Epilogue Quill
One Month Later
The Purity Front was dead.
Not officially, not in any court of law or Elder Council decree, but in every way that mattered.
Its leadership had rotted into the ground along with Morgana and Thaddeus.
Its army of undead had been reduced to soil and mushroom spores scattered across the ruined foyer of the Pyre estate.
And the remaining witches who’d worn that mask of righteous purity had scattered to the wind the moment their leaders fell, most of them turning themselves in before the Elder Council even had to send anyone looking.
I sat at the kitchen counter of our new home, nursing a cup of tea while I read through the morning paper.
They’d run another story about the reconstruction efforts at Widdershins, complete with a photo of Wild standing in front of the half-rebuilt west wing looking entirely too pleased with himself for someone who was supposed to be helping oversee a magical catastrophe.
Besides him was Professor Blackwood, looking like she was getting just a little tired of putting up with him.
“They gave him a hard hat,” I said, turning the paper around so Aeron could see it from where he stood by the window, still shirtless from his shower, his damp scales glistening in the light. “A hard hat. On a fae. As if that’s necessary at all.”
“He probably asked for it,” Aeron said, not even glancing over. His attention was fixed on something outside, that faraway look he got sometimes when his mind wandered back to the estate, to his grandfather, to all the things we still hadn’t fully talked through even a month later.
I set the paper down and came to stand beside him, slipping my arm around his waist. “Hey. What’re you thinking about?”
“Nothing,” he said, but his hand came up to cover mine anyway, lacing our fingers together. “Just about the hearing next week, I guess.”
The Elder Council hearing. The one where they’d formally address what had happened, where they’d decide what to do about the empty seat Thaddeus had left behind, where they’d ask Aeron and I to testify about everything he’d witnessed in that foyer.
I’d been trying not to think about it too hard myself, but it clearly hadn’t been far from either of our minds these past few days.
“You don’t have to go through it alone,” I reminded him, echoing words I’d said more times than I could count over the past month. “I’ll be right there.”
“I know.” He turned, finally, wrapping both arms around me and resting his chin on top of my head. “I just keep thinking about what they’re going to ask. Whether they’ll want the full truth about the succession, about who inherits the Pyre seat now that he’s gone.”
That was the part that scared him most, I’d come to realize.
Not the grief, though that still ambushed him some nights, in the middle of the night when anxiety crept in.
It was the responsibility waiting on the other side of it, an entire legacy and a council seat and centuries of expectation, all of it funneling down onto shoulders that had barely finished mourning the man who’d built that legacy on lies.
“You’ll figure it out,” I said, echoing his own words back at him from that first horrible night. “Whatever they decide, whatever comes next, you won’t be doing it alone.”
He huffed out something that might have been a laugh, might have been relief, and pressed a kiss to the crown of my head. “I’ve already made my decision, actually. I’m going to turn it down. I just hope they’ll accept that.”
I pulled back just enough to look up at him, searching his face for any trace of doubt. There wasn’t any. Just that quiet certainty he’d been carrying around lately, the kind that made him seem older than the carefree cocky dragon I’d fallen for at Widdershins.
“You’re sure?” I asked anyway, because it felt like the kind of decision that deserved to be questioned at least once. “That’s a lot of power to walk away from.”
“That’s exactly why I’m walking away from it,” he said. “Power like that, it’s what turned him into what he became. I watched it happen. I don’t want to spend the next few centuries wondering if I’m slowly becoming the same thing.”
I thought about arguing, about telling him he wasn’t his grandfather, that he wouldn’t allow his grief to turn him into a monster.
But I’d said all of that already, more than once, in the weeks since it all happened.
He knew it. He believed it, mostly. I had to trust he knew what was best for himself.
“Okay,” I said instead, reaching up to brush my thumb along his jaw the way I always did. “Then we tell the Council together. Let them find someone else to run the world.”
He smiled at that, small and tired but real, and some of the tension in his shoulders eased. “Wild’s going to have a field day when he finds out. He’s been taking bets with Elias on whether I’d cave to family obligation.”
“Please tell me you’re not actually going to give him the satisfaction of winning that bet.”
“Oh, I fully intend to make him lose spectacularly.” He kissed my forehead, then the tip of my nose, working his way down until I was laughing and swatting half-heartedly at his chest. “But we’ll worry about that later. Right now, I think I want something else.”
“It’s been barely two hours since the last time,” I said.
“And your point is what?”
I let him pull me toward the living room, tea forgotten on the counter, the newspaper with its ridiculous photo of Wild in a hard hat left open on the table.
A surge of lust pushed through the bond between us and I let myself give into it.
After all, I was still a guy in his early twenties.
It wasn’t like I could resist such a thing from the hottest dragon I’d ever met.
The couch caught the back of my knees before I even realized he’d steered us there, and then I was falling, pulling him down with me, his weight settling between my thighs like it was the most natural thing in the world. Which, I supposed, it was now.
“You’re doing that thing,” I said, breathless already, “where you decide something’s happening before you actually ask me.”
“Do you want me to ask?” His voice had dropped into that low rumble that did unfair things to my whole body. His mouth was already trailing along my jaw, down to the spot beneath my ear that made my toes curl.
“No,” I admitted. “You don’t have to ask with me.”
He laughed against my skin, and the sound of it vibrated straight through me.
His hands found the hem of my shirt, dragging it up and over my head with more efficiency than he had any right to possess.
And then his mouth was on my chest, tongue flicking over one nipple until I arched up into him with a gasp.
“You’re overdressed,” I managed, tugging uselessly at the waistband of his sweatpants. He’d barely bothered to put anything on after his shower, and I was suddenly very grateful for that fact.
“Fix it, then,” he said, pulling back just far enough to let me shove the fabric down his hips.
He kicked them off the rest of the way, and then he was bare against me, all those warm red scales and hard muscle, the faint shimmer of his scales catching the morning light spilling through the windows.
I ran my hands down his sides, feeling the way he shuddered under my touch, the way his composure cracked just slightly whenever I found those sensitive spots between his scales. He liked it there, I’d learned. And he liked it when I held his horns while I rode his cock.
“Red,” he said, and it came out strangled as I dragged my nails lightly down his spine. “If you keep doing that—”
“What?” I asked, all faux innocence, even as my own cock throbbed insistently against the confines of my sweatpants. “Doing what?”
He answered by hooking his fingers into my waistband and yanking, hard enough that I laughed before the sound broke into a moan as his hand wrapped around my shaft, slow and deliberate, thumb swiping over the sensitive head until my hips jerked up against him without permission.
“Fuck…”
“If you insist,” he murmured, and then he was kissing me again, deep and consuming, his tongue sliding against mine while his hand kept working me with maddening patience.
I fumbled between us, finding his thick cock at last. My fingers didn’t touch as I wrapped my hand around it, milking a large bead of pre-cum from the tip.
We moved together after that, a rhythm we’d learned over the past month, one that still managed to steal the breath from my lungs every single time.
He reached for the small bottle we’d started keeping tucked into the couch cushions, because apparently we’d become the kind of couple who needed lube within arm’s reach in every room of the house, and slicked his fingers before trailing them down between my thighs.
“Ready?” he asked, always asking, even now, even after a month of this becoming as familiar as breathing.
“You know it,” I said, and spread my legs wider in invitation.
He worked me open with a patience that bordered on cruel, one finger becoming two, curling deep until I was writhing beneath him, chasing a pleasure that built low and insistent in my gut.
By the time he finally settled between my thighs, pressing the blunt head of his cock against me, I was nearly incoherent, begging in a way that would have embarrassed me a month ago and now just felt like a normal Tuesday.
“Look at me,” he said as he pushed in, slow and steady, giving me time to adjust to the size of him. I did, meeting those golden eyes even as my back arched off the couch cushions, even as my whole body trembled with the effort of taking his massive cock.
“Fuck you’re beautiful like this,” he breathed, once he was fully seated, and once I’d relaxed enough around him that he could start to move. “I love you like this. Open for me. Trusting me.”
“Of course I trust you,” I gasped out, hooking my legs around his hips to pull him deeper. “Now fuck me or I swear I’ll—”
His hips thrust forward, cutting me off.