Chapter 3 #3
I pressed on, knowing I didn't have much time. He brings me meals. My favorites, from before. He sets rules for my wellbeing—sleep, food, telling him if I'm cold or ill. He built a nursery, Lena. A nursery for children we never had. The man beneath the corruption is still there.
A pause. Then: Davoren wants to attack. He's been ready to storm the palace with fire since you disappeared. The other lords are split—some want to wait for the equinox, some want to strike now. Only Morgrith counsels patience.
Of course Morgrith counseled patience. He understood, better than the others, what it meant to love someone through darkness.
He's planning to kill me.
I felt Lena's response like a physical blow—horror and rage and desperate protectiveness surging through our connection. What?
At the equinox. He's going to— I steadied myself, pushed through the words. —make me fall in love with him again. Care for me perfectly. Worship my body until I'm desperate and willing. And then, at the moment of climax, when the bond is completely open—
She finished for me, voice hollow even through the blood-link: He'll kill you. And use your death to become a god.
Yes.
Then we're coming to get you.
Her determination blazed through the connection, fierce and absolute. I felt the other Dragon Lords beyond her—distant presences, gathered in council, preparing for war. Felt Morgrith's shadow-deep patience and Davoren's volcanic rage and all the power they were prepared to unleash on my behalf.
No.
My response stopped her cold.
If you attack, you'll give him a reason to choose rage over doubt.
Right now he's uncertain. I can feel it through the bond.
He wants to believe his plan is perfect, but some part of him—the part that built nurseries and prepares my favorite foods—that part isn't sure.
An attack would crystallize him into the monster.
Would give him enemies to fight instead of questions to face.
A long pause. I could feel Lena thinking, weighing my words against her terror, against the protective instincts of her bond with Morgrith and her loyalty to the other mates.
I need time, I pressed. Time to reach the man underneath. Time to remind him what he gave up when he chose to become the monster. Time to make him remember why he built that nursery in the first place.
And if you're wrong?
Her question was soft. Gentle. The question of someone who had to ask, even knowing she might not want the answer.
If he kills you?
I thought about the nursery. The velvet dragon. The way his hands had shaken when I called him on his uncertainty.
Then at least I'll have been brave instead of running.
The truth of it resonated through our connection—mine to give, hers to receive. I had run once and destroyed everything. I wouldn't run again, even if staying meant destruction of a different kind.
Six days, I sent. Give me six days before the equinox. Tell the others to prepare, but don't attack. Trust me.
Another pause. I felt her conferring with Morgrith, felt his shadow-touched wisdom threading through her thoughts. Felt his approval, reluctant but real.
Six days.
Her agreement came with something else—warmth and pride and a love that had been waiting a thousand generations to be expressed.
We're all rooting for you.
The connection began to fade, blood-link stretching thin as the effort of maintaining it took its toll.
But I caught one more fragment before she was gone entirely: an image of seven Dragon Lords and their mates gathered around a war table, fierce and worried and united in their hope that I might succeed where violence would fail.
Then she was gone, and I was alone in the nursery with the velvet dragon and the frozen mobiles and six days to save the man I loved from becoming a god of grief.
The dream came for me with his heartbeat.
I slipped from waking to sleeping without transition, one moment curled in the massive bed with silk against my skin and the bond pulsing its eternal ache, the next somewhere else entirely. Somewhere that wasn't mine.
I was looking through his eyes.
The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow, and I felt his body around me—stronger than mine, taller, the coiled power of a dragon contained in human form. His heart pounded against ribs that weren't mine. His hands reached toward something I couldn't see.
No. Not couldn't see.
Toward someone I knew.
Myself.
I was watching myself run.
The bond screamed between us as my past self fled, a golden thread stretching, stretching, pulling so tight it vibrated with frequencies that shouldn't exist. Through his eyes I saw my own back growing smaller in the distance.
Through his ears I heard my own feet pounding against earth as I ran from everything he offered.
His incomprehension was vast and absolute.
Why?
The question echoed through him, through me, through the bond that connected us even across the gap of dream and memory.
Why was she running?
What had he done wrong?
He had courted her gently, patiently, the way dragons were supposed to court their mates.
Had brought her food and shelter and protection.
Had shown her his human form first so she wouldn't be frightened.
Had told her she was beautiful because she was, because she would always be, because looking at her made his immortal heart do things it had never done before.
And she was running.
Away from him. Away from everything. Toward the cliffs where the land ended and the sea began.
He chased her. Of course he chased her—what else could he do? The bond demanded he pursue, demanded he catch her, demanded he fix whatever had gone wrong because she was his mate, his other half, the completion he had been waiting for since the world was young.
But she was faster than she should have been.
And the cliffs were coming closer.
I felt his terror like it was my own. Felt him push his body beyond its limits, felt his dragon trying to break through his human form because wings would be faster, faster, he had to reach her before—
The edge.
She reached the edge.
She didn't hesitate.
And the bond SNAPPED.
Agony.
Not pain—pain was too simple a word, too small to contain what crashed through him in that moment.
This was unmake. This was the universe itself reaching into his chest and ripping out the golden thread that had connected him to hope, to love, to any future worth living.
This was watching the other half of his soul choose death over his arms and feeling himself come apart at the seams.
He screamed.
I felt the scream tear from his throat, felt it rip through vocal cords that weren't built for this kind of sound, felt it echo across the cliffs and the sea and the whole of a world that suddenly meant nothing.
She was gone.
She had chosen to be gone.
And the love that couldn't die—the bond that persisted even past death, even past the void, even past ten thousand years of frozen grief—that love had nowhere to go. No vessel to contain it. No mate to receive it.
So it curdled.
Transformed.
Became something dark and cold and patient, something that fed on grief instead of joy, something that turned a dragon made for nurturing into a monster made for destruction.
I became the wound that birthed him.
VALDRIS!
I woke screaming his name, the sound torn from my throat raw and ragged, my whole body shaking with the aftershocks of a grief that wasn't mine but was, had always been, would always be part of what connected us.
He was there.
On the bed beside me, close enough that I could feel the heat of him through my thin shift, his hand hovering over my shoulder like he wanted to touch but was afraid.
His dying-star eyes were wide, wild, stripped of their usual cold perfection.
For this one moment, in the aftermath of nightmare, he was just a man watching a woman wake screaming from dreams of his destruction.
"You were dreaming of it," he said roughly. "I felt it through the bond."
"I felt you break." The words came out in gasps, sobs, sounds that weren't quite language. "I did that to you. I watched myself run and I felt you come apart and I—I'm sorry, I'm so sorry—"
Something in him snapped.
His arms came around me, hauling me against his chest, pulling me into an embrace so tight I could barely breathe.
But I didn't need to breathe. I just needed this—his body solid and warm against mine, his heart pounding beneath my cheek, his arms wrapped around me like he could hold the pieces of us both together through sheer force of will.
"I have you," he said.
The words came out rough. Dragged from somewhere the darkness hadn't touched, somewhere deep beneath the corruption and the grief and the god he wanted to become. His voice cracked on them, broke apart and reformed around a tenderness I had thought he'd lost.
"Breathe. Just breathe."
I clung to him and cried.
Ten thousand years of guilt, finally finding release against the chest of the man I had destroyed. My tears soaked into his shirt. My hands fisted in the fabric at his back. My whole body shook with sobs that had been building since I first understood what I'd done when I ran.
His hand stroked down my spine.
Slow. Steady. The movement of someone who knew how to soothe, how to comfort, how to be the steady presence that a frightened person could anchor to. His lips pressed against my hair, and I felt him breathing with me—in, out, in, out—teaching my body to remember how.
He was rocking me.
Tiny movements, barely perceptible, the kind of thing you did for a child who woke from nightmares. The kind of thing a Daddy would do.
The bond sang between us, humming with the closeness, with the press of his body against mine, with all the contact I had been craving since I emerged from that egg.
I could feel him—really feel him, not just the distant awareness the bond usually provided.
Feel his warmth, his heartbeat, the particular rhythm of his breath against my hair.
Feel the desire he couldn't suppress, even now. Even while comforting me.
We wanted each other.
Still. Always. Despite everything.
"I'm going to kill you," he whispered against my hair.
But it sounded like a question now. Like something he was testing, trying on, seeing if it still fit the way it had when he first made the plan. His voice wavered on the words in ways it never had before.
"I know," I whispered back.
My tears had slowed. My breathing had steadied. But I didn't pull away from his arms, and he didn't let me go.
"But not tonight," I added softly.
His arms tightened around me. His chest expanded with a breath that shuddered on the exhale.
"No," he agreed. "Not tonight."
I fell asleep in his arms, surrounded by his warmth and his scent and the steady pulse of a bond that had survived everything the universe could throw at it.
My last conscious thought was that his hand was still stroking my spine, still soothing, still caring for me even as he planned my destruction.
When I woke at dawn, he was still there.
Curled around me in the massive bed, one arm pillowing my head, the other draped across my waist. His breath was slow and even against my hair. His body was warm along the length of mine.
His hands were gentle.
His arms were strong.
He was going to kill me.