Chapter 15
Nica: margaret i’m safe
Margaret: WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN
Nica: it’s complicated. also there may be a hearing.
Margaret: a legal hearing? do you need counsel?
Nica: not that kind of hearing
Demetri expected Nica to recoil. She did not. That frightened him more than any recoil could have, because it meant she was choosing to stay in the same room as the truth, and hope was the one thing two centuries had taught him not to trust.
They returned to the estate beneath enough magical concealment to hide an army.
Benedikte carried the captured Gideon Rook in iron restraints in a separate vehicle, and Caelen and Lirien sealed the grounds before anyone crossed the threshold.
Nica stayed beside Demetri. Not touching.
Not leaving. He was fiercely, pathetically aware of the exact distance between them — eighteen inches, the width of the fear she hadn’t decided what to do with yet.
The spear wound had closed, but green magic still burned through his nerves like acid poured into the seams of him, and the Chain was gone, and his dragon pressed against human thought with every heartbeat, closer to the surface than it had been in sixty years.
He had hours. Perhaps less. None of it mattered until Nica knew the truth.
All of it. He would spend the last clear hours he might ever have giving her the thing she’d asked for and he’d refused, and let that be the last honest act of a long life if it had to be.
They sat in the translation room because it was hers — her choice — the manuscript between them like a third party to the conversation. Caelen and Lirien waited near the doors. Benedikte stood by the windows, a dark shape against the fog. Nica looked at Demetri. “What are you?”
“Draquonir. A dragon.” The word he had been forbidden to give her fell into the room and did not kill her, and something in his chest unclenched a fraction.
“A man and a dragon.”
“Yes. Two aspects. Distinct, but not separate.” The dragon stirred, pleased to be discussed.
Tell her I am the better half. Demetri ignored him.
Nica noticed the shift in his attention, read it off his face the way she’d learned to read everything.
“He’s talking to you, isn’t he? What is he saying? ”
“Frequently, that I am an idiot.” Her mouth almost moved. “What did he say just now?” Demetri considered protecting his dignity, decided it was worth nothing beside the chance of that almost-smile. “He told me to tell you that he is the better half.”
Nica looked down, and this time the smile appeared — small, painful, precious, the first one since the bunker. The dragon preened, insufferable. She likes me.
“She knows nothing about you,” Demetri muttered.
Nica looked up. “This is going to take some adjustment. Explain the bond.”
Demetri’s entire body tightened. Here was the ground he’d been circling for four days, and now she’d walked them both onto it. He forced himself to speak. “A Draquonir may recognize one person as a fated mate. I recognized you the instant I caught you.”
“The scent. The shaking. The way you looked at me.”
“Yes. And I knew there would never be anyone else.” The truth again, easier this time, worn smooth by how many times he’d swallowed it.
Nica walked to the windows. “Did fate choose for me too?”
“No. My dragon’s choice is absolute. Yours is not.” He said it clearly, because it was the whole architecture of his restraint, the reason he’d stopped the fire twice, the line he’d have died on. “So you’re trapped.”
“You are not a trap.”
The dragon rumbled agreement so hard it hurt.
“And if I don’t choose you?” The honest answer was death — not hers, his — and Demetri chose another truth, because the Chain could not become part of her decision. “I will respect it.”
Her eyes narrowed; she’d caught the shape of the thing he wasn’t saying, the way she always did. “What happens to you?” He did not answer. Not yet. Nica moved on, filing it, and he knew she’d come back to it. “What does bonding involve?”
Demetri explained, keeping his voice level, clinical, because if he let any heat into it she’d hear how much he wanted it and mistake the wanting for pressure.
The first stage: sex, dragon fire entering her body.
The second: his breath over her skin, the mark, silver after the glow faded.
Telepathy. A shared life. Longevity. Nica listened without interrupting, her cataloger’s attention turned on the terms of her own future. “Permanent?”
“Yes. It cannot be undone.” He would not soften that. She of all people needed the permanence named honestly.
“Would I stop being human?”
“No. You would remain yourself. But you would live as long as I do, if the bond settles fully. And you would hear me. And him.” The dragon lifted his head. Tell her yes. “Yes.”
“What happens if I say no?” The room went silent. Demetri stood, because this was the one he could give her without a flaw in it. “You leave. And the executioners will not reach you. Because I will stop them. Even if it starts a war.”
Nica stared. He did not soften the truth; she deserved to know the exact scale of what she meant to him, measured in the only currency ancient creatures respected. “What if I choose the bond because I’m afraid to die?”
“I will refuse it.” The dragon howled at the very possibility. The man did not waver.
Her face changed. “You can refuse? Even if that means war? Why?”
“Because fear is not consent.” He had waited two hundred years to have something worth wanting this badly; he would not take it counterfeit.
The dragon objected to the very possibility, thrashing against the principle.
The man held it anyway, the way he’d held every line since she fell into his arms.
Nica touched the manuscript, her gloved habit surfacing even now, even here. “When I read the rite at WMS, you already knew. Did it affect you?” Demetri laughed once, surprising them both. “I nearly shifted beside you.”
“You sat there looking bored.”
“I have had practice.”
“With women reading your mating ceremony?”
“No.” The corner of her mouth lifted, and for one heartbeat the terror and the law and the failing Chain all stood aside, and there was only a woman almost smiling at him across a book, and the dragon went very quiet, as though it too understood the value of the moment and did not want to frighten it away.
Then Caelen entered carrying the broken blade from the bunker, dark green light moving beneath the markings on his arms, Benedikte behind him with a case of six more weapons.
Caelen drew a small silver tool and touched it to the spiral sigil, and the mark illuminated — not blue-green, gold — additional symbols appearing beneath, too fine for human eyes.
He inhaled sharply, and Demetri heard the catch of grief in it.
“My brother’s true mark. He embedded two spells.
The first made the weapon lethal — Crowe would have demanded it.
The second is a resonance.” He touched the next weapon, and its sigil answered, gold light passing between them in thin threads.
Benedikte went still. “I have felt that. Every time I used one blade to locate another.”
“You have been reading Faelar’s map,” Caelen said, and there was wonder under the grief now.
“He knew someone would find the weapons. He made every blade call to the others.” Even in torment, in a stone cell, Faelar Aldrith had reached forward twenty years to hand his brother a trail.
Caelen placed both hands over the nearest weapon, and gold magic expanded, and a map formed in the air above the table.
Points of light. San Francisco. Vancouver.
New York. London. Paris. Warsaw. The hunter network laid bare.
And one point burning inside the estate itself.
Demetri’s dragon roared. The light moved — approaching the house — and a vehicle crossed the outer gate.
Lirien checked the display, her face going still.
“King Ryker.” Behind the royal convoy, two winged shapes descended through the fog.
Elven executioners. The dragon lunged at the sight of them, and Demetri, Chain-less, held it by will alone, and felt exactly how little will he had left.
Another light appeared on Faelar’s map, inside the king’s second vehicle. A weapon. Caelen’s face hardened. “Someone in that convoy carries my brother’s blade.”
Benedikte moved toward the door. Demetri blocked him.
“Not yet. We need proof the king will accept.” Nica stepped between them, small and unarmed and bruised, and both dragons froze.
She looked at Benedikte. “You spent eight years finding the truth. Don’t ruin it eight minutes before the hearing.
” Slowly the blue faded from his eyes. The dragon gave a pleased rumble, thoroughly besotted. Our mate commands old kings.
Footsteps approached. The doors opened, and King Ryker Draquonir entered with two council representatives and the executioners behind him. His gaze found Nica, then Demetri, then the glowing map. “What,” Ryker said, “have you done?”
Demetri stepped beside his mate, close enough that his shoulder brushed hers, every ancient instinct in him arranging his body between her and the swords by the wall. “Found the war your council buried.”