Chapter 18
Margaret: I’m told you fired a werewolf today
Nica: he LICKED a reliquary
Margaret: he did what to a what
Nica: i’ll explain at the meeting. bring coffee.
Three weeks after the estate burned, Nica fired a werewolf conservator for licking a twelfth-century reliquary.
“It was one time,” the man protested.
“It was medieval silver with unknown magical residue.”
“I was identifying the enchantment. My tongue is more accurate than the equipment.”
“You are no longer allowed in Collection Room Three.” Nica pointed toward the door, and the werewolf left muttering about human bureaucracy.
She held the pointing finger steady until the door shut, then let herself grin.
Three years ago she’d been too timid to correct a mislabeled crate; now she managed a floor of immortals and threw them out when they misbehaved.
Some things, apparently, a person could grow into.
Demetri leaned against the office wall, arms crossed. He’d watched the entire exchange without interfering, and that alone proved the bond had changed him — the old Demetri would have loomed, would have handled it, would have arranged the world before she could ask. “You enjoyed that,” Nica said.
“Immensely. I assumed all conservators tasted objects.”
“Do you taste everything you investigate?” His gaze moved over her, slowly, deliberately, and heat entered the bond — his hunger arriving in her own body warm and direct, the way it did now, with no wall between their minds to soften it.
Nica’s face warmed. “That was not professional. You’re in my office. During work hours.”
“Yes.”
“Stop looking at me like that.”
“No.” She threw a pencil. Demetri caught it — of course — crossed the office, placed it carefully beside her hand, and kissed her.
Not carefully. Nica gripped his jacket, the bond carrying his hunger directly into her body and her own back into his, a loop that fed on itself; three weeks had not dulled it, and if anything every touch grew sharper now that nothing stood between their minds.
His dragon stretched inside the connection, luxuriant. Desk.
“No,” Nica said aloud. Demetri lifted his head. “I said nothing.”
“He did.”
The dragon felt no shame. The desk appears sturdy.
“It is covered with provenance reports.”
Move them.
Demetri’s mouth twitched. “You encourage him.”
“I have no control over him.”
Correct.
Nica pushed Demetri back, laughing, and the laugh went straight down the bond and she felt it settle in him, felt how much he still marveled at being the cause of it. “We have a meeting in ten minutes. With Margaret. She knows we’re sleeping together.”
“She does not need evidence.” Demetri adjusted his cuffs, and Nica watched, and he knew she watched — the bond made privacy difficult.
It also made lying impossible. Not technically.
Emotionally. Every time he tried to hide worry, the sensation pressed against her mind like heat behind a closed door, and she’d learned to knock on that door until he opened it.
It was, she thought, the opposite of every relationship she’d ever run from; there was nowhere in him left to hide, and nowhere in her, and the terror of that had somehow curdled into the only safety she’d ever trusted.
The Chain no longer existed. He did not need it; their mating bond anchored the dragon without muting either of them.
Demetri smiled now. Argued. Laughed occasionally, though he still treated the activity as if it might damage his reputation.
He’d also entered her rooms without knocking — once; Nica had made the consequences memorable — and the dragon still complained about it.
Margaret arrived precisely on time, her bruise faded to yellow, her anger at WMS not faded at all.
She took the chair across from Nica and looked around the new restitution office.
Pacific Meridian had converted an entire floor into conservation labs, secure archives, and research space, the Crowe objects occupying only one section.
Faelar’s weapon map had identified dozens of other stolen collections.
The work would last decades. Possibly longer.
Nica planned to be there for all of it — and, for the first time in her life, the word decades did not frighten her.
She had them now. She had been given time, the one thing she’d never had enough of, in quantities she was still learning how to hold.
Margaret opened the contract Demetri had placed in front of her, and her eyebrows rose. “This salary is obscene.”
“Yes,” Demetri said.
“Triple my WMS compensation.”
“Yes.”
“Full research authority.”
“Under Nica.” Margaret looked at her. Nica smiled. “Welcome to the team.” Margaret turned another page. “Pension?” Demetri looked toward the ceiling. “We can adjust the structure.”
“Why?”
“Because you may find the vesting timeline unexpectedly complicated.” Margaret narrowed her eyes.
Nica kicked him under the table; he did not react.
Margaret signed, and Nica felt an absurd swell of joy at it — the one person from her old life, the closest thing she’d had to family before all this, choosing to stay in the new one.
She had not yet been told the full truth.
Her exposure remained limited, and Ryker’s revised ruling allowed selected humans to work with sanitized records under magical protection.
The king had begun rewriting the disclosure law — slowly, painfully, with Nica sending him annotated objections every morning.
He’d stopped replying after the fourth day. She considered that progress.
Margaret left with Caelen to tour the facility, and Nica watched them through the glass wall.
Caelen had returned to work quickly. Too quickly.
His grief lived beneath every movement, in the particular care he took with each object, as though every stolen relic were a brother he could bring home in Faelar’s place.
They’d found Faelar’s final chamber in Crowe’s underground estate — no body, only a self-binding mark burned into stone and a message hidden in the forge.
Brother, follow the road I could not walk.
Faelar’s weapons now guided coordinated raids against the remaining hunter cells.
Some surrendered. Some fought. The global network had cracked, not vanished.
But a dead man had reached across two decades to arm his own rescue, and Nica thought that was its own kind of immortality, the kind that did not need scales.
Benedikte had left the estate two days after the battle.
Stellan came for him, and father and son stood on the western cliff for nearly an hour without speaking before Benedikte allowed Stellan to embrace him.
He was resting somewhere in Norway now. Ryker had rescinded the death order but not absolved every killing; judgment would wait.
Grief had waited eight years. It could wait a little longer.
Demetri came up behind Nica and placed his hands on her shoulders, his touch moving warmth through the bond. “You are sad.”
“For Caelen.”
“Yes.”
“And relieved.”
“For Benedikte.”
“Yes.”
“And worried.”
“For you.” His hands tightened. Nica leaned back against him, letting his heat and the low steady hum of him through the bond settle her.
“About the rotations.” Demetri had used new identities for two centuries; every twenty years he disappeared and returned as a son or a cousin, and the current Demetri had two years left before he was supposed to die.
Publicly. Nica hated the thought with a fierceness that startled her — the idea of him vanishing, even in fiction, even on paper, touched the oldest wound she had.
But Ryker had approved a new plan. Demetri Vasiliev would age — slowly, magic and altered images creating the illusion over the coming decades — and he would remain himself.
No disappearing. No leaving her behind to preserve the lie.
“I am not going anywhere,” he said.
“You say that because you can hear me spiraling.”
“Yes.”
“Cheating.”
“The bond is useful.”
“It is invasive.”
She likes it.
Nica ignored the dragon. Mostly. Because he was right, and the dragon always knew when he was right, and gloated.
Demetri kissed the top of her head. “The legal documents are complete. The current identity will remain active.”
“And in sixty years?”
“I will appear eighty-three.”
“You’ll hate that.”
“I already dislike it.” Nica smiled. “And me?”
“You may choose how you wish to appear.”
“Thirty forever sounds suspicious.”
“Forty?”
“Rude.” His arms closed around her, and Nica turned in his hold, and the humor drained out of her into something she was still learning how to say.
“I’m serious. I don’t know what forever looks like.
” She had spent her whole life unable to picture next year; forever was a language she did not speak.
“No one does.”
“You’ve had more practice.”
“Poor practice.” He said it with two centuries of loneliness folded into two words, and she understood that his forever had been as frightening as hers, only longer.
She rested her hands against his chest, and the silver mark across her back warmed, answering the nearness of him the way it always did now.
Demetri’s eyes flashed ruby. “There is something else,” he said.
Nica felt his nerves before she saw them — a flutter down the bond, incongruous in a creature that had faced kings and executioners without blinking. Demetri Vasiliev. Terrified. The dragon bounced inside the bond like an impatient animal. Ask her.
“I am attempting to.”
Slowly.
“I have waited three weeks.” Nica stared. “Are you arguing with him?”
“Yes.”
“About what?” Demetri released her, stepped back, and went down on one knee.
Nica’s heart stopped. The dragon roared approval.
Demetri held no ring. Instead he opened his palm: an old Russian icon pendant rested there, ruby enamel surrounding a tiny silver flame.
“My mother gave this to me when I left Russia,” he said.
“It is the only object I have carried through every identity.” Two hundred and seventy years, a dozen names, a dozen buried lives — and this one small thing had survived all of them, and he was giving it to her.
Nica looked from the pendant to his face. “You don’t have to—”
“I know.” His eyes held hers. “The bond made you my mate under Draquonir law. It did not make you my wife under yours.” Her throat tightened.
Demetri spoke in old Russian then, the same formal language she’d read from the manuscript on the first day, Baba Yelena’s cadences in a dragon’s mouth.
“Before fire and witness, I ask not for obedience, but companionship. Not for possession, but return. Walk beside me while roads remain.” Tears blurred him.
He continued in English. “Marry me, Nica.”
The dragon pushed through. Say yes.
She laughed through the tears, and Demetri’s eyebrows rose. “He’s impatient.”
“He has no manners.”
I have waited two hundred and seventy years.
Nica touched Demetri’s face — the jaw she’d wanted to feel under her palm the first moment he caught her, the mouth that hadn’t known how to smile and now did, because of her. “Yes.”
The word barely left her before he stood and lifted her off the floor, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, and Demetri kissed her, and the dragon filled the bond with fire and triumph, and for once she did not tell it to behave.
Behind the glass wall, Margaret stopped walking. Caelen followed her gaze. Lirien appeared in the corridor and clasped both hands beneath her chin. Nica lifted her mouth from Demetri’s. “We have an audience.”
“They can leave.”
“It’s my office.”
“Then they can still leave.” She laughed, and Demetri smiled against her mouth — no hesitation now, no unfamiliarity, the expression finally worn in, finally his.
Later, after champagne and Caelen’s dry toast and Lirien crying openly, Demetri took Nica home.
The estate’s damaged western wing remained under repair, scaffolding pale against the old stone, but the balcony stood intact, fog moving across the Pacific the way it had the first night she’d stood here and watched a shape move through it.
Nica waited beneath the stars while Demetri crossed to the stone wall. “You’re sure?” he asked.
“No.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“I’ve never flown on a dragon.”
“You have never done many things.”
“I’m beginning to notice.” He shifted — ruby scales flowing through human skin, wings spreading across the balcony, the enormous ancient shape of him unfolding where the man had stood — and lowered his body and extended one foreleg.
Nica approached. The first time she’d seen him fully, he’d been bleeding in a bunker, and she’d been too frightened and too in love to look properly; now moonlight moved over his scales like light over water, and his eyes watched her with Demetri’s intelligence and the dragon’s absolute devotion, and she let herself look, and found nothing in her afraid.
She touched his face. Beautiful, she sent through the bond.
The dragon preened. You encourage intolerable behavior, Demetri sighed inside him. He got it from you.
The dragon lowered one wing to make a path to his back, and Nica climbed.
Magic shaped a secure place between his shoulders; she settled against the warm scales and gripped the ridge in front of her.
Ready? Demetri asked. No walls between them.
No hidden truth. No locked doors, no bracelet, no law standing between his mind and hers.
Nica looked toward the distant lights of San Francisco — the city where she’d learned not to need anyone, where she’d lived twenty-nine years so carefully that three people would have noticed her gone, the city where a dragon had caught her falling out of the air and refused, ever since, to let her fall alone. Yes.
Demetri launched. The balcony vanished beneath them.
Wind rushed around Nica, cold and enormous, then warmed as his magic closed over her, and they climbed through the fog, above the dark water, higher until the city appeared beneath them like scattered gold spilled across black velvet.
Nica laughed, the sound torn away by the wind and carried, somehow, straight into him through the bond.
The dragon answered with a roar that shook the night. Demetri banked toward the stars.
And for the first time in her life, loving someone did not feel like falling. It felt like flight.