoying, and as it gobbled the dust, it smelled like it was about to burst into flames. But I couldn’t care about that because I had Dominic Bedwyr, heir to the headship of the first dragon family in Wales, on his hands and knees in front of me. He was enthusiastically, if inexpertly, hoovering up dust from the shelf he’d just emptied. And if the way he leaned forward happened to show off an arse that was probably illegal in its perfection, that was another reason my court case was not getting read.

Eventually, he rose to his feet, dusted down his knees, and shot me another of those looks. As if he knew I’d been glued to his arse. Metaphorically speaking. Sadly.

For a while, we settled back into work. Or at least, I attempted to. Dominic attacked the shelves with the handheld vacuum in intermittent bursts of enthusiasm, occasionally sneezing dramatically and declaring the Bedwyr ancestors biological weapons.

Eventually, even he seemed to run out of energy for destruction and dropped back into his chair with a folder of correspondence he claimed he was “categorising”, though from the speed he was turning pages, I suspected he was mostly looking for scandals.

“Met Abimelech Mortimer last night,” he said casually after a while.

It took everything I had not to gape at him. In dragon terms, that was like announcing he’d just met the king. But that was probably the reaction Dominic was after, so I wasn’t going to give it to him.

“Oh,” I said, letting only idle curiosity show. “What’s he like?”

“And that,” he said, setting the folder aside and coming to perch on the table beside me, so his thigh was distractingly close, “is the million-dollar question. I can tell you what he wanted me to think he was like, but that’s all.”

“Sounds as if his reputation as a cold-blooded mastermind is well earned,” I said. “I know my head of family doesn’t trust him as far as she can throw him, but she’s not going to turn down the opportunity to access all these records that we’d never otherwise get to see. Even if your family does seem to have spent most of the twelfth century falling out over hunting falcons.” I gestured to the court case in front of me. “How do dragons even own falcons? They’d be terrified of us.”