Chapter Thirteen #3
The connection snaps into place so suddenly that I lose my breath.
Soren is still above me, still wrapped around me, but now there’s something beneath all of it that I’ve never felt before.
His emotions hit me with startling clarity: the overwhelming relief, the love, the fierce tenderness, and beneath it all an almost disbelieving happiness that I’m here and I chose him.
My eyes fill before I can stop them.
All this time, he’s been trying to tell me what I am to him. Now I don’t have to take his word for it.
I can feel it.
Soren goes still as he feels the connection too, and when he speaks, his voice is rough with wonder.
“The bond.” He presses his forehead to mine. “There you are, Angel.”
For a while, neither of us says anything.
I lie against him listening to his breathing settle, his hand moving slowly over my back as the heat between us eases into something almost comfortable.
Eventually his knot softens enough that we could separate, but Soren makes no effort to move, keeping me tucked against him for as long as he can.
I’m nearly asleep when a thought works its way through the haze.
“How long do dragons live?”
His hand pauses.
I lift my head. “Soren?”
“A very long time.”
“That sounds suspiciously like avoiding the question.”
“It is.”
I wait, and eventually he sighs. “Long enough that I don’t particularly want to discuss it while you’re lying naked on top of me.”
Unfortunately, now that I’ve asked, my brain is awake enough to think about it. Even if I get another sixty years, maybe more, they’re barely anything measured against a life that has already lasted six hundred.
He must see the realization on my face, because his arm tightens around me.
“Don’t,” he says softly. “I know where your mind just went.”
“You’ll outlive me, ten times over.”
“Yes, but not as quickly as you think.” His arm tightens around me. “The bond will change how you age. It’s already begun. You’ll have far more years than an ordinary human would, and if we ever have children, carrying dragon blood would extend that further.”
I prop my chin on his chest. “How much further?”
“Enough that we have time.” His thumb moves slowly along my back. “But yes, Angel. Unless something changes, I will outlive you.” His expression softens. “But I’m still going to love you for every day you’re here. I refuse to spend the years we have grieving them before we’ve even lived them.”
That hits hard enough that I tuck my face against his chest.
“Then you’d better not waste any of them.”
He laughs.
Not the quiet amusement I’ve heard from him before, but a real laugh, warm and startled enough that I feel it through his chest. I lift my head just to see it, and the sight of Soren smiling beneath me with absolutely none of his usual restraint makes me want to hear that sound as often as I possibly can.
“I mean it,” he says when the laughter fades, his hand settling against my back again. “Every day.”
I rest my cheek against his chest as the purr begins beneath my ear. “Every day.”
I’m nearly asleep again when the sound gradually fades. At first I think Soren has drifted off too, but when I look up at him, he’s wide awake and watching me with an expression I can’t quite place.
“There’s one more thing I want to show you,” he says after a moment. “Something I should have shown you before now.”
I push up onto one elbow. Considering how much I’ve learned about Soren tonight, I’m not sure what he could possibly still be keeping up his sleeve. “Should I be worried?”
His mouth curves slightly. “No, Angel. But you’ll need to get dressed. And bring something warm.”
That does nothing to answer my question, but Soren is already getting out of bed, so I follow. I pull on my clothes while he dresses beside me, then grab one of the heavy blankets from the foot of the bed and wrap it around me.
By the time we leave his rooms, my curiosity has developed a healthy edge of suspicion.
A few minutes later, I’m following him through the house wrapped in a heavy blanket.
The moment we step outside, I understand why he suggested the blanket.
The east lawn is silver with frost, the cold sharp enough to catch in my lungs, and above us the sky is clearer than I ever remember seeing it from the city.
Soren leads me away from the house until there’s nothing around us but dark grass and the distant line of trees, then stops and turns.
“This is the part of me you haven’t seen yet,” he says, his voice softer now. “Just don’t be afraid, okay, Angel? I would never hurt you.”
Heat rolls off him strongly enough to reach me through the cold as his glamour begins to fall away.
I’ve watched this happen before, I saw the scales surface and his body shift beneath the human shape he wears, but this time he doesn’t stop there.
The change keeps going, spreading through him until I realize those glimpses hadn’t prepared me for what Soren actually looks like as a dragon.
He is enormous.
Bronze and old gold scales rise against the night as his body expands across the lawn, every familiar piece of him becoming something larger and wilder until I have to tip my head back to keep looking.
Horns sweep from his skull, scales catch what little light there is, and when his wings finally unfurl, their span seems impossible, vast enough to block out whole pieces of the sky.
For one second, my body reacts before my mind can catch up. Every ancient survival instinct I possess looks at the creature in front of me and suggests that perhaps standing here in a blanket is a terrible idea.
Then I see how carefully he’s holding himself, and I remember: he would never hurt me.
Soren doesn’t move. He simply stands there, immense and perfectly still, watching me with those huge gold eyes as though he’s waiting to see what I’ll do.
I walk toward him. The frost crunches beneath my feet as I cross the distance between us, and by the time I reach him, the heat coming off his body has driven away most of the cold.
His breath washes over me, carrying smoke and the familiar warm spice, and somehow that’s what makes the massive creature in front of me feel like Soren again.
I lift my hand and lay it against the ridge of his jaw.
His gold eye closes, and a deep purr rolls through him, so powerful I feel it beneath my feet.
Something in my chest squeezes so hard it almost hurts. I knew what it meant when he let me into his private rooms, but this feels different. There are no walls around this part of him, nothing human he can hide behind, and he’s still standing perfectly still beneath my hand.
“You’re beautiful,” I whisper.
The sound that moves through him is so deep I feel it everywhere.
Then one of his wings lowers slowly until the edge settles onto the grass beside me.
It takes me a moment to understand what he wants, and another to decide whether he has completely lost his fucking mind. Apparently I have too, because I gather the blanket around myself and start climbing.
It is neither dignified nor easy, but Soren holds himself steady while I make my way up the warm slope of his wing and onto his back.
The scales are smaller where his neck meets his shoulders, but still hot even through my jeans, and there’s a raised ridge in front of me that gives me something solid to wrap my hands around.
A vibration rolls through him, and then Soren’s voice is suddenly inside my head.
Hold on, Angel.
I nearly let go instead.
“What the fuck?”
His laughter rumbles through the vast body beneath me.
Mate bond. When I’m in this form, I can speak to you through it.
“You might have mentioned that before getting inside my head.”
I just did.
I’m still deciding whether that deserves an argument when his wings spread wider.
Now be my good girl and hold on.
I barely have time to tighten my grip before his wings come down.
The first beat tears the ground out from beneath us, the second takes us over the trees, and by the third I can see the mansion below, every glowing window shrinking as we climb.
Cold air tears past me hard enough to steal my breath, but Soren beneath me is furnace-hot, and I press myself closer to his body.
For the first few minutes, I hold on with every available muscle.
Then he banks.
It’s slow and careful, nothing like the violent turn my imagination supplies when I realize what he’s doing, and suddenly the whole city is spread beneath us in ribbons of white and gold.
Streets I know by heart become thin lines; buildings that tower over the street fit beneath the sweep of one wing.
The world looks completely different from up here, and somewhere in the middle of staring at it, I realize I’m not frightened anymore.
I laugh.
The wind steals most of the sound, but Soren feels it anyway. A rumble begins beneath me, so deep that at first I mistake it for the movement of his wings, until I recognize what it is.
He’s purring.
That makes me laugh harder.
I lean into the heat of him while the city turns below us, my hair whipping across my face and the blanket threatening to escape no matter how tightly I’ve tucked it around myself.
I lose track of how much time we spend up there.
Eventually the cold fades into the background, I stop thinking about how far away the ground is, and somehow flying over the city on the back of a dragon starts to feel almost normal.
Eventually, Soren turns us toward home.
He brings us down with care, circling once before settling onto the lawn. I wait until his wing lowers before climbing off, much less gracefully than I climbed on, and the moment my feet touch the frost I turn to watch him change.