Chapter 7
Nica: margaret are you awake
Nica: this is going to sound insane
Nica: i think i saw something. in the fog. over the water.
Nica: never mind. jet lag. from a forty minute drive.
She saw us. The dragon’s satisfaction moved through Demetri’s skull like a purr.
He stood on the balcony with rain running down his chest and Nica staring at him as though she’d watched the sky split open — because she had.
Fog and wings and a shadow, ruby scales catching the moonlight.
She’d seen him. Some ruinous part of him was glad of it, glad she’d looked up into the dark and seen the truth of him and not yet run, and he hated that gladness, because it belonged to the dragon and not to the man who was supposed to be keeping her safe from exactly this.
He kept his breathing slow. The shift still burned beneath his skin, the dragon pressing against the fragile boundary between them, testing for weakness, and the broken Chain barely held him now.
The silver links circled his wrist beneath his closed fist, dim with dying magic; the bracelet had shattered during his fight with Benedikte, and though Caelen had bound the largest pieces together, the repair was cosmetic. A bandage over a severed artery.
Flying had been a mistake. Not flying would have been worse.
He’d spent hours in his rooms listening to Nica breathe on the far side of the house, hearing her footsteps, smelling her through two walls and a closed door — that warm, unnameable scent threading into his lungs and lodging there — every primitive part of him demanding he go to her: lie beside her, touch her, guard her sleep, cover her body with his own until nothing in any world could reach her.
The damaged Chain amplified the hunger so far that his human skin became a cage.
So he’d shifted and taken to the fog, hoping cold air and distance would quiet the dragon.
Instead, Nica had stepped onto the balcony while he circled, and now she stood in a thin shirt with the rain darkening the cotton over her shoulders, her pale hair whipping around her face, her nipples drawn tight beneath the fabric, and every scrap of distance he’d bought himself in the cold went up like paper.
Demetri looked away. Barely.
She is cold, the dragon observed. She is beautiful. She is ours. She is frightened. She is curious. She is still cold.
He reached for the elements, pulled heat from his own skin, and shaped the air around her, warming the rain before it could touch her.
Nica blinked, her arms slowly lowering. The wind still moved through the fog, rain still struck the stone, but none of it reached her now — an invisible pocket of warmth surrounded her, delicate as glass, made of nothing but his own banked fire.
He’d killed men with that fire. He’d leveled a hunter’s compound to ash with it once, in a single pass.
Now he spent it warming the shoulders of a woman in a wet T-shirt, and found it the best use he had ever put it to.
She looked down at herself, then up at him.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
Her eyes narrowed. He should have known better.
“Do not say that word to me again tonight.”
Despite everything, his mouth almost moved. His mate was furious with him, and the dragon approved. She has spirit. She has no shoes. Take her inside.
He stepped toward her. Nica stepped back, and he stopped at once — the small motion struck harder than Benedikte’s claws had, a sharp cold blade straight under the ribs.
Her gaze dropped to his bare feet, climbed the wet black trousers riding low on his hips, and caught on the blood at his side: not much, only a narrow line where the shift had reopened the healing wound.
Her face changed — the fear giving way, for one betraying instant, to concern, and the dragon seized on it, triumphant.
“You’re bleeding.”
“It is nothing.”
“That word counts.”
“Nica.”
“What were you doing out there?”
“Flying.” The answer left him before discipline could catch it.
Silence. Rain whispered against the boundary of heat around her. Nica stared, and Demetri’s dragon went still, and then, slowly, she looked past him into the fog. “Flying.”
He considered lying. He’d lied to enemies, to kings, to council interrogators and governments; he’d built human identities so complete that tax agencies and intelligence services had accepted them as fact.
He could not lie to her face. Not well. Not while she stood in front of him with questions burning in her pale eyes and her whole brave frightened body angled toward the truth the way a plant angles toward light.
“I own a helicopter.”
She looked up at the sky again. “I didn’t hear one.”
“The fog carries sound strangely.”
“That was not a helicopter.”
“No.” The admission cost him.
Her breath caught, and the dragon pressed closer. Tell her.
I cannot.
She is ours.
She has not chosen us.
She will.
That is not enough.
Nica crossed her arms again. “What did I see?”
Demetri took one careful breath. Magical law lived inside the question, and the answer could kill her.
If he told an unbonded human the truth, the Secret Kingdoms would demand her execution; his authority might delay it, his wealth might hide her for a time, but neither would erase the law.
And he’d already decided he’d burn the continent before he let an executioner near her.
He had crossed two hundred years and never once meant a vow the way he meant that one.
“I cannot tell you.”
Her face went blank — not calm, closed — shutters coming down over all that brave, burning curiosity, and Demetri hated it instantly, hated that he was the one who’d caused it.
“You can’t,” she repeated.
“Not yet.”
“So I’m supposed to pretend I didn’t see a dragon flying over your house?”
The word struck through him. Dragon. Her mouth had shaped it; her voice had given it life; and the creature inside him surged toward the sound of it like a beast toward its own name in her mouth.
Scales flashed across his chest, ruby-red, one violent sweep over his ribs before he forced them back beneath his skin, the effort tearing a low sound out of his throat.
Nica saw. Her eyes widened. Demetri’s control fractured, and he reached the balcony wall and gripped the stone with both hands before the claws could emerge, the granite groaning under his fingers.
“Nica. Go inside.”
She did not move. “Your chest.”
“I know.”
“What the hell was that?”
“Inside.”
“No.”