Chapter 4

Chapter Four

My eyes started to burn as tears pricked at them. I was so stupid to think that they loved me, that they wanted the best for me like I had wanted for them. I closed my eyes, feeling a tear slip down my cheek. Reaching up, I scrubbed that tear away and opened my eyes. Blinking rapidly, I wasn’t going to cry over them. 

I wouldn’t do it. Things would get better for me, they had to. I couldn’t keep going on the way that I was. Tonight, I’d sleep in my car, then head into work. Hopefully, Glinda wouldn’t mind if I used my free time at the shop to call around to find an inexpensive divorce attorney so that I could get this taken with and over as soon as possible. 

I wanted to be back in my home, but I didn’t want to be there with Nolan and Bethany. I never wanted to see my husband ever again and I was slowly getting angrier at my sister. That pain was turning into something darker that made me want her to hurt just like I was. 

Picking up my drink, I tossed it back. Deciding that I would get one more when I noticed a man was standing outside of the booth watching me closely. He was wearing a suit and looked oddly out of place here.

I looked up at him and swallowed hard at the look in his deep blue eyes. 

***Spencer POV***

I parked my SUV into the parking lot of Full Moon. It was one of the few businesses that I owned in the city that my family didn’t know about. They knew that it was shifter run, but they hadn’t realized that it was mine. It was the perfect place for me to sort through my father’s orders to my brother and I. I needed to find a mate; it didn’t have to be a mate that I was in love with. 

Love was for fools and I was no fool. Finding a mate that you loved made you weak. I had seen it too many times and I refused to weaken myself like that. 

Letting out a sigh as I pulled the keys from the ignition and rested my forehead on the steering wheel. This fucking day had been long and now I just wanted to have a few drinks and maybe find someone to warm my bed so that I could work off my tension before heading back to my house and sleeping it all off. Then I could get started on finding a mate tomorrow, just someone to make my father happy enough to hand over his title to me. 

My father had met up with my brother and I to discuss the future of our thrall. The old dragon was coming to the age where he knew his end would be soon and even though I hated the bastard, I didn’t want what he was asking of my brother and I.

I didn’t want a mate. I could run the thrall without one, it wouldn’t help me like he thought it would. Love was for the weak and I wasn’t weak. Yet, my father wanted me to find my mate. He wasn’t willing to hand over the thrall to me or my brother unless we had found our mate. He wanted us to claim them and breed with them, securing things for the future of our thrall before he was willing to hand over his title to one of us. 

So whether I liked it or not, I was going to have to find my mate. It didn’t matter to me if it was my fated mate or not. I knew that this was a bad idea. That I didn’t want a mate, but I would need one for this. I couldn’t let my brother take over the thrall. 

He was too young and didn’t think things through. It would only end up bringing about destruction to our thrall. There weren’t enough dragons around anymore for that. If our thrall dissolved, it would bring the Elder’s council down on us and I didn’t want that. No one wanted Vega and her consorts to come to our territory and split it up between other thralls, flocks, and packs. 

Vega was doing better than her father had and several thralls were flourishing, but we weren’t one of them. No, my father had been loyal to the previous head of the council and he had yet to submit to Adner’s daughter Vega. I couldn’t say that I blamed him, it was hard to bow to someone like her. 

I’d heard rumors that Marcus Blackwell and his half dragon mate had been the one to take down the old dragon. I didn’t know if that was true, but it would make it hard for any of us to accept the newest Elder. I myself didn’t want to submit to her either, but I was willing to do it if I were the head of our thrall just to make sure that my people were safe. 

My brother was like our father. He wouldn’t bend and he was too brash and young to take over as the Tarak of the thrall. I couldn’t let that happen to my family. That’s what the thrall was. I wouldn’t let it be destroyed by the whims of a child. He was likely to mate everyone off just so that he could be free to do as he pleased. It would be the same things with the thrall’s business holdings. Everything split up and divided.

At least, Full Moon was something that he couldn’t touch. I’d hired a pretty little wolf shifter to manage the place and Cristina did a good job of that. She might look like a slip of a woman with her bright blue and green hair and her deep amber eyes, but she was just as fierce as a dragon when it came to taking care of what she considered hers. 

And Cristina considered Full Moon hers just as much as anything else that she owned. I’d helped the rogue wolf out, giving her a place above the bar to stay while she sorted out things with her previous pack and even though she wasn’t part of my thrall, I knew that she thought of me as her alpha.