Chapter 22
Draven
The alarm cut through me.
My eyes opened to darkness, my ceiling, my room—and my body didn't care. Every nerve was still there. The hunger was there, alive, and waking up hadn't done a damn thing to kill it.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. Breathed. Counted.
My cock was hard enough to hurt, my skin feverish, and the hunger. The hunger wasn't doing what it was supposed to do. Normally it dispersed.
The wanting wasn't dispersing.
Every molecule of need had her name, her face, the exact pitch of her voice when she'd said you're not a monster while looking at me with those golden-brown eyes.
I sat up. The sheets were wrecked. My breath was uneven and I hated that I noticed.
I dragged a hand through my hair, swung my legs off the bed, and stood. Bare feet on cold stone. The room was dark and quiet and none of it mattered because underneath the wanting, recognition was building. My incubus mind was only now catching up to what had happened.
Tess had entered my dreamspace uninvited.
I walked to the bathroom. Gripped the edge of the sink and stared at my own reflection in the dark mirror.
She hadn't knocked. Hadn't been pulled in by me. I'd been deep in a memory I didn't share, didn't invite anyone into. And she'd just appeared. Walked straight through a locked door like the lock didn't apply to her.
There was only one reason a person could enter an incubus's dream without invitation.
My pulse was steady. My hands were steady. The rest of me was falling apart.
Mate.
The word hit my chest hard. Not the soft, fairy-tale version—the real one. The kind my mother told me about—that if I was ever lucky, truly lucky, my hunger would find a fixed point. A person it didn't want to consume. A person it wanted to keep.
And the hunger heard the word.
The diffuse, restless burn I'd managed for thirty years narrowed to a single point. Her. Her hands on my face. Her heat burning through my shirt where she'd pressed against me. The furious tenderness in her voice when she'd looked at the worst thing I carried and refused to be afraid of it.
My grip on the sink tightened. The stone creaked under my fingers.
This was what recognition did. I'd read about it, heard the stories—the old ones, not the sanitized versions they put in textbooks.
An incubus's hunger finding its mate wasn't a softening.
It was an intensification so precise it felt like a new sense.
The hunger had been scattered my entire life. Now it was locked.
Her skin under my hands. The catch in her breathing when I'd pulled her against me. The way she'd kissed me back like wanting me was the simplest thing she'd ever done.
And that was the part that was going to destroy me.
Because every person who'd ever wanted me had wanted what I could make them feel—the incubus pull, the manufactured heat, the fantasy I projected.
Tess had wanted me. The real version. The ugly version.
And she'd reached for it with both hands like it was something worth holding.
And now every cell in my body was saying yours.
I stepped into the shower.
The water hit hot. Hot enough to sting.
It ran down my chest, my shoulders, pooled at the base of my spine. Didn't touch the burn underneath.
I was still hard.
Still carrying her weight against me like my skin had memorized her shape and refused to let it go. The impression of her mouth. Her fingers pressing into my jaw. That small, wrecked sound she'd made when I'd pulled her closer—not a moan, quieter than that, gone straight through me.
I wrapped my hand around my cock. No hesitation, no negotiation with myself. My body knew what it wanted.
The first stroke dragged a rough exhale out of me, my free hand bracing flat against the tile. The water beat against my back and I closed my eyes, and she was there.
Tess.
The way her body had felt pressed along the length of mine. The way her mouth had opened under mine and her fingers had fisted in my shirt like she was anchoring herself—or me—and for the first time in my life, someone else's wanting hadn't felt like a demand. It had felt like being found.
My hand moved. Slow at first, then not.
The hunger narrowed with every stroke. Not scattered, not searching. Just her. Relentless and undeniable.
My mate.
I tightened my grip. My hips pushed forward into my fist.
My stomach clenched thinking about her breasts against me when she'd pressed close, her hands tightening on my shirt like she'd felt me harden against her and hadn't pulled away. Had pressed closer.
I thought about what would have happened if the alarm hadn't gone off.
Peeling that sundress up over her head, watching her eyes go dark behind those glasses before I took those off too. Her palms flattening against my stomach, dragging up over my chest. Her fingers tracing the lines of my tattoos like she was reading them, decoding me the way she decoded everything.
What she would have felt like underneath me—her thighs falling open, her legs hooking around my hips, the slick heat of her when I pressed my cock while her back arched off the bed. Her nails biting into my shoulders when I rocked against her, and the sound she'd make—
"Tess." The word came out low.
My rhythm built. Grip tighter, strokes harder, water hammering my spine.
Her voice in my ear. That sound—I wanted to hear it again. I wanted to be the reason for it. I wanted her so badly my vision blurred and my hand slammed against the tile hard enough to crack grout.
The tension in my gut wound tighter, tighter, my jaw clenched, my knees locked, every muscle drawn tight.
I came with her name caught behind my teeth.
For a few seconds, everything stopped. The hunger.
The recognition. The operational mind that hadn't shut up since I was a teenager.
All of it—quiet. Just sensation cresting and breaking, my cock pulsing in my hand, pleasure rolling through me in long, heavy waves while the water drummed against my back.
Then my forehead found the tile. I stood there, breathing. The hunger was still there.
All of it.
Clarity settled in the aftermath. The bone-deep kind, the kind that already has the answer.
I knew what she was to me. That was settled. Locked in somewhere beneath my ribs where no amount of discipline or distance was going to dig it out.
And in about an hour, I was going to walk into a training arena where she'd be three feet away from me, close enough to feel her body heat, and she wouldn't know any of it.
I had no idea what I was going to do about that.
I turned off the water.
???
Amrion was quiet as I walked.
That was how I knew he felt it. My dragon had an opinion about everything—my posture, my diet, the way I cinched a chest strap. Silence from him meant the shift was big enough to make him careful.
Gravel crunched under my boots. The hunger sat in me. Since the recognition, it hadn't wandered. It knew exactly where it wanted to be.
"Last night changed you."
Not a question. I could feel him in the bond, his attention pressed close, reading me the way he read ward signatures—looking for the shape underneath.
"Yes."
"She walked into your dream."
"Yes."
The arena walls were visible through the trees now. I kept walking. Amrion kept pace in the bond.
"You know what that means," he said.
"I know what it means."
A beat. His presence warmed.
"And?"
"And I want to sit with it." I watched the trees thin ahead of me. "She's carrying enough. The investigation, Silvius, all of it. I'm not adding to her plate right now."
"That's the practical reason. What's the real one?"
He knew me too well.
"It's the best thing I've ever felt. I want to hold it for a while before I hand it to someone else."
Amrion was quiet again. But the quality of it changed.
"Good," he said. "Hold it, then."
I reached the arena entrance and stopped. Five dragons in a training arena is a sight that doesn't get old.
The heat hit first—layered, elemental, pressing against my skin. Then the sound. The low-frequency hum of five massive bodies breathing in stone, the crack of static, the scrape of claws shifting on obsidian perches. Scale and shadow.
I crossed toward Amrion.
Charcoal scales threaded with silver-blue veins, pulsing faintly with his breath. Mirror-bright eyes found mine the moment I stepped inside. I put my hand on his shoulder. Warm scales, the slow expansion of his ribs pressing against my palm. I settled.
"Better," he murmured.
"Shut up."
"Much better."
Then I turned around, and Tess was twenty feet away, and every molecule of calm I'd scraped together caught fire.
She was in the black Dragon Rider uniform.
Hair pulled back, glasses slightly crooked, mid-sentence with Lunessa, head tilted, and while I watched, she laughed at something—a real laugh, not the careful one.
Her nose scrunched. Her glasses slipped and she pushed them back up with the heel of her hand without breaking eye contact.
My incubus locked onto her. The hunger said mine so loud I felt it in my teeth.
But underneath that—I watched her push those glasses up and thought, She does that when she's forgotten to be careful. When the real version is running the show.
I looked away before she caught me.
"Fascinating," Amrion said.
"One word and I ground us both."
"Aerial perimeter defense," Theron said without preamble.
"You've been drilling the basics for three days.
Today we add field comms." He held up a small enchanted earpiece.
"Standard Guild issue. Voice-activated, range-limited, channel-locked to your team.
You talk, your team hears you. Nobody else. "
He tossed one to each of us. I caught mine and fitted it. A faint hum, then silence. Live but empty.