Chapter 17 #2
The dragon surged. She felt it move through him under her hand, felt the heat spike, and a word pushed through the bond that was just beginning to open between them, doubled, more rumble than voice. Ours.
Demetri removed the rest of her clothing with hands that would not stop shaking.
Not hunger alone. Reverence. Two hundred and seventy years of certainty arriving inside one impossible moment, and his fingers trembled against her hips as though she were something that might vanish if he gripped her too hard.
Nica stood naked beneath the ruby symbols and lifted her chin.
“Your turn.”
He had nothing left to remove; the shift had taken his clothes when the dragon rose in the hall.
Her gaze dropped anyway — down the broad chest, the hard plane of his stomach, the dark hair, the heavy jut of his cock, thick and flushed and already leaking for her — and heat flooded her face despite the war thundering somewhere above them, despite the blood, despite everything.
“You’re staring, milaya,” he said. Smoke curled from between his lips as he said it. Actual smoke.
“So were you. For four days.”
“I intend to stare at you for the next several centuries.” His mouth almost curved. “Starting now.”
He lifted her — effortless, one arm beneath her thighs — and Nica wrapped her legs around his waist, and he carried her to the center of the sigil and lowered her onto the black rock.
It was warm. It should have been cold and hard against her bare back, and instead it was warm, the ancient stone waking under the two of them.
“Comfortable?” he asked.
“It’s a rock.”
“I can change it.”
Silk flowed beneath her, ruby-red and soft as water, conjured out of nothing. Nica looked down at it, then up at him, one eyebrow raised. “You made that. With magic. You let me sit on industrial vinyl at the auction house for two hours.”
“I was distracted.” His gaze moved down the length of her, slow and greedy, drinking her in. “You have no idea, Nica, how badly I wanted to lay you across that little desk and make you forget the book existed.”
She laughed — breathless, wrecked already — and the sound reached every fractured place inside him and knit it.
Demetri knelt between her thighs. Nica touched his face, her thumb dragging over the sharp edge of a cheekbone. “No more hiding.”
“No more.” He turned his head and kissed the center of her palm, then her wrist, the thin blue vein there where he’d wanted his mouth since the first day.
“No more walls. No more locked doors. No more holding back from you.” His eyes lifted to hers, ruby bright now.
“I have held back from you every moment since you fell into my arms. Tonight I do not.”
And he set his mouth to her body and began to take her apart.
He worked down her slowly, relearning every inch of her now that she knew his name — his true name, the one two centuries of false identities had buried.
His lips found the hollow of her throat, the slope of one breast. His mouth closed hot over one nipple, and Nica arched off the silk, her fingers fisting in his dark hair, a cry breaking out of her that echoed off the curved stone walls.
He drew on her, tongue flat and then flicking, until the peak stood hard and aching, and then he did the same to the other, unhurried, thorough, a man who had waited long enough that he refused to rush a single second of this.
The dragon fire rose in him. She felt it — a wave of heat gathering at the base of his spine, pressing toward her. Not yet, he told it, and held it at the edge.
He kissed down her ribs. The soft plane of her belly.
The sharp jut of one hipbone, where he lingered, scraping his teeth over it until she shivered.
And then Nica opened her legs for him — an invitation, a choice, her own hands drawing her knees wide — and Demetri looked at her spread open and wet and flushed for him, and a sound tore out of his chest that had no human shape at all.
“Moya.” The word came ragged. Mine. “Look how ready you are. All of this. For me.”
“Demetri —”
“Say it is for me.”
“It’s for you,” she gasped. “Only you. God —”
He lowered his mouth.
Her cry rang through the chamber. He tasted her — heat and salt and the scent that had called him across two centuries and a burning city, the scent his dragon had filed away the instant she hit his arms and sworn never to lose — and her thighs clamped around his shoulders.
He held them open with both broad hands, patient, ruthless, and licked into her slow and deep.
Her hips bucked. He pinned them. He dragged the flat of his tongue up to her clit and closed his lips around it, and Nica sobbed his name and pulled his hair hard enough to hurt, and the small sting of it went straight to his cock.
“Demetri — Demetri, please —”
The dragon rumbled against her, a vibration that rolled up through her core, and she felt his mouth curve. Enjoying this. Enjoying her.
He slid one thick finger inside her. She was soaked, clenching, and he groaned into her flesh at the tight wet heat of her.
He curled the finger and found the place that made her back leave the silk.
Added a second. Stretched her, worked her, his mouth never leaving her clit, and Nica came apart with a scream, her whole body seizing, her heels digging into the stone, wave after wave rolling through her while he drank down every pulse and did not stop until the last tremor left her shaking.
Dragon fire rushed toward her, toward the place where his mouth still gentled her through the aftershocks. Ruby light gathered at the seam of them.
Demetri stopped it.
Nica felt the withdrawal, the sudden cold absence of something that had been about to pour into her, and her hand caught his wrist. “You’re doing it again. Holding back.”
“Until you ask.” He rose over her, his mouth wet with her, his eyes blown black and ringed in ruby.
“For the fire?”
“For everything.” He said it against her lips. “For the fire. For the bond. For the mark. For all of me. I will not take one thread of it that you have not given me freely. Ask, Nica. Or I will spend the rest of the night making you come and never once let it inside you.”
She sat up. Demetri rose with her. And Nica touched the scales that had begun to bloom across his ribs — ruby, hot, smooth under her fingertips. “Show me,” she whispered. “All of you. I want to see what I’m choosing.”
Ruby spread beneath her hand. Not a full shift — enough.
Scales sweeping up his sides and over his spine, his pupils narrowing to black vertical slits, claws lengthening from his fingertips and then stopping, held, before they could become weapons against her skin.
Smoke ghosted from his parted lips. He was terrifying. He was beautiful. He was hers.
She leaned in and pressed her lips to a single scale above his heart.
The dragon shuddered through the whole of him. Mine, it said, and this time she heard it clearly, a second voice layered under Demetri’s own.
Nica lifted her head. “Was that him?”
“You heard?”
“Not words.” She touched her temple. “A feeling. Like heat behind a door.”
“The bond is beginning.” His voice had gone thick. “It will open all the way when I take you. You will hear us both. There will be no more secrets between us, ever again. Are you certain, Nica? Last time I ask.”
“Then finish it.” She looked him dead in his inhuman eyes and said it clearly, so the man and the dragon and the ancient magic in the stone would all hear. “Take me. Bond me. I choose you — knowing what you are, knowing it’s forever. Now stop asking and give it to me.”
Demetri rolled onto his back and drew her over him.
Nica straddled his hips, and the broad head of his cock nudged against her wet heat, and she reached between them and guided him, then stopped, poised over him, her hair falling around them both like a curtain. “Do we need —”
“No.” His hands flexed at her hips, careful of the claws. “There is no child unless we both will it. The bond governs conception. I would have to want it. You would have to want it.” His ruby gaze burned up at her. “Someday I will want it. Not tonight. Tonight I only want you.”
“You’ve never done this. The bond.”
“Never.” The word came out reverent and rough.
“Two hundred and seventy years, Nica. I never wanted it. Never once. Not until a woman fell off a ladder into my arms and the whole of my life reorganized around her.” His hands tightened.
“Only you. There has only ever been you, waiting at the end of all that time.”
“Only you,” she echoed, and she lowered herself onto him.
Heat surrounded him — slow, tight, unbearable — and Demetri’s head pressed back against the silk, the cords of his throat standing out, and he gripped the fabric on either side of him rather than her hips because his claws would cut.
She sank down by inches, her breath catching at the stretch of him, the sheer thick length of him filling her by degrees, and when she was halfway she stilled, trembling.
“Look at me,” he ordered, wrecked.
She did.
“All of me,” he said. “You take all of me.”
And she seated herself fully, and both of them stopped breathing.
For one suspended heartbeat neither of them moved.
He was buried to the root inside her, throbbing, his whole body locked rigid with the effort of holding still, of holding the fire.
She felt impossibly full. She felt the bond humming at the place they joined, a pressure, a presence, waiting.
Sweat sheened his scaled chest. The sea crashed somewhere below. His hands shook.
“Nica.” Her name came out of him like a prayer in a language older than the church that had named her.
Then she moved.