Page 61 of Dragon’s Ending

“Dominic—”

“It doesn’t change anything.” He said it quickly, harshly, as though he needed the words out before I could contradict him. “It’s not like I didn’t know why I was sent away.”

But his hands were shaking.

And finally I understood why Dominic touched me so much. Why he gravitated constantly towards warmth and contact and closeness like he was terrified it might vanish if he let go for even a second. He’d spent eleven years being observed instead of held.

“For what it’s worth, your family fucking sucks,” I told him, sitting down close beside him, leaning in until our shoulders and arms were pressed together.

He huffed a wreck of a laugh. “I mean, yeah, but…” he shrugged. “They weren’t wrong. I couldn’t control my dragon. I was a mess.”

I stroked wet hair back from his face. “Dominic, you were a child. You’d just lost your mum. Of course you were a mess. They were supposed to help you through it, not send you away.”

He buried his face in his arms, and I put my arms around him and pulled him in against me.

God knew how long we sat there like that. I said nothing further, because I honestly didn’t know what to say, and Dominic wasn’t talking.

I couldn’t understand this family. Not a bit. Evelyn had told me Rhodri had defied his entire family to marry Mari, so I didn’t want to imagine what kind of a state he must have been in after her death. But to send their son away? No matter how many times I tried to wrap my mind around it, I couldn’t. Maybe, had it been just for a few weeks, I’d have put it down to Rhodri losing his mind through grief, but to keep him away for eleven years? It was unfathomable.

And the boy who’d been so appallingly treated didn’t give a sign of it normally. He swaggered through life as if nothing could touch him. He was a million miles away from the man I was now sitting next to, tucked up into himself and shivering.

As he said, he’d known the facts, but there was all the difference in the world between knowing and seeing it laid out like that. Not a hint of nuance or understanding. Just judgement, masquerading as record keeping. Future generations would inherit that judgement as if it were fact. Except the real shame wasn’t Dominic’s—it was the people who’d done this to a devastated child.

The rain was still coming down and it was freezing out here, but I didn’t want to suggest going back to the house—Rhodri’s house—and there was nowhere else for us to go.

Dominic stayed curled forward, rain dripping steadily from his hair. Then suddenly he swore softly under his breath.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re shivering.”

I opened my mouth to deny it just as my teeth chattered, which rather ruined the effect.

Dominic huffed what might almost have been a laugh and pushed himself upright with visible effort. “Come on,” he muttered. “Before you freeze to death and I have to explain to your head of family how I killed you by emotional breakdown.”

Despite everything, a startled laugh escaped me.

Moving seemed to help him somehow. Or perhaps it was just having something practical to do that seemed to bring him back to himself. We found our clothes in separate piles in the wet grass, stumbling around barefoot through darkness while rain drifted steadily down around us. At one point Dominic silently handed me my shirt where it had apparently landed halfway across the hillside.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah.” His voice still sounded wrong. Like all the texture had been sanded away and what was left was dull with exhaustion.

By the time we finally started back towards the house, I wondered why we’d even bothered dressing. Our clothes had been soaked through before we put them on, and wet wool and soggy denim weren’t exactly keeping me any warmer.

Dominic walked close beside me without seeming aware of it, his shoulder brushing mine every few steps. It hurt to think of why he did that, but I made sure to stay close enough that we kept touching.

The house loomed out of the darkness eventually, bright windows promising warmth and dryness. Dominic slowed as we approached it, tension drawing through his shoulders again.

After a moment, he puffed out a short, sharp breath and headed for the back door without a word.

Inside, the sudden warmth felt almost unreal, and the squelching sounds we made as we climbed the back stairs might at another time have been funny.

We were halfway up the stairs when Dominic glanced over at me and frowned. “You’re still shivering.”

“I’m fine.”

“You look hypothermic.”