CHAPTER FIFTEEN #4
It came up through my spine like a column of fire, and I heard something that was very close to a sound leaving my own throat, something I swallowed before it could fully form, as I locked every muscle in my body and held on.
I was the king. I was the one who was in fucking charge. I had ordered this.
I told myself all of it again, each word as cold as I could make it, stacking them against the heat like a bulwark against a flood.
The dragon pressed back with the force of something that had been waiting its entire existence for exactly this moment, and I felt it at the backs of my eyes, felt it in the shaking of my hands, felt it in the way the bars under my palms had begun to warm.
I was still upright. But that was all I had.
GO TO HER. OPEN HER MOUTH. PUT OUR COCK IN IT. MAKE HER SUCK US.
No.
I wouldn’t move. I would force the dragon to witness all of this. And when she began to moan harder and her entire body began to shake around Corvin’s cock, it was all I could do to keep myself standing.
It was then that Corvin’s rhythm broke. The change was subtle, but I recognized the moment his control left him.
His grip on her shoulders tightened until his knuckles went white as his hips stuttered forward, once, hard, and then he drove into her as deeply as he could go and held there, shuddering, his head dropping back and his throat working around a sound that was barely human.
She cried out beneath him.
The dragon tore itself loose.
It came all at once, the way a dam doesn’t leak before it breaks, the way there’s no warning and then suddenly there’s nothing but water.
I felt it rip through the boundary between us, and the heat was immediate, total, and wrong, the kind of heat that lives in the marrow, that turns breath to vapor, that has nothing to do with the body and everything to do with whatever ancient,
terrible thing I’d swallowed the night I took it into my blood.
My exhale came out as smoke.
I looked down at my hands. The fingernails had already curved. The skin at my knuckles had gone strange, the texture altered, something harder and iridescent pushing up beneath the surface in thin overlapping lines. Scales. At least, the beginning of them.
I pressed the heel of one hand against my temple and felt something there that shouldn’t have been there.
The pressure of it was extraordinary. Not pain exactly, though it was close to pain.
More the sensation of something that had always existed beneath the surface finally insisting on its right to break through.
The bone at my temples had begun to shift.
I felt the movement of it, felt the way the skin stretched and then yielded, felt the slow emergence of something curved.
Horns.
Not fully. Not yet. But the beginning was unmistakable, and I knew how quickly the beginning became the rest.
I moved.
I pushed the door open, stepping through it, and I was grateful, violently grateful, for the fact that I hadn’t locked it behind me when I’d entered.
It was a detail of carelessness that had become the only thing standing between me and what I would do to them both if I stayed in this cell another sixty seconds.
I had enough of my wits to remember to lock the cell door behind me, but my hands were shaking when I did so.
The key scraped against the mechanism twice before it caught.
The scales had reached my wrists by this point, and I could feel my fingers curving further, the joints restructuring themselves around the dragon’s insistence, and I turned from the door and ran.
The corridor was dark and long, and I moved through it with my jaw locked and my hands at my sides, breathing through my nose in short controlled increments that came out as smoke.
I heard the prisoners exchanging words of shock as I hurried past them.
Each exhale left a faint haze in the torchlit air.
I could smell it: sulfur and char, the particular acrid signature of dragon fire looking for an outlet.
I reached the stairs and took them two at a time.
The door at the top was heavy oak banded with iron, and I hit it with my shoulder, coming out into the corridor beyond, and then I stopped.
Empty. The hallway was completely empty.
No guards. No pages. No wandering courtiers. No knights. Just stone and shadow and the distant sound of the castle settling around me, the particular silence of deep night when even Camelot slept.
I stood there for a moment with my back against the wall and the door to the dungeon stairs at my shoulder, and I breathed.
In.
Out.
The smoke was still there, thin but present, curling from between my lips with every exhale.
She yields for him, the dragon said, and its voice had gone quiet and terrible, the way it got sometimes when the roaring was done and what remained was simply truth. She opens for him. Her body takes him and keeps him and makes those sounds. Those sounds are ours. They should be ours.
I pressed the back of my skull against the stone and said nothing.
We could have taken her. We could have taken her instead. We could have filled her with our seed. We could have given her our child.
My hands were beginning to return slowly, the scales retreating the way they always did when the worst of the surge had passed, the skin reknitting itself over the evidence of what lived beneath.
The horns were still there, partial and aching at my temples, but diminishing.
I pressed two fingers against one and felt it pull back under the bone with a sensation like a tooth being reseated in its socket.
I breathed until the smoke stopped.
Why would you do this to us?
I straightened from the wall, smoothed the front of my tunic with both hands, and walked down the corridor toward the opposite end.
The castle was quiet around me.
But I knew that behind me, somewhere beneath the stone, the dark, and the locked door, she was still making sounds I had no business hearing.