Chapter 24
Gregory
The approaching dawn softened the sky, bleeding the deep black of night into a bruised purple that illuminated the cabin. “Let’s get you into a bath,” I whispered.
A small nod to my neck was Evan’s only answer. I stood, carried him the few feet to the chair and set him down, taking care as I draped a thick blanket from the bed around his shoulders.
Chill crept into the cabin, but I couldn’t bring myself to start the fireplace. After what we’d just been through, my stomach twisted at the thought of flames. I didn’t want to scare him again. Instead, I set out a few candles around the big tub in the bathing corner and lit them.
I went to the porch and grabbed the two large wooden buckets I used for hauling water.
It took four trips—each one sending fresh misery through my healing torso—to the well that followed the stream flowing down from the mountain peaks.
The water was clear and cold, fed by snowmelt and springs.
Pure water, twenty paces from my door, made every week of digging through rock and root worth it.
On each trip across the damp earth, Thunder stomped and paced in his paddock, letting out a troubled whinny, the whites of his eyes stark in the gloom.
I poured the last bucket into the tub, the water rising nearly to the brim. Holding my palm over the surface, I let my own magic flow, a gentle heat that made the air shimmer until steam began to rise in lazy curls. I gathered a rough bar of lard soap and a few clean cloths, then went back to Evan.
I knelt before his chair, taking the blanket from his shoulders. “Are you okay?” I murmured.
Evan’s chin dipped once, his focus somewhere far away. I reached for the hem of his oversized shirt and gently eased the damp, grimy fabric over his head. His slender, smooth body was smeared with soot. I needed to wash away the dirt, the fear, and the memory of the Emberfall Cliffs.
“These too,” I said, my hand pausing near the waistband of his smallclothes.
He gave a shaky “Okay” on a ghost of a breath, and I eased them down his legs until he stood bare before me.
I rose and shed my own trousers, then took his hand and guided him toward the bathing corner. I stepped into the tub and sat, ignoring the water that spilled over the rim and splashed onto the floorboards. Gripping his hand tighter, I guided him in with me.
Evan sank down between my legs, his body relaxing as he leaned back into me, the water lapping gently around us.
I started with the soap and cloth, building up a lather.
My strokes were slow over his back and shoulders, working to wash away not just the soot, but the memory of the fire.
I ran the suds through his long copper hair next, my fingers massaging the strands until they were clean.
As I rinsed the last of the lather away, the water darkened his bright copper strands to a deep, burnished rust. I moved the wet hair to the side and pressed a soft kiss to the nape of his neck.
Evan quivered, the tremor traveling down his spine and into my chest. I followed it with another kiss, and then another, trailing them along the elegant line of his throat.
He was clean. Safe.
In the warm, candlelit gloom, he broke the silence. “I had a dream,” he said, then paused a moment. “Mom was dying all over again, but… it wasn’t mine.”
I rested my chin on his shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“It was a memory. The other Evan. He was running through the capital of your Empire with his mom, escaping.” He sniffed.
“Mordaine cornered them. His mom fought, but it wasn’t enough.
And I… He couldn’t do anything to save her.
I watched her crumble to the floor, just like I found my mom in our apartment in Queens. ”
“How old were you? When your mom passed away.”
“I was twelve,” he answered. His shoulders slumped, and the tension drained out of him, only to be succeeded by a heavy weariness.
I suspected he had more to say, so I waited, and he told me how he hadn’t thought about it for most of the past twenty-three years.
How one day, the nightmares he used to have stopped.
I had been much younger when my own world was turned to ash, but grief has no age. I knew the suffocating silence that follows the screams, the crushing weight of standing alone in the wreckage of a life that no longer exists.
When Evan spoke again, his voice tore me from the wreckage of my past. “And you were there,” he whispered, awe filling his tone. “He saw you. The knights were about to kill him, and you just showed up. A burning god on a black horse. You saved him.”
“And the Emberfall Cliffs?” The question escaped as a rasp, harsher than I intended. “Why there?”
He watched the water ripple around us. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “The memory… It was so real. All I could see was the fire. Your fire.” He raised his head, finding my eyes. “I was thinking of you.”
The bathwater went still, and every muscle in my body stiffened. My sweet Evan was thinking of me. And his magic, born of a nightmare, had taken him to my place of fire and ruin.
He was talking about that day. The day I burned too brightly, the day the inferno inside consumed me, and nothing could drag me back from the edge.
He was there. He’d witnessed it. He hadn’t seen a savior.
He saw the monster I became—not a hero running into the flames, but a man running from what I’d done.
I leaned back, the edge of the tub hard against my neck as my head fell against it, displacing the water around me. I ran a hand through my wet hair in a defeated motion.
“I’m not a hero,” I told him. “I’m a coward who only knows how to run from his fate and mistakes.
The Emberfall Cliffs are the proving ground for my house, Dax’s house.
For generations, every alpha descendant of our bloodline who would lead has faced the fire there in a Test of Wills.
It is a sacred duty, a rite of passage to master the dragon within.
Only then can one claim their birthright and carry the title of Dragon Lord.
My father passed his test. He was our Dragon Lord, just as his father was before him.
” My magic warmed the water, but it couldn’t touch the chill deep in my bones.
“And I am the only one who ever failed.”
Evan moved, sending a small ripple between us as he pivoted to face me. He settled on my lap, straddling my hips, and cupped my face, holding me down so I couldn’t turn away.
“For him, you were a hero.” He held my stare without a flicker of doubt. “I used to believe hope was for the weak, for the ones who didn’t know better. Magic didn’t exist, and there was nothing that could bring my mom back. But then I landed here.”
He took a breath. “I had that dream, but I know, deep in my heart, that what Mordaine said at the lake is true. My mom is still alive in this world, and I need to find her.”
He stroked my jaw with his thumbs, and the simple touch was its own torment.
“You are my hope, Gregory,” he whispered.
“My safety. My home in this world. I won’t take this second chance for granted, and I will do what is right.
For the other Evan, I know you were his hope too.
He feared you because he was alone and couldn’t stand to lose anyone else. ”
I couldn’t bear the weight of the faith radiating from him.
My ribs had mostly fused by now, the healing leaving only a deep ache behind.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” I managed to choke out, a painful lump rising in my throat.
“I am the Unholy Alpha. I killed the Saintess—the goddess’s chosen high priestess.
That day in the capital, I was supposed to marry her.
But I went into a rut, and I lost all control.
” The confession tasted like poison on my tongue.
“When I came down from the frenzy… she was dead. But I don’t remember even touching her. ”
I forced myself to raise my head, and confusion marked every line of his face. I covered his hands with mine where they rested on my face and brushed a soft kiss over his knuckles, the gesture small and inadequate against the weight of my confession.
“They drugged me,” I said. “The Church couldn’t control my bloodline with their usual magic.
Our power was a threat to the throne itself—they feared a new Dragon Lord could one day challenge the Emperor, so they tried to bind me to their cause through marriage.
The Empire’s solution for my father had been to take his head.
It is the only way to kill a dragon descendant for good.
They slaughtered my family that way during the Scouring Wars while we were hiding in a village. ”
My father had been a true Dragon Lord, a man whose skin could harden into scales dense enough to deflect siege bolts, whose blood ran so hot with draconic fire that ordinary steel melted before it ever broke the surface.
And yet a single blade had done what armies could not.
One clean stroke through scale and sinew and magic, as if the old power in his veins had been nothing but smoke.
I never learned what kind of blade they used or what steel stripped his defenses bare.
That ignorance festered in me like rot in the marrow of my bones.
Because if the Empire had found a way to cut through a Dragon Lord once, they could do it again.
They could do it to me. And the sickening truth I could never escape was that they had chosen not to.
They let me live, not out of mercy, but because a living weapon served them better than a dead heir.
That blade, whatever it was, could find my neck as easily as it had found my father’s.
A pained whimper escaped Evan, his touch softening into a caress. I let my pheromones diffuse into the air, a soothing tide of sandalwood meant to shelter him from the harshness of my story.
He leaned into the scent, a silent sign to continue.
“They wanted to bind me through marriage, to control my bloodline by tying me to the Church. But something went wrong, or perhaps they changed their minds. Maybe they realized even marriage wouldn’t be enough to control the dragon blood.
So they drugged me into a blind rage during what was supposed to be our wedding.
When I came down from the frenzy, the Saintess was dead.
They framed me for her murder, turning me into the monster they always claimed I was. ”
Silence stretched between us, thick with the steam rising from the water. Evan studied me for a long moment, his expression unreadable, and his thumbs grazed my cheekbones in a gentle, thoughtful motion.
He finally whispered, the words barely there, “A monster? No. I’ve seen real monsters, Gregory. Men in my world who would burn whole families to the ground for a bit more power and call it good business. The things you did were survival.”
His palms cupped my jaw, his hold becoming inescapable. “You’re not a monster. You’re my beast, yes. But not a monster.”
A smirk hooked the corner of my mouth, unbidden. He was claiming me, possessing me, not with the sweet, honeyed pleas the other Evan had offered, but with a feral certainty that called the dragon in my blood.
My smirk quickly faded, though, replaced by a bitter laugh.
“It doesn’t matter to them. Their magic, their holy chains, they don’t work on me.
I’m made of the wrong kind of fire, Evan.
A fire powerful enough to forge a crown or melt one.
And the things the Empire can’t control”—I met his stare—“they call heresy.”
Evan let out a weary sigh. “People are the same everywhere. Terrified of the things they can’t control. All this—alphas, omegas, heresy—is all new for me. The rules, the reasons you’re supposed to hate yourself, they don’t mean anything to me.”
He moved closer. His magic’s green glow was gone, but defiance sparked in his eyes, his lips set in a firm pout. “I’m not going to lie, I was scared of you when I first landed here. But I’m not anymore.”
I attempted to pull away, to escape the absolution in his eyes and discount the forgiveness I hadn’t earned. “No,” I rasped.
He leaned forward, and his fingers pressed gently into the scruff along my jaw, stopping me from turning away. “Hey. Believe me.”
“Evan, please—”
He drowned my words with a kiss, firm and silencing, a purposeful act that shut down every argument and piece of self-hatred I carried. He was taking my pain and answering it with a claim, leaving no room for anything but him.