Chapter twenty-four #3
Denver spread out below us like a map—the grid of streets, the glitter of glass towers catching the street lights, the snake of the Platte River cutting through it all.
And beyond the city, the Rockies. Endless peaks draped in snow, ridgelines sharp as knife edges against the impossibly clear moonlit sky.
The air was thin and cold and tasted like freedom.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, and the wind stole the words before they could go anywhere. But Theron heard me anyway—felt me, through the bond, through the place where my hands gripped his scales.
This is what I am, he said, and there was something raw in the thought. Vulnerable. Like he was laying himself bare in the most literal way possible. This is what I’ve been hiding from you.
I pressed my face against his neck, tears streaming sideways from the wind. “It’s incredible. You’re incredible.”
You’re not afraid.
“No.” And I wasn’t. Not even a little. Not of the height or the speed or the impossible reality of riding a dragon over the Rocky Mountains.
I was terrified of a hundred things—of losing my family, of centuries stretching ahead of me, of being worthy of something this extraordinary.
But afraid of him? Never. “I’m not afraid of you. I never will be.”
He banked left, and the world tilted, and I held on tighter and laughed—actually laughed, wild and breathless, the sound ripped away by the wind but echoing through my chest like something breaking free.
He climbed higher. The air thinned until my lungs burned with each breath, and then he leveled out, wings spread wide, riding a thermal that carried us effortlessly over a ridgeline dusted in fresh snow. Below us, a valley opened up—impossibly vast, a river threading through it like liquid silver.
This is where I come when the world gets too loud, he said. When the human shape feels too small.
I understood that. Understood it in a way I couldn’t have articulated a week ago but felt bone-deep now. The containment of it—of being something vast pressed into something small, of holding back and holding back and holding back until you forgot what it felt like to just be.
“Take me lower,” I said, pressing the words into his scales with intention. “I want to see the river.”
He tucked his wings and dove.
My stomach dropped, the ground rushing up at impossible speed, and I screamed—not fear, just the pure animal thrill of falling, of trusting someone else to catch you.
At the last possible moment his wings snapped out, catching the air with a concussive boom that sent spray from the river exploding outward in a perfect circle.
We skimmed the water’s surface so close I could have nearly trailed my fingers in it, and the cold mist hit my face like a baptism.
Your mark, Theron said, and something in his tone shifted—reverent, almost awed. It’s forming.
“What?” I pressed my hand harder against his scales. “What mark?”
Look at your wrist.
I lifted my tingling left hand from the ridge, keeping my right firmly anchored, and turned my forearm toward me.
There—spreading across the inside of my wrist like ink bleeding through paper—was a pattern.
Copper and gold, iridescent, shifting in the light exactly the way his scales did. It looked like—
“It’s you,” I breathed. “It’s your pattern.”
The mate mark. His wings beat once, carrying us back up into the golden light. It often appears during the first flight. It means the bond is sealed. Complete. Permanent.
I stared at the mark—my mark, our mark—and felt something settle in my chest that had been unsettled my entire life. Like a key turning in a lock I hadn’t known existed.
“Permanent,” I repeated. And the word didn’t scare me. It felt like coming home.
Permanent, he confirmed. For as long as we both live.
Centuries. Hundreds of years. Watching the world change and change again, reinventing ourselves, finding new cities and new names and new lives. But always this. Always him. Always the warmth of scales beneath my hands and a voice in my mind that knew me completely.
“Take me home,” I said, pressing my cheek against his neck one more time. “I want to start the rest of our lives.”
He turned in a wide, graceful arc, banking toward Denver. The sun was setting now, painting the sky in shades of copper and gold that matched his scales so perfectly it looked deliberate. Like the universe was showing off.
Below us, the city glittered. Somewhere down there was the arena, where we’d go back to work tomorrow.
Where I’d skate and he’d coach and we’d pretend we were nothing more than player and mentor in front of the cameras.
But compared to how vast our future was a few years of being wary in front of cameras was nothing.
And where we’d fight for a cup with a team full of dragons who’d risked everything to bring me home.
But right now, up here, there was no pretending. No hiding. Just the two of us and the sky and the impossible, beautiful truth of what we were.
And how much we loved.