Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
SOREIA
Isurface through fire.
Not the burning kind—not destruction, not pain. This fire moves through my blood like a second heartbeat, pulsing heat into places that had gone cold and dead. It fills the hollow spaces the poison carved, floods the emptiness where my magic used to live.
I’m not supposed to be alive.
The thought arrives with strange detachment, clinical observation from a mind that hasn’t quite caught up to a body that’s decided to keep functioning. Divine poison doesn’t have antidotes. Anchor witches don’t survive when their magic unravels. The laws of my existence are absolute.
Were absolute.
My eyes open to orange light.
Stone walls curved above me, rough-hewn and ancient. They glow with banked heat—not from any flame I can see, but from the rock itself, as if decades of dragonfire have seeped into the mineral structure and taken up permanent residence.
A cave. His cave.
I know that without knowing how I know it. The air tastes like him—ash and iron and the particular scent of power held barely in check. This space is saturated with his presence. His territory in the most literal sense.
And I’m lying on heated stone, breathing air that doesn’t hurt to draw, with dragonfire coursing through my blood that by all rights would have destroyed me.
My body runs diagnostics without permission.
Old habit. Years of monitoring the slow deterioration that defined my existence have carved grooves into my consciousness that function automatically.
Every morning since my power awakened, I’ve cataloged the damage—measured how much the magic cost me overnight, calculated how many days remained in a lifespan that shortened with every breath.
Lungs: functional. No fluid, no strain, no rattle that signals internal bleeding.
Heart: steady. The arrhythmia that had been worsening for months is gone, replaced by a rhythm so stable it hardly feels like mine.
Muscles: responsive. I flex my fingers against the stone beneath me and they obey instantly, no trembling, no weakness.
The poison—
I search for it. The cold spreading through my blood, the pressure building behind my eyes, the creeping numbness that had been claiming my body territory by territory. The toxin designed specifically to unravel Anchor magic at the source.
Gone.
Not suppressed. Not dormant. Erased, as if it had never existed.
That’s impossible.
I push myself upright too fast. The cave tilts, my vision graying at the edges, and I catch myself on my palms against stone that pulses heat into my skin like a living thing. Three heartbeats to steady. Another two before the world stops spinning.
And then I see him.
Kaster sits against the far wall, watching me.
His body tells the story of what happened—wounds still seeping sluggish blood, bones that haven’t finished knitting, exhaustion carved into every line of his face.
The gash across his back has closed but the skin remains raw, angry red against the amber light.
His ribs move wrong when he breathes, the rhythm interrupted by fractures that need more time.
By all logic, he’s dead. By all logic, I’m dead. Neither of us followed the script.
“You’re awake.” A statement delivered in the controlled quiet that refuses to give anything away.
I swallow. My throat doesn’t hurt anymore—another impossibility in a growing list. “What did you do?”
His expression doesn’t change. “Kept you alive.”
“That’s not—” I stop. Start again, forcing my voice to stay steady. “The poison was killing me. Divine toxin designed for Anchor witches. There’s no cure. No treatment. I would have died in that canyon.”
“Yes.”
“But I didn’t die. I’m—” Another pause as I search for the right words. “I’m better. Stronger than I’ve been in years. My magic isn’t—”
I reach for the power that has been both a gift and a curse since childhood. The Anchor magic that lets me make death permanent, that lets me pin reality in place with the force of my will.
It responds instantly. Cleanly. No pain. No drain. No sense of my own life force bleeding away with every use.
“What did you do?”
He rises from his position against the wall. The movement costs him—I see the way his muscles seize, the careful control required to mask how much his body is fighting each step. He crosses the distance between us with deliberate grace despite the damage.
Stops directly in front of me.
This close, the heat radiating from his skin is overwhelming. Dragon fire barely contained beneath human form, burning so hot, I feel it from three feet away. His scent fills my awareness—smoke and violence and the particular metallic tang of old blood.
“I mated you.”
The words confirm what I already know. The fire running through my blood is the answer. I remember asking for it.
Dragon mating. The thing every witch learns to fear before she learns to walk. The permanent bond that can never be broken, the surrender of autonomy that lasts until death and possibly beyond. The trap that has destroyed more powerful women than me.
“You mated me.” I say the words aloud, feeling their weight settle. “I asked you to.”
“Yes.”
The permanence settles over me. Not with dread—with the particular weight of an irrevocable choice made clearly, at the edge of oblivion, and kept.
“Why?”
The question emerges quieter than I intended. Not accusation—genuine curiosity. He’s spent weeks fighting this, denying every protective instinct, rationalizing proximity as tactical necessity. What changed?
His eyes meet mine. In the orange glow of the cave, they burn with an intensity that has nothing to do with the flames heating the stone.
“I couldn’t let you die.”
Such a simple answer. Such a massive admission from a creature who has built his entire existence around emotional isolation.
I study his face. The hard lines, the unyielding set of his jaw, the refusal to look away or soften or pretend that what he did was anything other than exactly what it was. A decision made in desperation, because he couldn’t accept a world where I didn’t exist.
“I should hate you for this.”
“Probably.” He doesn’t flinch. “Are you?”
I consider the question seriously. Search inside myself for the resentment that should be there.
“No.”
His pupils dilate. Fractionally, barely visible—but I’ve been watching him long enough to recognize the tells he thinks he’s hiding.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m alive.” The words come easier, gaining momentum. “Because for the first time since my power manifested, breathing doesn’t hurt. Because the magic that’s been killing me for fifteen years is finally, finally not.”
I lift my hand. Call a thread of Anchor power and let it flow across my palm. No pain. No drain. No nosebleed, no trembling, no sense of my remaining days ticking away.
“You gave me this. However you did it—I’m not going to hate you for it.”
He doesn’t respond with words.
Instead he reaches for me. His hand cups my jaw, tilts my face up toward his. The contact sends heat cascading through my skin—not the heat of fever, not the heat of fire. Different. Deeper. As if his touch has found pathways that didn’t exist before and claimed them as his own.
“You don’t understand what this means.” His voice is rough. “The mating bond isn’t temporary. It doesn’t fade. From now until the end of everything, I will know where you are. I will feel when you’re hurt. And I will never, ever stop coming for you.”
“Is that supposed to frighten me?”
“It’s supposed to be the truth.” His thumb traces my cheekbone. “I won’t apologize for keeping you alive. But you deserve to know what I’ve done. What we are now.”
What we are now.
The bond pulses in the back of my consciousness—a presence I’m only beginning to recognize. Not intrusive. Not demanding. Simply there, like a pulse echoing his own.
“I know what we are.” I hold his gaze. “I’m choosing not to regret it.”
His grip tightens on my jaw. Not painful. Possessive. “Say that again.”
“I’m choosing not to regret it.”
When he kisses me, it’s not gentle.
Nothing about him is gentle—the way his other hand fists in my hair, the way his body presses me back against the warm rock, the way his mouth takes instead of asks. This is claiming. Possession. The physical manifestation of what the bond has already accomplished at a deeper level.
I meet him with equal force.
My fingers dig into his shoulders, finding the places between wounds where I can grip without causing fresh damage. His skin burns beneath my palms, dragon heat barely contained, and I press into it instead of away from it. Let the fire fill me the way it filled me when I was dying.
The way it saved me.
His mouth moves from my lips to my throat. Teeth graze the pulse point that’s beating faster than it has any right to, and the sensation sends electricity racing through nerves that feel newly awakened. I arch into him without thinking.
“Tell me to stop.” The words vibrate against my skin. “Tell me and I will.”
“No.”
His laugh is harsh, broken. “Stubborn witch.”
“Says the dragon who claimed me while I was unconscious.”
He pulls back. Meets my eyes with an intensity that makes my breath catch. “Do you want this?”
“I want to feel anything other than dying.” The truth emerges raw and unfiltered. “I want to know what this body can do when it’s not fighting to survive. I want—”
I stop. I’ve never been good at articulating want. Years of rationing every expenditure of energy have trained me to focus on need—the immediate, the essential. Want was a luxury I couldn’t afford.
“I want you.”
His expression shifts. Not softer—he doesn’t do soft—but more intent. Focused in a way that makes me feel like prey, like the target of attention so absolute nothing else exists.
“Then you’ll have me.”