Chapter 13 Amara
AMARA
The first thing I noticed was the warmth and not just the blankets or the nest still soft around me, but the specific warmth of a body behind mine, a broad chest rising and falling slowly against my back, an arm draped over my waist like it had always belonged there.
I lay still for a moment and let myself feel it. I felt safe and I felt chosen.
Two things I had stopped believing were available to me sometime around the age of nineteen when Colin had looked at me and found me lacking. Two things I had quietly stopped asking for because wanting them and not having them hurt worse than just not wanting them at all.
My hand moved to my neck without me deciding to and I found the bite mark.
My fingers rested there, pressing gently against the tenderness.
I had expected to wake up in a panic, had expected the cold morning light to strip away whatever had felt so certain in the dark and leave me with nothing but regret and a very complicated situation.
What I actually felt was settled, and quiet in a way I hadn't been in years.
My phone was on the bedside table and the screen was lit up with notifications. I reached for it carefully, trying not to wake Kael, and squinted at the messages.
Lila.
All seven messages were from my cousin. The first few were relatively restrained. By the fourth one she had apparently abandoned all pretense.
Amara I need details RIGHT NOW.
He literally GLOWED. The whole east wing. People were talking about it all night.
Are you bonded? Oh my god are you BONDED?
Call me.
Amara.
AMARA.
I read them all the way to the end, waiting to feel something. Irritation maybe, or maybe that familiar shrinking sensation that Lila had always managed to produce in me without even trying.
Nothing came.
Just a faint distant amusement, like watching something that used to have power over me from very far away.
I typed back two sentences.
I'm fine. I'll fill you in another time.
I set the phone down without waiting for her response and didn't think about her again.
"You're awake."
Kael's voice was rough with sleep, low against the back of my neck. His arm tightened slightly around my waist, a barely conscious pull toward him, and I felt the warmth of the scales against my back, steady and golden even in the morning light.
I rolled over to face him.
He looked absolutely devastating first thing in the morning. Rumpled tux shirt, hair disordered, hazel eyes soft and unhurried, the gold of the scales still glowing faintly across his chest and arms. He looked at me like I was the best thing he'd woken up to in years, maybe ever.
"Hi," I said biting my lower lip.
"Hi," he said back, his mouth curving.
We stayed like that for a while, talking about nothing important in the easy quiet way of people who have run out of things to hide from each other.
His thumb moved absently back and forth against my waist and I let myself just exist in it, this warm unhurried morning with this man, without bracing for something to go wrong.
Then his phone buzzed.
He reached for it, read whatever was on the screen, and his expression did something that moved through fond and exasperated and landed on slightly pained.
"What?" I asked.
He turned the phone toward me without comment.
It was a text chain from his brothers. I got the general picture in about four seconds. The words breakfast, nine o'clock, Mother's orders, and don't be weird about it were all I needed.
I looked at the gala dress on the floor. Then I looked at my hair in the reflection of the dark window across the room.
Laughter burst out of me like a busted can of biscuits.
It was a real laugh, the kind that came from somewhere genuinely relaxed, the kind I hadn't produced before approximately ten o'clock on any given morning in recent memory.
"I am not going to breakfast like this," I said.
"No," Kael agreed immediately.
"I need a shower."
"Also yes."
He said it so casually that it took me a second to register the implication and then I looked at him and he looked at me and neither of us said anything else about it.
The bathroom was warm and steamy by the time we got there, the kind of warmth that softened everything at the edges and made the rest of the world feel very far away.
Kael reached past me to adjust the temperature, his chest brushing my back, and I tipped my head to the side when his lips found the bite mark on my neck. Not urgent. Just a quiet good morning pressed into my skin that made my eyes close and my hands find the edge of the sink for balance.
"Still tender?" he murmured against it.
"A little," I said. "Don't stop."
He laughed softly and I felt it more than heard it, warm against my neck, and something about that laugh in this small steamy space made my chest feel full in a way I didn't quite have words for yet.
We stepped in together and the hot water came down over both of us and for a moment we just stood there, his arms loose around my waist, my back against his chest, letting the warmth settle into us.
Then his hands started moving.
Slow and unhurried, the way he did everything that mattered.
Tracing the curves I had spent years hiding under oversized cardigans, like he was reminding himself of the map of me in the morning light.
His palms spread flat against my stomach and I felt the faint warmth of the scales beneath his skin, that steady gold that had apparently decided I was home and intended to keep saying so.
"You're doing it again," I said.
"Doing what?"
"Glowing."
"I glow when you're close," he said simply, like this was just a fact about the world now, like weather or gravity. "It’s a permanent thing.”
I turned around in his arms to face him and the water ran down over both of us and his hazel eyes were soft and gold-flecked and completely certain in the way they always were when he looked at me and I thought I would probably never get used to being looked at like that.
I hoped I never did, in any case.
I reached up and pushed the wet hair back from his forehead and he caught my wrist and pressed his lips to the inside of it, just briefly, and the gentleness of it moved through me like warm honey.
"Hi," I said softly.
"Hi," he said back.
I kissed him then, not the careful tender kiss of last night or the reverent press of lips that had accompanied everything weighted and significant and life altering.
This was something easier and warmer. The kiss of someone who knew now where they stood and liked it there and wanted to say so with their mouth because words were taking too long.
He responded immediately, his hands sliding up my back, pulling me closer until the water ran between us and there was no space left to speak into anyway.
This was different from the night before. Last night had been the culmination of six months of wanting, careful and deliberate and weighted with everything we were finally saying out loud. This was just us.
Just Kael and his warm hands and the steady gold glow of his scales brightening against the steam and the very clear knowledge that he was choosing this again in the full light of morning without a single hesitation.
That knowledge did something to me.
Made me bolder than I'd been last night and less careful. I pressed him back against the cool tile and felt him exhale sharply and his hands gripped my hips and the scales flared warm and bright against the white of the shower wall.
"Amara," he said, my name rough in his throat.
"I know," I said against his jaw. "I know."
He lifted me like I weighed nothing and I wrapped my legs around him and the steam rose around us and outside the bathroom window February was doing whatever February did and none of it had anything to do with us.
He moved slowly in and out of my opening that was dripping wet. Even with the hot water running cold and both of us breathless and the scales throwing gold light across the tile, I was wet for him.
Kael seemed to only have one speed when it came to things that mattered to him and that speed was thorough and it was going to be the end of me in the best possible way.
I pressed my face into his neck and held on.
When I came apart this time it was quieter than the night before, softer like a cashmere sweater. It was less like something breaking open and more like something settling into place. It was like finding the last piece of a piece of a 1000 piece puzzle that had gone missing.
He followed me over the edge a moment, his knot swelling inside of me once again later and my name on his lips.
His arms locked around me and the scales at full warm brilliant gold.
We stayed like that for a long moment, locked together with the water running cool.
Neither of us was particularly interested in moving, instead nipping gently at each other’s lips until his knot slowly unshelled from inside of me.
"The water's cold," I said eventually.
"Yes," he agreed, not moving.
I laughed then and felt him smile against my hair.
He reached back without looking and turned the water off and we stood in the quiet dripping steam of the bathroom and I thought that this was the most at home I had felt in my own skin in longer than I could remember.
Maybe ever.
Getting dressed presented an obvious problem since my options were the gala gown or nothing and I was choosing neither. Kael went to the old wardrobe without being asked and came back with an armful of options.
The sweatpants with a drawstring were enormous on me and I pulled on the string as tight as I could finally getting them to settle into place. The shirt was soft and worn and smelled like the cedar lining of the wardrobe mixed with something underneath that was just him.
Then he held up a cardigan, that was old and slightly stretched at the cuffs, a deep forest green that had probably been his at some point in the distant past. He held it out with the particular expression of a man who understood exactly what he was offering and why.
I put it on and it swallowed me completely in the most delicious way possible. The sleeves fell past my hands. The hem hit mid thigh. I pulled it around myself and something in my chest settled in a way that felt embarrassingly significant for a piece of knitwear.
I caught my reflection in the mirror above the dresser.
My hair was curly and damp, and my face was bare. The bite mark set prominent and visible on my neck while I drowned in a cardigan that belonged to a dragon prince.
I looked at myself for a long moment, waiting for the familiar instinct to find something wrong, but it didn't come.
Kael appeared behind me in the reflection, dressed in simple clothes of his own, his hair still damp, the scales a quiet gold in the morning light. He met my eyes in the mirror and said nothing.
He didn't need to.
I nodded once, more to myself and then turned away from the mirror. He took my hand when we reached the door.
The sound of voices carried up from somewhere below, multiple of them, overlapping and warm, punctuated by what I was already beginning to recognize as Ryker's laugh. My stomach did a slow nervous revolution.
"I'm about to have breakfast with your entire family," I said. "In your cardigan. With a bite mark on my neck."
"You are," Kael confirmed.
"That's terrifying."
"They already love you," he said. "Ryker has been rooting for you since the tux fitting."
I looked up at him. "You told them about me at the tux fitting?"
He had the decency to look slightly pained. "They smelled you on me."
I stared at him for a full three seconds and then laughed despite everything, the nerves loosening just enough, and he smiled down at me with that particular smile he saved for moments when I caught him off guard in the best possible way.
We walked through the door together.
The dining room was everything I expected from a house like this. High ceilings, long table, morning light coming through tall windows onto a spread that suggested Celestine Solas did not believe in a small breakfast. Four faces turned toward us as we entered.
Ryker's expression was immediate and completely unsubtle. It was on of pure delight.
Damon raised his coffee cup in a small dignified acknowledgment that managed to communicate both welcome and approval simultaneously.
Caspian stood and quietly pulled out the chair beside him without a word, which was somehow the thing that got me right in the sternum.
And Celestine looked at me from the head of the table with warm green eyes that I recognized from her son's face and said simply, "There she is. Sit down, sweetheart. Coffee's hot. I have a feeling you don’t like it with sugar, just black.”
Kael’s mother’s words got the biggest smile out of me and he just shook his head as we sat down to eat.
Ryker lasted approximately thirty seconds before leaning across the table toward me with barely contained glee.
"So. The whole east wing, Amara. The whole east wing lit up gold.
I've been waiting twenty six years to see that happen to one of us and it happened to him.
" He jerked his thumb at Kael. "The baker. Of course it was the baker."
"Ryker," Kael said.
"I'm just saying it's poetic."
"Eat your breakfast."
I wrapped both hands around my coffee cup and felt the warmth of it seep into my palms, and looked around the table at these loud generous people who had apparently been rooting for me since before I knew there was anything to root for.
The morning light came through the tall windows and caught the gold of Kael's scales through his shirt sleeve where his arm pressed against mine.
I thought about my tiny apartment and the radiator that clanked and the neighbor's TV through the wall and every quiet solitary morning I had spent telling myself that small and safe was enough.
It had been enough.
But this was something else entirely.