Valdris (Dragon Master Daddies #7)

Chapter 1

Evara

The bond came first. Before my heartbeat.

Before the awareness of lungs or limbs or the shell pressing against my palms. Before I remembered I had a name, I remembered him—a golden thread wrapped around whatever was left of my soul, stretching east and down into a darkness so vast it had swallowed ten thousand years without noticing.

It had never died.

That was the thing I couldn't escape, the truth that had followed me through the void between death and life, the void between running and returning.

I had torn myself away from him. I had watched his love curdle into something monstrous.

I had died knowing what my cowardice had cost the world.

And through all of it—through the nothing, through the everywhere-and-nowhere that had been my existence for millennia—the thread had remained.

Golden. Taut. Aching.

My anchor. My torment. The only thing I'd held onto when everything else dissolved into formless dark.

Valdris.

I didn't think his name so much as feel it pulse through me, a heartbeat that wasn't mine, a warmth that had no business existing in the cold void of unmaking.

My hands pressed against something smooth and unyielding.

Shell. Curved walls that shouldn't exist, containing a body that shouldn't exist, encasing a soul that had finally, finally clawed its way back to the world it had abandoned.

I pressed harder.

The shell cracked.

Light flooded in—not the warm gold of sunlight or the silver of stars, but something else. Something impossible. Colors that hurt even as they healed, wavelengths that existed only in the space between realms, light that my new eyes shouldn't have been able to see but somehow did.

I couldn't breathe.

Not because there was no air—there was, rushing in through the widening fissures, tasting of salt and ancient magic and something achingly familiar—but because I had forgotten how.

My lungs were new. My throat was new. Everything was remade, reconstructed from memory and magic and the desperate pull of a bond that refused to let me stay dead.

But I remembered him.

The way his hands felt cupping my face, rough and impossibly gentle, like he was holding something sacred.

The gold of his eyes before they went cold, before I ruined them with my running.

The sound of his roar when I fled—that was the worst of it, the memory that had followed me through ten thousand years of nothing.

Not anger. Not even hatred, though that came later.

Just devastation. The sound of something breaking that could never be repaired.

I pressed my palms flat against the inside of the shell and pushed.

The cracks spread like lightning across glass.

Light poured in from every direction, and with it came sensation—wet and warm, my new skin slick with something that shimmered, my hair plastered to shoulders I was only just remembering how to move.

The shell fell away in fragments that dissolved before they could touch the water below, returning to the pure energy that had formed them.

I unfolded.

There was no other word for it. Limbs that had been curled for months slowly extended. A spine that had never held weight learned to straighten. A head that contained ten thousand years of memory lifted toward light that shouldn't exist.

And the grotto revealed itself around me.

Flowers. Flowers everywhere—blooming from the wet stone walls, cascading down toward the black pool that surrounded the crystallized platform where I'd emerged.

Their petals glowed with bioluminescence in colors I recognized, colors that made my chest ache with a grief so old it had become part of me.

These flowers had been extinct for centuries.

I knew because I'd watched them die. Watched the last of them wither as Valdris's corruption spread, as the world mourned what my cowardice had cost it. And now they bloomed again, here in this impossible space, as if the universe itself was welcoming me home.

The water surrounding me glowed with ancient magic—not the cold light of preservation but something warmer, something that pulsed in time with the bond singing through my blood.

East. Down. Come to me.

Movement at the grotto's edge.

I lifted my head and found them watching—two figures standing at the threshold of this sacred space, one tall and shadowed with eyes like captured starlight, one smaller and trembling with a face that stopped my newly-beating heart.

I took my first breath.

It tasted like grief—salt and iron and the ache of everything I'd lost. It tasted like hope—the flowers, the magic, the woman who wore my face and had been brave in all the ways I hadn't. And beneath both, distant but undeniable, the taste of fire.

The bond pulsed.

East. Down. Come.

He knew I was awake. Wherever he was—in whatever darkness had contained him for millennia—he felt me return. The thread between us, starved for ten thousand years, sang with a frequency that made my new bones vibrate.

I was supposed to rest. Supposed to recover. Supposed to let the Dragon Lords and their mates plan and strategize and find safe ways to approach the monster I had made.

But the bond didn't care about safety.

And neither, I was finally learning, did I.

He's coming, something whispered in the back of my mind. Or maybe I was the one going to him. Maybe I had always been going to him, even when I ran, even when I died, even when I spent ten millennia in the void between worlds.

I opened my mouth to speak—to say something to the woman who wore my face, to the man who had paid in dragon-fire to bring me back—but the words that emerged weren't the ones I'd planned.

"He knows," I whispered.

And the darkness beyond the grotto seemed to shudder in response.

Icouldn't stop staring at her. At the shape of her jaw, the exact shade of her eyes, the way her dark hair curled at her temples in the same pattern mine had once held.

Looking at Lena was like looking into a river and seeing not my reflection but my possibility—the woman I might have become if I'd been braver, stronger, less of a coward with a heart too small to hold a dragon's love.

The grotto's impossible light played across her features, and I cataloged every similarity like a healer taking inventory of wounds.

The same grey eyes, luminous and deep. The same nose, though hers had been softened by generations of mixing.

The same scar above the left eyebrow—that stopped me, made something in my chest clench tight enough to hurt.

I remembered getting that scar. A stone I hadn't seen, a fall I couldn't stop, blood running into my eye while my mother fussed and cleaned and promised it wouldn't leave a mark.

She'd been wrong. It had marked every generation since.

"You're my blood," I whispered.

My voice came out rough, broken. Ten thousand years of silence had left it raw, and the words scraped against my throat like sand. But I needed to say them. Needed to make them real.

"My line survived."

Lena's eyes filled with tears. They caught the bioluminescent light and glittered like captured stars, like the remnants of the magic that had brought me back.

Behind her, Morgrith stood silent and watchful, his starlight eyes taking in everything, but I couldn't focus on him.

Not when my descendant—my blood—was crying in front of me.

"I carried your memories," she said. Her voice shook. "Your dreams. I didn't know they were yours until—"

She stopped. Overwhelmed. The same way I'd been overwhelmed when Valdris first revealed himself to me, when the bond first ignited between us. The same desperate confusion of suddenly understanding something that had always been there, waiting to be recognized.

I reached out with trembling fingers.

My hand shook—new muscles, new nerves, new everything still learning how to coordinate. But I managed to touch her cheek, and the moment my skin met hers, the world split open.

The echo of a bloodline stretching across millennia, connecting origin to descendant through something deeper than thought.

I saw her.

Not as she stood before me, but as she had been.

Kneeling beside Morgrith while he burned with the cost of his sacrifice, while shadow-fire consumed his dragon-nature and left him something less.

Her hands pressed to his chest, her gift—my gift, passed down through a thousand generations—pulling his pain into herself.

Taking what would have destroyed him and transmuting it through her own flesh, her own suffering, her own impossibly brave heart.

I saw her running toward the darkness when every instinct screamed at her to flee.

I saw her accepting a bond that terrified her, choosing to stay when staying meant risking everything she knew about herself.

I saw her being good in all the ways I hadn't been, brave in all the moments I had failed.

The vision faded. My hand was still on her cheek, wet now with tears that might have been hers or mine.

"You didn't run," I said softly.

The words came out wondering. Almost reverent. Because I knew what it cost—knew the terror of a dragon's love, knew how overwhelming it was to feel that vast attention turned toward you, knew the desperate animal urge to flee before you lost yourself entirely.

"When your dragon found you, you stayed."

Lena's breath caught. "I almost didn't."

"But you did."

"I was terrified." She said it like a confession, like something she thought might make her lesser in my eyes. "When Morgrith first—when the bond first—I wanted to run. I wanted to disappear. I thought if I could just get far enough away, it would stop. The pull. The need. All of it."

"I know," I whispered. "I know exactly what that feels like."

Gods help me, I knew. The bond had felt like drowning when it first ignited—like being swallowed by something so vast there was no room left for the person I'd been. I had been terrified that loving him meant losing myself.

I had run.