Chapter Twenty #2
And when my mother arrived to enforce the laws I’d broken simply by existing in his world for too long, the sentence was supposed to be death. Raze had been given one chance to control the fire she had returned to him, and when he couldn’t, the price became mine to pay.
She should have killed me.
That was the law.
Instead, she chose something colder.
Something crueler in its mercy.
She stripped my memories away and tore me out of his world, not to punish him, but to save me from loving a dragon she believed would only burn me in the end.
The memories cascade faster now, overwhelming in their intensity.
His hands in my hair. Ice spreading across my skin in patterns that felt like claiming.
The way he looked at me in Church when I corrected Flux’s legal analysis and proved myself useful instead of just a liability waiting to be eliminated.
The taste of him, frost, fire, and possession so absolute, it rewrote every understanding I had about what desire could be.
The night we had together before my mother arrived.
The way the flame in the dome burned golden for the first time in three centuries.
Everything I lost when my mother’s magic unmade me to protect the laws that kept their world hidden.
“Roxy.” Raze’s voice cuts through the memory storm, sharp with an edge I recognize as barely contained violence.
“Why do you have a photograph of me in dragon form? Why does your research go back months… fuck, years?” His eyes narrow, ice cracking through the blue. “How long have you been hunting us?”
“I wasn’t—” I start, then stop, because half-truths will only make this worse.
I swallow hard and force myself to meet his gaze.
“I didn’t hunt you the way hunters do. I wasn’t looking for trophies or proof.
” Silence presses in. “I’m not human,” I say, and the words feel heavier spoken aloud than they ever did in my head. “Not completely.”
Every head in the room turns.
“I’m a witch,” I continue, before anyone else can fill the gap with assumptions.
“Barely. Whatever magic I was born with is thin, diluted, more potential than power. I can’t cast the way she can.
I can’t bend the world or rewrite laws or curse entire bloodlines.
” My voice tightens. “So, I live human. Work human jobs. Stay out of supernatural circles because there’s nothing for me there except her shadow. ”
Raze doesn’t interrupt, and that feels much worse.
“My mother…” I say quietly, “… isn’t like me.”
Understanding flickers across Scar’s face before he masks it.
“She’s old,” I go on. “Older than most of the creatures she judges. And she’s obsessed with balance.
With containment. With punishing anything she decides is a threat to the order she believes in.
” I gesture helplessly. “Which is why she put a curse on dragons who burned too hot. Why she exiled whole clans into the mountains and told herself it was mercy.”
Raze’s jaw tightens.
“I grew up hearing about you,” I admit. “About this place. About the ice curse. About how dragons were meant to burn wild and free and instead were locked into cages made of their own rage.” My breath shudders.
“I didn’t believe it at first. Not really.
So, I started researching, mapping sightings, tracking disappearances.
Trying to figure out if the stories were real…
and if they were, whether the curse could be broken. ”
The room is deathly still now.
“That’s why the wall,” I say softly. “The research, the notes… I wasn’t spying for her. I was trying to understand what she’d done. And whether she was wrong.”
“And you just… wandered into our territory?” Raze asks, his voice dangerously even.
“No,” I say, because this part matters. “I came looking. I just didn’t expect to survive it.
” The truth settles like falling rain. “I didn’t plan to stay,” I add, and this is the part that hurts the most to say.
“I was supposed to observe and report back what I learned. Maybe help undo some of the damage if I could.” My eyes burn.
“And then leave before I crossed lines I couldn’t uncross. ”
Scar lets out a low, thoughtful hum. “That explains the scent,” he murmurs. “Magic-adjacent, bloodline inheritance without the bite.”
I barely hear him.
“Everything after t-that…” I say, my voice breaking despite my best effort, “… everything was real. The accident. The fear. Falling for you.” I look at Raze fully, openly. “I didn’t lie about that. I didn’t pretend my way into your bed or your trust. I didn’t even remember who I was by the end.”
Raze stares at me like he’s trying to reconcile two incompatible truths.
“So, you knew,” he says finally. “And you still came?”
“Yes.”
“And you stayed.”
“Yes.” The word lands like a challenge.
“And you let her take your memories…” he asks, ice and fire grinding together in his voice, “… instead of letting her take my fire again?”
My throat closes. “Yes.”
No one speaks.
Because now they understand.
I’m not a human trespasser.
I’m not a spy.
And I’m definitely not an innocent.
I’m just a woman who walked knowingly into a monster’s den because she believed the monsters deserved better than the laws written over their bones.
Raze exhales slowly, controlled, deadly. “Which means…” he says, “… everything that followed started with a choice.” Something in his tone sharpens, not an accusation, but on the edge of it.
“No!” The denial explodes from me with enough force to make both of them focus entirely on me, predatory attention I’ve learned to navigate through weeks of captivity, claiming and learning to survive in a world where humans are prey, and I’m somehow both.
“The hunter was real. The crash was real. I was trying to calm him when we hit that tree. I didn’t plan to end up at your doorstep bleeding and terrified. ”
“But you planned to find me eventually.” It’s not a question.
I meet his gaze without flinching, letting him see the truth written in my eyes even as my heart threatens to beat itself to death against my ribs.
“Yes, I planned to find you! Planned to see if I could help break the curse, maybe prove to my mother that her laws are… limited. That supernatural and human don’t have to be completely separate if there’s choice involved instead of just an accident. ”
“And then?” Scar interjects, moving into my peripheral vision with that unsettling vampire grace. “What was supposed to happen after you helped the big bad dragon regain his fire?”
The answer sticks in my throat, weighted with the memory of my mother’s face when she arrived at the clubhouse, with the knowledge that her laws existed for reasons rooted in centuries of humans destroying what they feared and supernatural beings losing control when exposed.
“I was supposed to leave,” I finally admit, each word feeling like a small death. “Report back. Let my mother know if the curse could be broken or if it needed to remain in place.” My hands tremble as I wrap my arms around myself. “I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with you!”
The words hang in the air between us, confession and accusation intertwined, peeling back every lie until only the brutal truth remains. The same truth that drove me to spend years covering these walls in research, even when I couldn’t explain why it mattered so much.
Raze closes the distance between us in two strides, his intense eyes focused on mine.
“But you did.” His hands come up to frame my face with the careful precision of someone handling something breakable that they desperately want to crush and protect in equal measure.
Ice spreads from his touch, not burning but claiming, reminding every cell in my body that I already belong to him, even if my conscious mind spent three weeks in amnesia.
“You fell in love with a monster. And when the witch came to enforce her laws, you chose to forget everything rather than watch me lose my fire again.”
Tears spill over my eyes despite my best efforts to contain them.
“I couldn’t let her cage you again. Not when I was the reason you found your contentment.
Not when the flame finally burned the way it was supposed to after three centuries of d-dying.
” My voice cracks. “I’d rather lose myself than be the reason you went back into that crystal prison. ”
For a long moment, Raze stares at me, his blue eyes with a redish gold tinge now circling the blue, searching my face for any hint of deception or manipulation, finding only honesty, grief, and a love that survived memory loss and should have died with the rest of my recall.
A low growl escapes him, then suddenly he slams his lips to mine in a brutal and claiming kiss.
A possession so complete it rewrites everything I thought I understood about gentle or careful or any of the soft words people use when they talk about romance and connection.
This is fire and ice colliding, dragon and witch-blood human, three weeks of separation, rage and loss compressed into a single moment of absolute claiming.
I kiss him back with equal intensity, my hands fisting in his leather cut, dragging him closer even as his ice spreads across my skin in patterns that hurt and heal simultaneously.
Everything I forgot comes roaring back with each breath shared between us, memories and sensations, and the bone-deep certainty that this, him, us, the impossible reality of belonging to a dragon, is worth any price my mother’s laws demand.
When we finally break apart, both breathing hard, Scar is grinning with the kind of dark amusement that suggests he’s been watching our entire reunion with predatory interest.
“Well…” the vampire drawls, his red eyes gleaming in the darkness. “This is going to piss off the witch spectacularly. I’m honestly really looking forward to it.”
Raze doesn’t release me, his hands still framing my face as he holds my gaze with an intensity that makes it hard to think about anything except the way his thumb traces my cheekbone in a gesture that’s probably subconscious but feels devastatingly tender given that he’s an ice dragon who spent centuries without the capacity for gentleness.
“Come back,” he says, and it’s not a request. “The club is riding to war. The fae are coming because they know about you, about what you are and what you know about our operations.” His expression hardens.
“I won’t let them take you. I won’t let anyone take you.
Not the fae, not your mother, not the laws that say we can’t exist in the same world. ”
I should refuse.
I should point out that returning to the clubhouse means breaking the very laws my mother enforced when she wiped my memory, that claiming me publicly as his ol’ lady will bring down consequences neither of us can predict or control.
But standing here in this apartment that smells like lavender and obsession, surrounded by research that proves I never really left him, even without memories to anchor why it mattered, I can’t find a single reason to say no.
“Yes,” I whisper, and watch his eyes blaze with satisfaction. “Take me home.”
Scar’s grin widens. “The witch is going to lose her mind. This is the best entertainment I’ve had in decades.”
Raze releases my face only to take my hand, lacing our fingers together with the kind of natural ease that speaks to claiming deeper than conscious thought. “Pack what you need. We leave in five minutes. The brothers are waiting, and the fae won’t give us long before they make their move.”
I look around the apartment one final time, at the years of research on my wall that became my lifeline during three weeks of amnesia, at the space I’ve occupied without truly inhabiting, at the human life I tried to rebuild from fragments and guesswork.
None of it matters compared to the warmth of Raze’s hand in mine, the certainty of belonging somewhere that feels like home even though it’s built on violence, criminal enterprise, and creatures that shouldn’t exist outside mythology.
Raze makes a call back to the club to fill them in while I finish packing, and five minutes later, I’m walking out of my apartment with nothing but a backpack and the dragon whose curse I came to break, whose heart I accidentally claimed, and whose world I’m choosing over every safe, rational option available to a human woman who knows better than to fall in love with monsters.
Behind us, the research wall burns, dismantled and then lit with ruthless efficiency by Scar himself.
Every photograph, every note, every map I pinned up while trying to understand a world I wasn’t supposed to touch now lies crumpled in a steel trash can, edges glowing red as the pages collapse into ash.
Smoke stings my eyes, carrying away proof of who I was before all of this…
… before him.
The witch’s daughter and the ice dragon.
Heading back into the mountains where war is brewing, the fae are circling, and my mother’s magic will hunt us down for daring to defy laws older than human civilization.
I should be terrified.
Instead, I grip Raze’s hand tighter and follow him into the darkness, finally, remembering who I am and exactly where I belong.
Even if it means going to war to defend it.