Page 81 of Daughter of Garnet

"Why would you gift me Dominic Bradly as a scent match, knowing who his father is?"

Ilota speaks in my mind almost immediately.

"I do not have the strength to Bless you with a match."

"Then whose choice was it?"

If scent matches are gifts from the Gods, then Dominic's patron is the one who stuck us together. I want to know why.

"Hey, Kashmyre?" I say out loud. "I know I'm not one of yours, but could you please explain why you paired us together?"

Dominic looks at me like I am a fool. "What are you doing?"

"Trying to find out why the Gods matched us. Ilota says she had nothing to do with it."

The Alpha shakes his head and rubs his temples. "Can you just shift, please?"

Do I tell Dominic that his dad would kill me if he knew I existed? Does he even know what a bad guy his father is? His shady treatment of the Omegas at the Institute alone is enough to convince me he shouldn't hold the position he does.

"Shit," Dominic swears, bending in half. "That hurts, fuck."

I rush to him and grab him by the arm. "What hurts?"

"A God yelling in my fucking head."

I fight my smile. "Ah, Kashmyre saying hello, is he?"

"He has never spoken to me once, and you ask a question, and now he's all too happy to answer?"

"What did he say?" Dominic clams up and rolls his lips together. "Come on, what did he tell you?"

His eye twitches, followed by a loud exhale. "Fine. Fine." He waves through the air, as if the God in his mind is a pesky bug flying around his head. "He says that I need you as much as you need me."

"I don't need you!"

"And I don't need you."

"I don't know, maybe you do. You did drag me out here to shift."

He growls and stalks away from me toward a tree, bracing his arm on it with his back to me. "My sabertooth is demanding it. Just because he needs you doesn't mean I do."

"Aren't you tired of fighting this, Dominic?"

I don't know what my goal is, asking that question. I don't want to be with him any more than he wants me, but I'm having a hard time spitting in the Gods' faces by rejecting him. They're all-knowing, right? If Kashmyre thinks we need one another, who are we to deny it?

Dominic strips off his clothes and shifts into his sabertooth tiger form to avoid answering me.

My dragon pushes against me now, asking to be let out, and I'm struggling to deny her. The beast lowers himself to the forest floor and rolls over, showing me his belly.

If there was any thought in my mind that Dominic was in control, it's gone now. He'd never show his belly to me.

That is enough to have me pushing my clothes off, but once I'm standing naked in the forest, my garnet necklace placed carefully on my stack of clothes, my worries come back.

What if someone sees me and reports me to the Archon?

But my dragon doesn't care about any of that, wanting to be with her scent match, and pushes to the forefront.

It's only my second time in this form, and it feels both foreign and like the most natural state of my body at the same time, which is an odd sensation to get used to. I do feel more connected to my dragon now than I have before, but I don't know if that's the shift or the lack of my necklace.