Chapter 2 #2
I had expected ice. Expected cold to match those dying-star eyes I remembered from the grotto, from Lena's memories bleeding through the bloodline. But this—
This was heat like a hearth fire. Like sunlight on bare skin. Like the remembered warmth of a body pressed against yours in sleep.
I pressed my palm to the corridor wall and felt it pulse with something that might have been life.
The fire still burned.
Somewhere beneath the frozen perfection, beneath the corrupted beauty he'd wrapped around himself like armor—the warmth remained. The man I had loved, the dragon who had courted me with acts of service and terrifying tenderness, was still in there.
The bond screamed its agreement. My body screamed along with it.
My nipples were so tight they ached, pressed against fabric that felt like sandpaper.
Every step sent sensation shooting through my core, the slick slide of my thighs making me hyperaware of my own body in ways I'd never experienced.
I was empty—hollow—aching for something to fill the space that had been waiting for him since before I was born.
Come to me, the bond demanded. Come and be completed.
I rounded a corner—
And the throne room opened before me.
Vast beyond reason. Black crystal walls shot through with veins of silver that pulsed like a heartbeat.
A ceiling lost in darkness above, lit only by the faint glow of captured stars.
The floor was obsidian so polished it reflected like a mirror, and my bare feet left no mark on its perfect surface.
At the center stood a throne carved from shadow itself, dark and terrible and empty.
But he wasn't sitting.
He stood before it, human form, waiting.
He was the most beautiful man who had ever existed.
The thought hit me like a physical blow, stealing what remained of my breath.
I had remembered him beautiful—had carried the memory of his face through ten thousand years of nothing—but memory was a pale shadow of reality.
He stood in the throne room's silver light like something carved from moonlight and longing, and I couldn't look away.
Couldn't breathe.
Couldn't do anything but stare at the monster I had made and see the man I had loved.
He met my eyes across the vast space between us.
And the world stopped.
His features were carved from moonlight and shadow, symmetrical with a precision that felt like violence.
His jaw could cut glass. His cheekbones rose like blades beneath skin so pale it seemed translucent, lit from within by a luminescence that had nothing to do with health.
His hair was pale gold—almost white—falling past shoulders broad enough to carry worlds, and his body was built for war and worship alike, powerful and perfect and absolutely still.
Too still. Too perfect. Like a statue given breath but not warmth.
But his eyes.
Gods, his eyes.
They had been gold once. I remembered gold—warm and tender and full of a love so vast it had terrified me. Now they were the color of dying stars, luminous but cold, ancient beyond comprehension, holding ten thousand years of frozen grief in their depths.
Those eyes fixed on me across the throne room's impossible expanse.
And I felt myself recognized.
Then the bond detonated.
Silver-white light exploded from both of us without warning—blooming across my skin in patterns that burned and soothed simultaneously, intricate marks tracing themselves over every inch of me like invisible fingers writing in languages I didn't know.
I screamed—or maybe I moaned—the sound torn from me as sensation overwhelmed every nerve I possessed.
Pleasure and pain. Recognition and terror. Home and ruin.
The mate marks we had never completed, finally manifesting after ten millennia of denial.
I saw the same light blazing across his skin—saw his perfect control shatter for one devastating moment as the bond claimed what it had always been owed. His head fell back. His jaw clenched. A sound escaped him that might have been my name.
Then I was falling, my knees buckling, the world tilting as the overwhelm took me under—
He moved faster than thought.
One moment he was across the room. The next his hands were gripping my arms, hauling me upright, and the contact—
Lightning.
Pure, devastating lightning cascading through every nerve, every cell, every atom of my newly-made body.
My back arched involuntarily, pressing me against him, and I felt him everywhere—the hard planes of his chest against my breasts, the iron grip of his fingers around my arms, the heat of him burning through my dress like his touch might leave marks.
A moan escaped my lips before I could stop it. Shameless. Desperate. The sound of a woman ten thousand years starved finally tasting what she'd been denied.
"You came back."
His voice. Gods, his voice—still the most beautiful sound in any world, even rough with rage and something darker. It vibrated through me where we pressed together, resonated in my bones, made my core clench with need so sharp it bordered on pain.
"I was going to kill you the moment you woke."
I could barely speak. His hands on my arms were the only thing keeping me standing, and every point of contact was sending pulses of arousal straight to my center. My thighs clenched around nothing. My nipples ached where they pressed against his chest.
"Then why haven't you?" My voice came out wrecked. Breathless.
His grip tightened—fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, hard enough to anchor me to my own body when everything else was floating away. His jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscle jump beneath his perfect skin.
I felt his fury through the bond. Ten thousand years of it, crystallized into something cold and sharp and patient. He had dreamed of this moment. Had imagined countless ways to make me suffer for what I'd done. Had nursed his hatred like a flame through the endless dark of his imprisonment.
But underneath the fury—
I gasped.
He was aroused too.
Painfully, desperately aroused. I could feel it through the bond like a second heartbeat, his desire tangled with his rage until they were indistinguishable.
And I could feel it physically—the hard length of him pressed against my hip through layers of fabric, proof that his body wanted me even as his mind screamed for vengeance.
"Because the bond won't let me." The words were torn from him, ragged and raw. "Because I won't let me."
He pulled me closer—whether to threaten or to hold, I couldn't tell. The movement ground his hardness against me, and I heard myself whimper. Felt him shudder in response, his control splintering further with every second of contact.
"You destroyed me." His voice dropped to something barely above a whisper, intimate and devastating. "You should be running."
I looked up into those dying-star eyes—into ten thousand years of frozen grief, into rage that could burn worlds, into the desperate, devastating want he couldn't hide no matter how hard he tried.
And I said the truest thing I had ever said.
"I'm done running."
Something in his expression cracked. Just for a moment—just long enough for me to see the man beneath the monster.
The dragon who had courted me with gentleness I hadn't deserved.
The lover who had wanted nothing but to care for me, provide for me, wrap me in his protection and never let anything hurt me again.
He was still there.
Buried under corruption and grief and ten millennia of learning to be cold—but still there.
"You don't get to decide that," he said, and his voice had gone rough in ways that made me shiver. "You don't get to walk back into my domain and declare yourself finished with running. You left me. You chose to leave."
"I was afraid."
"You were a coward."
"Yes." The admission came easily. Ten thousand years of guilt had stripped away my defenses.
"I was a coward. I was terrified of how much you loved me.
Terrified of what surrendering to you would mean.
So I ran, and I died, and I spent millennia in nothing because that was easier than facing what I'd done. "
His hands trembled on my arms. The bond screamed between us, demanding completion, demanding we stop talking and start claiming.
"And now?" The words were barely audible. "Now you're not afraid?"
I reached up—slowly, giving him time to pull away—and pressed my palm to his chest. His heart pounded beneath my hand, racing despite his controlled expression. The bond sang at the contact, and I felt something in him reach back toward my touch like a starving thing offered food.
"I'm terrified," I whispered. "But I'm done letting fear choose for me."
Something in Valdris snapped.
I felt it through the bond—the fraying thread of his control finally giving way—a split second before he moved.
One moment my hand was pressed to his chest, feeling his heart race.
The next I was lifted entirely off my feet, swept into arms that held me like I weighed nothing, cradled against a chest that burned hot enough to sear.
One arm hooked under my knees. One braced behind my back.
He held me like something precious. Like something he'd been waiting ten thousand years to hold.
I didn't struggle. Couldn't have if I'd wanted to—my body had gone liquid with want, every muscle soft and yielding against the hard planes of him. My head fell against his shoulder without conscious decision. My hands found the fabric of his shirt and fisted there, holding on as he began to move.
His strides were long and furious, eating distance with a purpose that brooked no argument.
The throne room fell away behind us, replaced by corridors of frozen starlight that blurred at the edges of my vision.
I could feel his heartbeat through his ribs—pounding fast despite the controlled set of his jaw—and his breath came just slightly too fast, betraying the calm his expression tried to project.
He wanted me.