Chapter 2
A lsander
Alsander stood motionless in the clearing where his curse had imprisoned him for three hundred years and watched the small human woman disappear between the trees.
His trees.
His silence.
His tomb.
Mine.
The dragon's voice. Thunderous. Absolute. A god demanding tribute.
The word surged upward from the ancient place inside him where his dragon had slept for centuries beneath layers of pain and fury. Slept until three days ago, until this frail human woman had crossed the boundary of his forest and stirred the beast toward wakefulness.
His dragon wanted to pounce. To claim . To bind her to him with dragonfire and bury its face in the curve of her throat and taste the salt-sweet skin where her pulse beat hardest. To mark her as his until the stars fell from the sky.
Desire surged through him, uncontrollable and all-consuming — a primal urge that threatened to drown every shred of honor he possessed.
He felt the shift beginning, the tingling in his spine that signaled the change, the prickle of scales surfacing along his forearms before he forced them back.
The dragon was fighting to break free and take what he knew was his.
To scoop her into his massive claws and carry her back to his lair.
To lay her down on furs and seduce her with passion and lust and need until she begged him to mark her.
Until she wanted the bond. Until his dragonfire lived in her veins and her scent lived on his skin and there was no part of either of them the other hadn’t tasted.
Mine.
Alsander understood then — with the cold, sick certainty of a man hearing his own death sentence pronounced — exactly what she was to him. The knowledge slammed into him with the force of a tidal wave. His dragon, the ancient, noble beast that had shared his suffering, had found his mate.
Pain, unlike anything he’d endured before, struck his heart.
This couldn’t be happening. He was Draquonir — born of dragonfire and ancient magic, a creature capable of reducing kingdoms to ash in either form. His kind only mated once. For eternity. It was a bond of souls, a joining of life forces that transcended time and space.
No! She cannot be our true mate, Dragon. We are twice cursed. Dying.
To find his mate now, when every sunrise brought him closer to oblivion — it was the cruelest twist of fate the gods had ever devised.
Worse, she was human. To the best of his knowledge, no Draquonir had ever taken a human mate.
Knowledge of his kind was forbidden. Worse, should they fully bond, she couldn’t survive without him.
And even if she could, he would never allow his mate to suffer the same cursed fate that trapped him in the forest.
Suddenly, Poppy’s scent reached across the clearing and wrapped him in its warmth. Sun-warmed skin. Crushed herbs. Wild rain and woodland moss.
He breathed her in, memorized her scent, and closed his eyes in torment. She was right there, so close, yet he couldn’t reach out. He knew he had to let her go, yet every step she took from him scraped against something primal inside him.
His dragon hated the distance. A low growl vibrated through his chest.
“She already knows,” he muttered hoarsely.
She was human. She had seen him shift.
Seen the dragon.
Draquonir Law demanded her death for that forbidden knowledge alone.
And his.
Gods, the pain.
It lived inside him now.
The emotion cut through him like a blade.
Dangerous. Weakening. Fatal.
He thought he’d carved such things out of himself long ago.
His dragon surged violently beneath his skin.
Mine.
Alsander’s control slipped.
The dragon’s roar tore from him before he could stop it.
The sound exploded through the forest hard enough to shake the mountain beneath his feet. Trees shuddered violently. Birds burst screaming into the air while stone cracked beneath feet.
His dragon fought him viciously now, growing more unstable with her every retreating step.
Pain roared through him. His vision flickered gold. Scales rippled briefly beneath the skin stretched tight across his arms before retreating again.
“Control it,” he snarled at himself, though the command rang hollow.
The dragon no longer cared about laws.
Or secrecy.
Or death.
He only wanted his mate.
“Wait,” he commanded her. He didn’t have to shout. Magic would carry his words where he directed them.
With control borne of desperation, he willed his dragon back.
Poppy froze mid-stride, the satchel full of Aos-sí-blooms shifting against her back. The fading sunlight caught in her hair, turning the simple braid into a rope of spun silk as she turned to face him.
She eyed him warily—as if she genuinely wanted to know what a cursed dragon could possibly want with a mortal woman but wasn’t sure she dared ask.
He should let her go.
Every instinct honed by centuries of self-imposed isolation screamed at him to send her away, both to protect her and to preserve the fragile peace of his suffering.
But the words that came out were not the ones he intended.
The dragon was already obsessed, curious about his mate.
He wanted to spend time with her, no matter the cost.
With monumental effort, he resisted the urge to close the distance between them and asked, instead, "What year is it?"
Idiotic. But he had been alone in this forest so long he'd lost track of the passage of human time. "Who rules the island?"
"The island? You mean Ireland?" She tilted her head to study him. Her gaze drifted over him from head to toe, lingered in places that, once upon a time, he never would have revealed to a lady in such a crude manner.
He watched her eyes spark with interest, intensifying his own.
He tracked her every movement. When her gaze crawled the length of his hard cock, lingered there, and the tip of her tongue peaked out to wet her lips, he nearly came undone.
His dragon, however, preened at his ability to attract his mate, silently repeating his demand for Alsander to go to her.
Take her right there in the clearing. Claim her. Fuck her into submission.
His jaw snapped with tension. Where were his manners?
Buried in the same cave you’ve been hiding in for three hundred years, his dragon growled.
She deserves better. Deserves respect , Alsander mentally growled right back .
She wants her mate, but you do not listen. Do as you will.
Irritated by his newly wakened conscience, nay, by the very dragon who’d slept through the last three centuries, leaving Alsander alone with his torment, he called upon his magic, waved his hand, and clothed himself in a pair of black trousers.
It was as much civility as he could manage when he’d much prefer the alternative.
Absurdly pleased by her look of disappointment when he was decently covered from the waist down, he resisted the urge to pounce and said, "Yes. The island. Who is its king?"
Her grin was infectious, but it was the little sigh that nearly buckled his knees as she took a second look. He needed to let her go before it was too late.
"The king of Ireland? You're really out of touch, then, aren't you?
Well, it's the year two thousand and twenty-six on the new calendar.
We've got a parliament now. The king of England is pretty much a figurehead these days.
Most people don't think the royal family is worth the taxes we pay to keep them in their fancy palaces. "
What in the name of all that was sacred was she rambling on about?
Did not matter.
He hadn’t left this forest. Couldn’t leave this forest. Had been alone a very long time. Speaking made his throat ache.
Still, he couldn’t let her go. Not yet.
"The fever." His voice was rough. Fractured. "In your village. How many children are sick?"
A flicker of something — sorrow, perhaps — crossed her features. "Three are dying. The little ones suffer worst." She gently patted the leather satchel pressed to her side. "But the flowers will help. So, thank you for letting me take them from your forest."
Alsander's gaze lingered on her hand where it rested against the pack. The Aos-sí-blooms —flowers sacred to the fairies, were his sister Mairin’s last gift to this world — the only part of her magic that had remained pure after her death.
They thrived here, in the heart of his cursed domain, sustained by the last vestiges of Banríon na Síol's power.
His sister had been called Queen of Seeds by the elves, blessed by the goddess herself.
The flowers were not meant for mortals. They were not meant for the outside world.
And yet he couldn’t deny this woman. Couldn’t summon anger. Her presence disarmed him. Made him weak.
"The path you used is treacherous," he heard himself say. "I will show you a better way."
It wasn’t an invitation. It wasn’t kindness. It was a selfish need to understand the phenomenon that was Poppy — to understand why the darkness within him shrank from her light. And if he was honest, to spend just a little more time with the mate he could never claim.
Her smile returned, a beam of pure sunshine, and it struck his heart like a physical blow. All the air escaped him in a low, painful groan. She was human, but she’d bewitched him without even trying.
"I'd like that." She waited until he reached her, then fell into step beside him as they began the journey out of the clearing. "I'm Poppy, by the way. Poppy Brightwood."
"So you said."
"What's your name?"
"I didn’t give one."
And he would not. Not even for his true mate.
Not when keeping his name from her lips had even a slim chance of saving her from the executioner.
Even the other magical beings from other kingdoms only partially knew the extent of the Draquonir’s true nature, and mates from those kingdoms were permitted full knowledge only when a Draquonir willingly shared their immortal dragonfire.
To reveal themselves sooner or to the wrong person — especially a human — meant death for both.