Chapter 20
Chapter
Twenty
If ever your flame snuffs out—don’t let your flame snuff out.
-Humaning for Beginners: A Dragon’s Tale of Human Management
“Go,” I told Adelaide, my voice low and firm.
She looked like she wanted to argue, but in the end, she nodded and slipped away, the faint patter of her footsteps filling my ears long after her departure. Finally, though, I stood alone with Taron, the air thick, tasting of soot and smelling of ash.
He didn’t turn to face me.
The bars stood open—Adelaide’s doing, no doubt—inviting disaster.
As I stepped into the cell, the muscles across his back rippled beneath bruised, bloodstained skin.
A quiet tension coiled around us, heavy with things unsaid.
But I couldn’t stay away. Not when a battle loomed. Not when we were running out of time.
“You don’t want to be near me right now, Lyssa,” he croaked.
“I don’t want to be anywhere else.”
“I won’t burn you. Don’t ask for it.”
A tide of compassion surged up and broke inside me. I knew the war that raged within him. And now I understood what he’d endured every time I told him no. Every time I fought what blazed between us.
“Taron,” I rasped, my voice cracking. “Love.” The endearment came unbidden, but it was right. Obvious and undeniable. Love for Taron shone as bright as the sun, all shadow and doubt gone.
Without fear clouding my judgment, I saw the truth so clearly: he wasn’t just someone I’d fallen for by circumstance. He was the love of my life. Terrible, perfect and inevitable. The storm I’d fought, but the anchor I’d needed.
Piece by piece, day by day, I’d ceded my heart to him. Now, there was no turning back.
“I’m not leaving,” I whispered. “But I am going to touch you. All right?”
He didn’t speak, just bristled, his shoulders rising. But he didn’t pull away, so I crossed the final distance between us and pressed my chest to his back, wrapping my arms around him, delighting as his heat enveloped me. For the first time since waking in my bed, I warmed up.
He drew in a sharp breath as I held him close and steady.
“Did Adelaide tell you my father is approaching with an army?” I asked, petting the hard-packed muscle under velvet skin.
He hissed. “Yes. We gave him exactly what he hoped for.” Bitterness tinged each word.
I kissed his shoulder, but relaxation never came to him. Guess I’d have to ramp this up a notch. “Will you play a game with me?”
Silence stretched. Then, wary and gravel-voiced, he asked, “What kind of game?”
“Twenty confessions. Similar to twenty questions, but we’re gonna share our deepest, most personal secrets.”
He tensed, but I felt his heartbeat quicken beneath my palm. Then he finally spoke. “What are the rules?”
“We take turns. No lies allowed. And,” I added with a half-smile, “we cuddle on the cot the whole time.”
A beat. Then he shifted to face me. His eyes searched mine. Ancient wild flames swirled in his irises, the amber now lit with a thousand different hues of color. My chest clenched. As much as I wanted the dragon back, I had to admit those flames looked good on him.
He reached for my hand and guided me toward the narrow cot resting against the cold stone wall. A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth. “I see my sisters have been here.”
They’d left their mark: a scarlet pillow, a woven rug in my favorite rose-gold hue, forest green, gold-trimmed blanket, and a wall tapestry of an ocean shore at sunset. An island of rest amid the dungeon’s gloom.
We lay down together carefully, testing the sturdy frame.
His arm slid around me with surprising gentleness.
He avoided my bandages, holding me as if I might shatter.
Maybe I already had. My cheek found its place against his chest, where his heartbeat thudded like a war drum.
I splayed my hand over his abs, feeling the raw power coiled beneath it.
“Mmm. You’re so warm,” I told him.
“This is your game, baby. You go first,” he murmured, brushing a kiss against my temple.
I took a deep breath, and although I ached to say the next words, the weight of them lay heavy with hope. Confession number one. “I love you.”
The silence that followed weighed on my lungs, thick enough to drown me. He froze for several long beats before crushing me closer, burying his face in my hair. A groan tore from him, low and wrecked.
“I love you, too.” The words scraped out of him.
“So much. I started falling the first moment I saw you in this palace. This impossible, fire-blooded fantasy made real. I tried to fight it. But when you kissed me, it was over. Every quip. Every act of kindness. Every bit of your fury and fire. All of it. Daggers shoved straight into my heart. That must count for at least six secrets.”
His confession unleashed an ocean of delight. Grinning, sheepish, I brushed my lips over his chest, a soft and reverent show of my adoration. “Ready for my confession number two?” I asked, voice low as I curled my fingers against him. “It’s a big one.”
He tightened his hold on me, his voice rough with conviction. “I am beyond ready.”
“Good,” I whispered, lifting on my elbow to study his expression. “Because I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
His grin unfurled, all slow, toothy and unfairly adorable. “Are you asking me to marry you, Lyssa?”
“That depends on your next secret.”
His grin deepened into something infinitely tender. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
“Then ja.” My lips quirked in kind. Time for number three. “I’m asking you to marry me…but only if you burn me.”
The smile dropped. Hard. “No,” he said, a fierce growl behind the word.
“I’ll die if you don’t.” The words cut my tongue on the way out. “A little detail I skimmed over when you asked me to burn you. For that, I apologize with every fiber of my flame-stripped, now deeply vulnerable being.”
“You will not die,” he roared, as if sheer willpower could decide my fate.
“It’s not optional, love. If not by aging, then by enemies who live only to torment me. If not by enemies, then by the next power-hungry dragon who wants my crown.”
“I’ll be your shield,” he snarled, fists clenching.
Sweet, infuriating man. “You can’t fight challenges issued to me.”
“I can. Battles issued to you are battles issued to me. As my wife, you’ll be mine, and I’ll be yours. We’ll be one.”
Oh, but his stubbornness had come out swinging. So adorable. So irresistible. So mine.
His shoulders stiffened. “That look,” he growled.
Something must have given away my thoughts. Time to bare scale and flame. “I can’t live that way, Taron. I’ve never known weakness, not once in all my centuries. But this? This mortal fragility?”
“Fragility is not weakness, Lyssa. It’s meaning. Every breath, every action costs something, and that’s why it matters.”
A shudder tore through me. “Please don’t make me stay this way.” I lowered once more and pressed my cheek against his chest, his heartbeat hammering into me. “I allowed fear to stop me before. Don’t do the same. Please. I’m not afraid anymore. Not of you. Not of the future.”
“I can’t, baby,” he rasped. “I can’t risk you.”
“You must. Cedric and Lorik march with an army. You’re new to your dragon. Raw and untrained. And my people—our people—are without an active queen. They need me. Just like you do. If I stay human, I will lose the throne, and Ashmorra will bleed for it.”
“But if you die and don’t revive…”
I hooked my leg tighter around his, anchoring us both in the words he’d once said to me. “I love you too much to die forever in your fire.”
The silence that followed was thick as tar. His fist clenched and unclenched. Breath sawed from his lungs. I could feel the dragon pacing inside him, snarling, wanting out.
I pushed, soft but sure. “They thought they destroyed us with that bond-breaking tonic. To make us part. Let’s prove them wrong. They didn’t ruin us. They reforged us.”
In the fire, I would be remade. Immortal and transcendent. Maybe still a queen. Maybe something else entirely. Honestly, I didn’t know what I’d become. But I knew who I wanted to see waiting for me on the other side.
At last, he barked, “Yes. I’ll burn you.”
Triumph exploded through me like a second heartbeat.
“But understand me,” he added, tone turning lethal as his arms tightened around me, holding me in place.
“If you die, I will rage. I can feel it brewing already. Bad things will happen. What I do will become a cautionary tale told in ashes and screams about what happens when someone takes a queen from the man who loved her too much.”
A shiver raced down my spine. My grin came slow and sharp. “See, that’s the energy I like. Very vengeful. Very hot. Let’s put it to good use, shall we? We can finish our game after I’ve revived and we’ve slaughtered our enemies.”
He smiled at me, a little sad, a lot scared, and he rose to his feet to offer me his hand. I took it, wincing slightly as he pulled me up.
Noticing my flare of pain, he scowled. “I hate that you’re hurting. Where do you want to…” Torment contorted his features, his voice rough. “Burn?”
“Here,” I said, sweeping a hand around the cell.
“It’s not romantic, but it’s practical. And I don’t wish to have an audience for this particular deed.
Let’s just give everyone the big announcement afterward.
How about, ‘Attention, subjects. Your queen lost her dragon, her king consort is the dragon, and his firebrand is now officially fireproof. All hail and carry on.’”
He huffed a laugh, though it cracked at the edges. “I’m taking over the speechwriting.”
“Whatever you want, professor,” I told him with a jaunty salute.
His gaze darkened. “I want you.”
And then he was kissing me. Deep. Hard. Desperate.
A man starved for his woman. Or a dragon who’d finally found his flame.
His mouth claimed mine, and I kissed him back with equal hunger, utterly ravenous.
We consumed each other with zero hesitation.
No breaking for second thoughts. I poured myself into him.
My fears, my hopes, my defiance, my love.
All that I was, all that I would become.
He tore away with a roar that echoed throughout the stone chamber, rattling the very foundation. I met his gaze with no doubt. No fear. For a single breath, our world held still. Then I nodded, giving him my acceptance. Gifting it to us both.
Ready, I stepped fully into our future.
He unleashed his fire.
The flames hit me with the power of a living beast, throwing me back. In seconds, I was engulfed. The inferno spread and devoured me whole. There was no gentle lead-in, no slow burn, only consumption. A searing heat that stole my breath, robbed me of thought, stripped me to the marrow of my soul.
I tried not to scream. Oh, I tried. I didn’t want Taron to hear it and carry the memory for the eons to come as I had with his ancestors. But it ripped from me anyway, raw and broken, dragged from my deepest depths.
The fire never stopped. It melted my flesh. Turned muscle to molten ruin. Boiled my blood until it shrieked through my veins, then turned to steam. Bone cracked, blackened, then ashed. I should have lost consciousness or faded, but I didn’t. I was there for all of it.
The agony reached its crescendo, then snapped into silence. A void without flame or sound. No pain, either. Just smoke and cold with the ghost of heat, swirling around the space where I'd once stood.
Nothingness came bit by bit. But before the last of it claimed me, I remained aware.
I sensed when Taron collapsed to his knees.
Felt the anguish churning in his soul. Knew his body heaved with silent sobs, his head bowed in prayer, or mourning.
Experienced the clench of his fists as his knuckles drained to white.
Heard a horn blast, announcing the enemy’s arrival.
Then I was gone, a final thought brushing my mind. I will have my forever with Taron, and not even death will stop me!