Chapter 12 Kael
KAEL
Everything seemed quieter inside of the nest, there was no rustling, there were no whispers.
Amara was sitting cross-legged inside it, the old burgundy cardigan pulled around her shoulders, watching me with those bright brown eyes that had been dismantling me one morning at a time for six months.
The lamp in the corner cast everything in warm amber.
Outside the heavy doors of the east wing, the gala had long since wound down to silence.
It was just the two of us inside of the nest that I’d built out of pure instinct. There were no secrets or titles or even bakery counters between us. It was truly just us, finally taking up the space, together.
I had moved from the floor to the edge of the bed when she'd asked me to stay, close enough that our knees almost touched.
The scales on my arms still glowed softly, warm gold in the low light, and I watched her eyes track them the way they had been since I'd taken my shirt off. Like she was still getting used to the fact that they existed, as if she could’t get enough of staring at them.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Anything."
She picked at a loose thread on the cardigan cuff, not quite meeting my eyes. "How many people have you been with? Since Sabrina?"
I looked at her steadily. "None."
Her eyes came up. "None?"
"None," I said. "After Sabrina I just... stopped. It didn't seem worth the risk."
Something moved across her face. Recognition, maybe? The particular expression of someone hearing their own experience reflected back at them.
"Me too," she said quietly. "Since Colin. That was..." She stopped. Exhaled through her nose. "That was first time and the last time. I just closed that whole part of myself off and told myself it was fine."
"Was it?" I asked.
"No," she said simply. "But it was easier than getting it wrong again."
I reached out and covered her hand with mine, stilling the nervous movement of her fingers against the cardigan.
She looked down at our hands. At the soft gold light moving beneath my skin.
"Kael," she said after a moment, her voice dropping to something smaller. "I need to say something and I need you to just let me say it without trying to fix it."
"Okay," I said.
She took a breath. "I know what I look like. I know I'm not..." She gestured vaguely at herself. "I'm not what people expect. I'm short and I'm soft and my mother has spent my entire life telling me my hips are too much and I've never quite managed to stop believing her. And I just."
She stopped and her jaw tightened. "I need to know that you actually want this. Not because of the fated match biology or the scales or whatever your dragon thinks it knows. But because you actually want me. The way I am."
She was looking at me now, steady and terrified and braver than she knew.
I didn't give her a speech or reach for elaborate words or construct something careful and impressive.
I just looked at her, all of her, the soft curves she'd spent years hiding under oversized cardigans, the warm brown skin glowing in the amber light, and took in those bright eyes waiting for me to confirm her worst fears or shatter them entirely.
"You're just right for me," I said.
The scales pulsed gold.
Her breath came out unsteady.
"Just like that?" she whispered.
"Just like that," I said. "I've watched you walk into my bakery every morning for six months and every single time, my first thought was that you were exactly right. Not despite anything. Not in spite of anything. Just exactly right."
She looked at me for a long moment and then she reached out and took the hem of my undershirt in her fingers.
I went very still.
"Show me," she said quietly. "Show me what it looks like when you actually want someone."
I closed the space between us slowly, giving her every opportunity to change her mind, and when she didn't, when she tilted her chin up and her hands pressed flat against my chest over the glow of the scales, and I kissed her for the first time.
It was soft and unhurried, and it was the way I did everything that mattered. She made a sound against my mouth that traveled straight through me and my dragon went absolutely still in the way it only did when something was exactly right.
I pulled back just far enough to look at her.
Her eyes were still closed.
"More," she whispered, a smile ghosting on her lips.
I kissed her again, deeper this time, my hands coming up to cup her face the way I'd wanted to for months, my thumbs brushing her cheekbones, feeling her breath hitch against my lips.
She tasted like warmth and something sweet and entirely her and I understood suddenly with complete clarity why my hands had been making honey-ember tarts before dawn for six months.
They had always known what the rest of me was too afraid to admit.
I eased her back into the nest slowly, my weight settling beside her rather than over her, and took my time.
Every piece of clothing came off carefully, deliberately, my hands moving without rush across every curve she'd spent years hiding.
She tensed once, her hands moving self-consciously, and I caught them gently and pressed them back down to the blankets.
"Let me," I said against her collarbone.
She exhaled and let me.
I wanted to learn her body the way I’d learned every recipe that mattered.
With patience and attention and the absolute conviction that getting it right was worth taking as long as it took.
Every sound she made I filed away and returned to.
Every place that made her breath catch I memorized and revisited until the catching became something louder and less contained.
The scales brightened steadily.
By the time she was pulling me closer with both hands, her voice soft and urgent against my ear, they were casting warm gold light across the ceiling above us.
"Kael," she breathed.
"I have you," I said. "I've got you."
I settled between her thighs and watched her face as I pressed forward, slow and careful, giving her time to adjust to the size of me, watching for anything that said stop and finding nothing but her hands gripping my arms and her head falling back and her lips parting around a sound that did something permanent to me.
We moved together slowly.
There was no urgency, and no heat biology driving us forward. Just two people who had spent six months talking around what they meant to each other finally saying it in the only language that had no room for omission or fear.
I kept my eyes on her face.
She kept her hands on my chest, her fingers pressed against the scales, feeling the warmth of them pulse beneath her palms with every movement. Her eyes dropped to them occasionally, wide and wondering, watching them glow brighter and brighter in the amber dimness of the room.
"It keeps getting brighter," she breathed.
"Yeah," I managed.
"Is that because of..."
"Yes," I said. "It's because of you. It's always been because of you."
Something in her expression broke open completely at that. Every last wall. Every piece of armor she'd built out of Colin's carelessness and her mother's criticism and years of telling herself she wasn't enough for anyone.
Gone.
She pulled me down and kissed me hard and I felt the shift in her, the moment she stopped waiting for something to go wrong and just let herself have this.
Have us, my dragon groaned.
Her mouth found my neck and I felt her hesitate there, her lips pressing against my pulse, and I knew what she was feeling because I was feeling it too. That she was feeling the pull and the sense of something arriving that had been on its way for a very long time.
"Kael," she said against my skin, her voice barely a whisper.
"Tell me," I said.
"I want..." She stopped. Pressed her lips to the place where my neck met my shoulder. "I want you to bite me."
The words moved through me like fire.
My dragon surged forward and I held it back by a thread, keeping my movements slow and deliberate even as everything inside me roared to comply.
"You're sure," I said.
"I'm sure," she said. "I'm choosing this. I'm choosing you."
I turned my face into her neck, found the soft curve where her neck met her shoulder, and pressed my lips there first. Felt her shiver. Felt her hands grip my back.
Then I bit her, calmly and gently claiming her.
The way I did everything that mattered to me.
She gasped, her whole body arching up into mine, and I felt the bond snap into place like a key turning in a lock that had always been there waiting. Warmth flooded through me so complete and total it was almost overwhelming.
The scales blazed hotter on my skin.
We moved together faster now, the careful patience giving way to something deeper and more urgent, her voice in my ear and her hands in my hair and every sensation amplified through the new bond between us.
And then I followed her.
My knot locked.
She made a soft broken sound at the fullness of it, her hands gripping my arms, her eyes going wide and dark.
"Oh," she breathed.
Just that one word and it undid me completely.
The scales hit their full brilliance and the entire room flooded with warm gold light, incandescent and total, pouring from my skin in a wave that had nothing to do with anything I could control and everything to do with the woman beneath me. My dragon, finally, completely, irreversibly certain.
This one. Her. Always.
We stayed locked together in the gold light, her hands pressed flat against my chest, feeling the warmth of the scales pulse beneath her palms. Her breathing slowed gradually, mine did too.
Her fingers began tracing the patterns of the scales absently, the way she used to trace the rim of her coffee cup at the bakery counter when she was thinking.
"Kael," she said finally, her voice breathy and slightly undone.
"I know," I said.
She tilted her head back to look at me, her eyes warm and unguarded in a way I had never seen them before. Not even in six months of morning visits and honey-ember tarts and everything we'd been building without either of us having the courage to call it what it was.
"You really glowed," she said.
A laugh moved through my chest before I could stop it, low and quiet.
"I really glowed," I confirmed.
She smiled. Small and real and entirely hers.
And I thought that I would spend the rest of my life making sure she had reasons to smile like that.
Starting tomorrow with honey-ember tarts.
But for now I held her close and felt her settle against my chest with a soft exhale and let the gold light hold us both in the quiet of the room where I had grown up dreaming of exactly this without ever knowing her name.