Chapter 4
Iwas going to come apart.
My skin burned. My blood burned. Everything inside me had become molten glass, shaped by four days of wanting what I couldn't have.
Four days since I'd come to this place.
Since Morgrith’s ritual had reformed me, had called me across the veil to a palace of white gold and captured starlight. Since I'd opened my eyes and found him watching me with ten thousand years of longing carved into his beautiful, terrible face.
Valdris. The First Dragon. The Unnamed.
My mate.
Four days of proximity.
Four days of his hands bringing me food, cutting my meat into careful pieces, lifting cups of wine to my lips.
Four days of him adjusting my blankets when I shivered, brushing my hair from my face when it fell across my eyes, watching me with that expression that made my heart stutter and my thighs clench.
And never—never—touching me the way I needed.
The sheets were silk beneath me, cool against skin that felt fever-hot. I shifted, trying to find relief in movement, and a sound escaped my throat. Something between a whimper and a moan. My nipples were hard, aching, dragging against the thin fabric of my nightgown with every breath. And lower—
Lower, I was molten.
I didn't decide to touch myself. My body decided for me.
My hand slid beneath the silk sheets without permission, down across my stomach, fingers trembling as they reached the hem of my nightgown and pushed beneath.
I was slick before I even made contact—so swollen, so sensitive that the first brush of my own fingers against that heated flesh made me gasp aloud.
Four days.
I'd never felt anything like this. Never known my body could become such a creature of need. Every nerve ending had been rewired, attuned to a frequency that sang only for him. I circled my clit with trembling fingers, desperate, chasing something that felt perpetually just out of reach.
His hands. I imagined his hands instead of mine—those elegant, powerful hands that had built empires and torn down mountains, cupping my heat with possessive certainty. His voice, that voice like ancient bells and distant thunder, commanding me to spread wider, to show him, to—
Good girl.
The fantasy-words sent lightning through my core. I pressed harder, circled faster, my hips rising from the bed to chase my own touch. Close. So close. I just needed—I needed—
The door slammed open.
My hand froze. My heart stopped. Everything stopped.
Valdris stood in the doorway.
The pre-dawn light caught him like a painting—white-gold hair loose around his shoulders, perfect features carved from marble and starlight, body coiled with a tension that seemed to warp the air around him.
He was shirtless, as if he'd sensed my transgression from wherever he'd been and come running.
Or stalking.
His expression stopped my heart.
Cold fury. Burning hunger. And underneath both, something darker—something ancient and absolute that I recognized in my bones, in my blood, in the part of me that had always known him.
Possession.
"Remove your hand."
His voice was quiet. Deadly. The calm before a cataclysm. It didn't sound like a man speaking. It sounded like a god issuing a commandment that the universe itself would enforce.
"Now."
I couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. My fingers were still pressed against myself, against the slick evidence of how much I'd wanted this, wanted him, and the shame that flooded through me only made the arousal worse. My face burned. My body burned. I was fire and fear and desperate, defiant want.
"I needed—" The words came out broken. Half plea, half explanation.
"What you need," he said, crossing the room in three strides—three strides that closed the vast space between us like it was nothing, like distance meant nothing when he decided to reach me—"is not yours to take."
He towered over the bed. Over me. His shadow fell across my body like a physical weight, like the darkness itself was claiming me on his behalf. Those eyes—the color of dying stars, gold gone cold and ancient—moved down to where my hand still trembled beneath the sheets.
I saw his jaw tighten. Saw his hands clench at his sides. Saw the massive evidence of his own arousal straining against the loose trousers that hung low on his hips.
He was as desperate as I was. As hungry. As ruined by these four days of proximity without completion.
But his control was absolute.
He reached down and pulled my hand from beneath the sheets.
His grip around my wrist was iron—not bruising, not painful, but absolutely unyielding. The kind of grip that said I could struggle all I wanted and it would change nothing. The kind of grip that crushed mountains, parted seas, sundered skies.
The contact sent lightning through my entire body.
I moaned before I could stop myself, my back arching off the bed, my hips lifting toward him as if my body had forgotten it was supposed to feel shame. As if every nerve I possessed had decided that his touch—any touch, even restraining—was what I'd been waiting for. What I'd been aching for.
His jaw tightened. A muscle flickered near his mouth.
"Your pleasure belongs to me."
The words fell like stones into still water. Not negotiation. Not request. Statement of absolute fact, delivered with the certainty of someone who had never in his existence been denied.
He held my wrist above my head, pinning it to the pillow, and leaned close. So close I could feel his breath ghosting across my lips. So close I could see the individual striations in his irises—gold and white and something darker, ancient, hungry.
"Every gasp," he said, his voice dropping to something almost tender, almost cruel. "Every shiver. Every orgasm. Mine."
I couldn't breathe. The word mine reverberated through my bones, through the bond that pulsed between us like a second heartbeat.
"You do not touch yourself without permission." His free hand came up to cup my jaw, tilting my face toward him, forcing me to meet his eyes. "You do not chase release I haven't given you."
His thumb brushed across my lower lip. Such a gentle touch. Such devastating control.
"Do you understand?"
I was trembling beneath him. Overwhelmed. Every cell in my body vibrated at a frequency only he could hear—desperate, wanting, terrified by the depth of my own need. This was the First Dragon. The most powerful being in existence.
And he was claiming ownership of my body like it was his divine right.
Like I'd always been his, and the ten thousand years between then and now were just a delay. Just a pause before the inevitable.
"Yes," I whispered.
The word came out broken. Too small for the vast space between us, for the weight of what we were. But it was all I could manage.
His eyes searched my face. Waiting.
"Yes, what?"
The question hung in the air. Two words that asked for everything.
I knew what he wanted. Had known since I opened my eyes in this palace and felt the bond singing between us like a chord played on the strings of the universe.
He wanted what I'd denied him ten thousand years ago—not just my body, not just my submission, but the word.
The name. The acknowledgment of what he was to me.
What he had always been.
My throat closed. Tears burned at the edges of my eyes. The shame of what I'd done—the running, the rejection, the millennia of loneliness I'd caused him—pressed against my chest like a physical weight.
"Yes, Daddy."
Something fractured in his expression.
I watched it happen—watched his perfect composure crack open like ice giving way to spring.
Grief. Triumph. Desperate wanting that matched my own, that had waited so much longer than I could comprehend, that had festered and grown and transformed into something terrible because I hadn't been there to tend it.
He'd wanted to hear that word from me for aeons.
And I'd finally given it.
His grip on my wrist tightened—then released. He pulled back, putting distance between us, and I watched him struggle for control. His hands clenched at his sides. His chest heaved with breaths that seemed too rapid for someone so ancient, so powerful.
"There will be consequences for this transgression," he said roughly.
The words should have frightened me. Maybe they did—some part of me understood that consequences from the First Dragon were not small things. Not mortal things.
But another part of me—the part that had been burning for four days, the part that had just called him Daddy and meant it—that part wanted his consequences.
Wanted whatever he would give me. Wanted to be marked by him, claimed by him, punished and praised until I forgot there had ever been a world without him in it.
"Tomorrow," he added.
A pause. A breath.
"For now—you need to be managed."
The word managed sent heat pooling low in my belly. Like I was something wild that required taming. Something precious that required care.
It was so intense, so primal, it made it hard to remember that the fate of the entire universe depending on my submission. On his restraint.
"Get up."
It was a command. Not gentle, not harsh—simply absolute. The kind of command that expected obedience without question.
I pushed myself upright on shaking arms. The silk sheets fell away from my body, leaving me in only the thin nightgown—the nightgown that was practically transparent, that showed the hard peaks of my nipples, that hid nothing of what I was. What I felt.
He looked at me.
His gaze moved down my body with devastating slowness, claiming every curve, every shadow, every inch of skin that was technically covered but might as well have been bare. When his eyes returned to my face, something in them had shifted.
Not softer. Not exactly. But deeper.
Like he was finally allowing himself to believe I was real.
"Come," he said, and turned toward the door.
I followed. Of course I followed. What else could I do?