Chapter 3
The bond.
It was always there. No matter what I was doing. It pulsed through my blood like a second heartbeat—no, like a first heartbeat, more essential than the one in my chest.
Even while I slept, I felt it in my dreams.
After I woke, I became aware of my body in layers: the silk sheets against my skin, impossibly soft and slightly cool. The hollow ache between my thighs that hadn't faded with sleep. The way my breasts felt heavy, nipples already tight against the thin shift someone had dressed me in while I slept.
Him. He had dressed me. Changed me out of my travel-worn clothes and into something clean and soft.
The thought sent heat cascading through my core, and I pressed my thighs together against the rush of it. Useless. The bond didn't care about propriety or timing or the fact that my captor had announced his intention to murder me. It just wanted.
I wanted.
Didn’t matter that he was a monster. The first monster.
I needed him.
The ceiling above me was carved from black crystal shot through with veins of gold that pulsed—slowly, steadily, in time with a rhythm I recognized.
His heartbeat. The room itself was an extension of him, responding to his presence somewhere in the palace, and I could feel him through the bond like a dark star pulling at my gravity.
Deeper in the palace.
The awareness was maddening. I knew where he was without knowing how I knew.
Could feel his attention turned elsewhere—not toward me, not in this moment—and some desperate part of me ached at the absence of his focus.
Ten thousand years of denial had turned the bond feral, and it didn't distinguish between love and obsession, desire and destruction.
I sat up, letting the fur coverlet fall away, and tried to breathe through the need.
Exploration. That's what I needed. Distraction from the way my body kept reaching for a man who wanted to use me to become a god.
The bedroom was vast and beautiful in ways that made my chest tight.
Midnight silk and dark crystal, yes, but also: a fireplace with flames that burned without heat or smoke, casting dancing shadows across walls hung with tapestries depicting dragon flight.
A vanity with silver-backed brushes laid out in perfect order.
A wardrobe—I'd noticed it last night—filled with gowns that would fit me exactly, in colors that would complement my skin.
He had prepared this room for a bride who never came.
The bathing chamber was beautiful.
A pool carved into the floor, fed by water that steamed gently and smelled of roses that had been extinct for centuries. Towels softer than clouds. Bottles of oils and perfumes arranged on shelves of white marble, each one labeled in his elegant script, millennia old.
For her hair.
For her skin after bathing.
For the sensitive places that need gentleness.
I backed out of the bathing chamber before I could think too hard about his hands rubbing oil into my skin, about water sluicing over my body while he watched, about all the ways he had imagined caring for me in this room.
My core clenched at the images anyway. The bond was relentless.
The sitting area offered temporary refuge—a window seat overlooking that impossible violet sky, shelves of books in languages I didn't recognize.
Dead languages, I realized, running my fingers over spines that crumbled at the edges.
He had collected the literature of civilizations that had risen and fallen while I floated in the void between worlds.
I pulled one down and found myself staring at poetry. Love poetry, from the shape and structure of it, even though I couldn't read the words.
Of course.
A door I hadn't noticed last night caught my attention—set into the wall beside the bookshelf, its handle carved in the shape of a dragon curled around a star. Something about it made my fingers itch. Made the bond pulse with an awareness I couldn't name.
I touched the handle.
The door opened.
And my heart stopped.
Dust covered everything. Thousands of years of waiting, preserved in crystalline stillness, untouched and heartbreaking. The room was smaller than the bedroom—intimate, meant for something precious—and every surface held evidence of hope that had calcified into grief.
A crib.
White wood inlaid with golden dragons that chased each other around the rails, their scales catching light from a window that showed stars instead of sky. The mattress inside was soft and perfect, dressed in sheets of palest blue, waiting for a weight that had never come.
Mobiles hung from the ceiling—tiny stars carved from crystal, frozen mid-spin, trailing ribbons of silver that would have danced in any breeze.
They cast fractured light across the walls, across the rocking chair in the corner, across the shelf of picture books showing dragons carrying laughing children through candy-colored skies.
I couldn't breathe.
Couldn't think.
Could only stare at what he had built in the centuries of his imprisonment, preparing for a future that my cowardice had stolen from us both.
My feet carried me forward without permission. My hands reached for the shelf beside the crib, where a stuffed dragon sat among other toys—blocks carved with runes, a music box that probably played lullabies, soft blankets in every color.
The dragon was made of velvet the color of sunset, warm oranges and golds that reminded me of his eyes before I broke them. Button eyes of amber stared up at me, patient and kind, and its body was soft when I lifted it, still perfect after all these years.
A tag hung from its paw.
Elegant script. His handwriting.
For our Little one.
The sound that escaped me wasn't quite a sob. It was older than that. Deeper. The sound of a woman finally understanding the full weight of what she had destroyed.
I sank into the rocking chair, clutching the dusty dragon to my chest, and wept.
For the children we never had. For the life where I stayed and let him love me. For the nursery he built and tended through ten millennia of darkness, still hoping, still preparing, still believing I would come back to him.
The bond pulsed with awareness—he knew I was crying, could feel my grief through the connection—but he didn't come.
Maybe he couldn't bear to see me in this room.
Maybe he knew that if he held me now, he wouldn't be able to let go.
I stayed in the rocking chair until my tears ran dry, the velvet dragon pressed against my heart, and mourned the future I had killed before it could begin.
Ihad returned to the bedroom by the time he found me, the velvet dragon still clutched in my arms like a talisman against everything that was coming.
The door didn't announce him. One moment I was alone with my grief and the persistent ache between my thighs; the next, the air shifted, grew heavier, and I knew without looking that he had arrived. The bond sang his presence like a bell struck in a silent room.
I turned from the window.
Valdris stood in the doorway holding a tray of hammered gold, and the contrast between his ice-carved face and the careful arrangement of breakfast made something twist in my chest. His features were perfectly controlled—that terrible beauty locked behind an expression that gave nothing away.
His movements were precise as he crossed the room, each step measured, calculated to project power without warmth.
But his hands.
His hands cradled the tray like it held something precious.
"Eat," he commanded, settling onto the edge of the bed and placing the tray across my lap. "All of it."
I looked down at what he had brought me, and my throat closed around something that might have been a sob.
Honeyed figs, their skins glistening amber in the soft light. Bread studded with rosemary and sea salt, still warm from the oven. Tea steaming gently in a cup of translucent white porcelain, and the scent rising from it—
Flowers. Flowers that had been extinct for thousands of years.
The same tea I had loved in my first life. The bread I had asked for every morning. The figs I had eaten from his hand while he watched me with gold-warm eyes and told me I was beautiful.
He remembered.
After ten thousand years of grief and corruption and learning to be cold—he remembered.
"You're not eating."
His voice cut through my spiral, sharp enough to make me flinch. I picked up a fig with trembling fingers and brought it to my lips. “You will eat when commanded.”
I had to obey. The bond demanded it.
The taste exploded across my tongue. Sweet and rich and perfect, exactly as I remembered, and I couldn't stop the small sound of pleasure that escaped me. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. Something flickered in those dying-star eyes—there and gone, suppressed before I could name it.
I took another bite. Then another. Chewing slowly, deliberately, watching him watch me eat.
The bread was warm and fragrant, the salt crystals crunching between my teeth, and each swallow felt like an act of intimacy.
He had made this for me. Had prepared my favorites, presented them on gold, commanded me to consume them—and something about being fed by him, even at this distance, even through the medium of a tray, made heat pool low in my belly.
The bond didn't distinguish between types of care. It just recognized that he was caring for me, and it wanted more.
I lifted the teacup to my lips. The extinct flowers tasted like hope and memory and something I couldn't quite name—something that made my eyes burn even as my body thrummed with need.
The last fig sat alone on the plate.
I picked it up, bit into it, and let the honey run down my chin. Then I caught the drip with my finger and brought it to my mouth, licking the sweetness from my skin without breaking eye contact.
His hands curled into fists at his sides.