Chapter 7
Every day was different. On this—day six—I felt new.
Not the fractured thing I'd been for six days. No more drifting between surrender and terror, littlespace and memories that weren't mine. No more fear or insecurity.
That girl was gone.
I lay in the vast bed where he'd placed me each night, surrounded by silks that smelled of him—ash and something sweeter underneath, something that made my chest ache—and took inventory.
The terror that had driven me ten thousand years ago? Gone. Not suppressed, not buried, but genuinely absent.
The desperate need to run when things got too vast, too consuming, too real? Dismantled brick by brick by the simple act of letting someone care for me.
The equinox was tomorrow.
The thought should have sent ice through my veins.
Tomorrow, Valdris would harvest my bonding essence to fuel his ascension.
Tomorrow, the First Dragon would complete his transformation into something beyond salvation—a god of ending, of unmaking, of the kind of destruction that left nothing behind to mourn.
But inside, I felt something like peace.
I sat up slowly, feeling the changes in my body—the way my senses had sharpened, the new strength humming beneath my skin, the bond pulsing steady as a second heartbeat. Not just connected to him anymore. Woven into him. Two threads of the same cloth.
The mirror across the room caught my eye.
At first I thought it was my imagination—a trick of the eternal twilight that filled this place. But no. Golden light was writing itself across the glass, letter by letter, in script I shouldn't have been able to read but understood perfectly:
Throne room. Now. We negotiate today.
My breath caught. Not from fear—from anticipation so fierce it felt like hunger.
I rose from the bed and crossed to where the gowns hung waiting. He'd provided me with so many—soft things for littlespace, sheer things for punishment, practical things for the rare moments when he let me wander his halls unattended. Each one a choice. Each one a message.
Today required something different.
The crimson gown hung near the back, almost hidden.
I'd noticed it days ago but hadn't touched it—too bold, too deliberate, too much like something a woman would wear when she knew exactly what she wanted and intended to take it.
The color of arterial blood. The color of dragon fire before it burns white.
I pulled it over my head and felt the fabric settle against my skin like a declaration of war.
It clung to curves that had filled out over six days of being properly fed.
Dipped low enough to show the silver-gold bond marks spreading across my collarbones.
Left my arms bare, exposing the intricate patterns that had crept up to my shoulders overnight—evidence of a transformation that was accelerating, changing me into something that had never existed before.
I looked in the mirror and saw the First Bride looking back.
Not a victim. Not a sacrifice. A woman walking willingly toward a dragon because she finally understood what he needed, even if he couldn't admit it himself.
The halls of Valdris's palace had grown familiar over six days of drifting through them in various states of surrender.
White stone that seemed to glow from within.
Crystalline formations that hummed with ancient power.
Flowers that had been extinct for millennia, blooming impossibly in gardens that shouldn't exist.
But today the palace felt different.
Every surface seemed to watch me pass. The light shifted as I walked, following my movement, highlighting the crimson gown like a spotlight. Even the air felt charged—heavy with potential, thick with the weight of what was about to happen.
The throne room doors stood twice my height, carved with dragons so detailed they seemed to breathe.
I pushed them open without hesitating.
He was waiting.
Valdris stood before a table of black marble so dark it seemed to swallow the light around it.
His white-gold hair fell past his shoulders, perfectly still despite the absence of any restraint.
His face—that face that had haunted two lifetimes of dreams—was arranged in careful neutrality.
But I could see the strain beneath it. The cracks in his composure.
On the table rested a single sheet of dragon-vellum, so ancient the material seemed to drink in light itself. Beside it lay a blade of white gold, its edge gleaming with something that wasn't quite reflection.
"It's time to negotiate the Pact," he said.
His voice was formal. Controlled. The voice of the Unnamed addressing a sacrifice, not the man who had held me through nightmares and whispered that I was precious.
"So that when you are harvested tomorrow, you will be at your peak." His dying-star eyes held mine, burning cold. "The bond must be fully formed for the power transfer to work."
I felt the words land between us like stones dropped into still water. Harvested. Power transfer. The clinical language of a ritual designed to kill me and fuel his ascension.
But beneath the formality, the bond told a different story.
I felt his heart racing. Felt the war inside him—monster and man, destruction and devotion, ten thousand years of fury crashing against six days of remembering how to love.
I stood in the doorway of the throne room where the First Dragon waited to negotiate my death, wearing a gown the color of the heart he insisted he didn't have.
And I smiled.
"You're not going to do it," I said quietly.
The words fell into the space between us like stones into still water. I watched the ripples cross his face—micro-expressions he couldn't quite control, tells that gave away everything his dying-star eyes tried to hide.
His jaw tightened. "You're deluding yourself."
"Am I?"
I stepped closer. Then again. Each step deliberate, unhurried, closing the distance he'd maintained for six days with such careful precision. Close enough now to feel the heat radiating from him—that impossible warmth that had nothing to do with fire and everything to do with what burned beneath.
"I've felt you through the bond for six days, Valdris. I felt you tremble when you bathed me."
His expression didn't change, but through the bond I felt something clench.
"Every stroke of the cloth. Your hands shaking like you were touching something sacred instead of something you planned to destroy.
" I stepped closer still. "I felt you break when you held me after my nightmare.
When I cried against your chest and you made those sounds—not words, just sounds, like something was being torn out of you—"
"Enough."
"I felt you ache when you read me that story.
" I was close enough now to see the individual striations in his irises—gold and white and something dying, something desperate.
"The one where the Little stayed. Where she chose the dragon even though everyone said she shouldn't.
Where they built a nursery together and filled it with dragonlings and lived in a forever that never ended. "
His hands had curled into fists at his sides.
"Sentiment," he said. His voice had roughened, lost some of its formal control. "Weakness. It changes nothing."
"It changes everything."
I reached up and touched his face.
The flinch was involuntary—I felt it shudder through him before he could stop it, felt the shock of contact after six days of him touching me without ever letting me touch back. My palm pressed against his cheek, warm skin over ancient bone, and I felt his jaw flex beneath my fingers.
He didn't pull away.
"You don't want to become a god of ending," I said softly.
"You don't want to unmake the world or ascend to some cold divinity where nothing can reach you.
" My thumb traced his cheekbone, mapping the geography of a face I'd loved and feared for ten thousand years.
"You want what you wrote in that story. A mate who chooses you.
A nursery full of dragonlings with your eyes and my stubbornness. A forever where I don't run."
Something cracked behind his eyes.
I saw it—the moment the ice fractured, when ten millennia of frozen fury showed its true face. Not hatred beneath the cold. Grief. Longing so vast it had calcified into something that looked like cruelty because wanting and not having had become unbearable.
His hand came up to grip my wrist.
Not pushing me away. Holding me there. His fingers wrapped around the place where my pulse beat against silver-gold skin, where bond marks climbed toward my shoulder, where the evidence of what we were becoming wrote itself in patterns older than human memory.
"You are wrong. But even if you were right," he said roughly. His grip tightened on my wrist, not painfully but possessively, like he was afraid I might disappear. "The Pact must still be negotiated."
I held his gaze. Didn't flinch from the dying stars.
"Whatever happens tomorrow—" His voice dropped to something raw, something that had no business existing in the throat of an ancient being of terrible power. "You will be fully mine first."
The words wound through me like smoke, like honey, like the first touch of fire before it burns. I felt them settle into my bones, into the bond, into the space between heartbeats where truth lived.
"Then let's begin," I said.
We sat across from each other at the black marble table, and the air between us felt like it might catch fire.
The vellum lay between us, pale and patient, drinking in the throne room's light. Waiting.
The negotiation was nothing like I expected.
I'd imagined formality. Clinical terms. The kind of cold precision that befitted an ancient ritual between dragon and sacrifice. Instead, every clause felt like undressing. Every term felt like a confession whispered in the dark.
"I will be your Daddy."
The word in his voice sent heat flooding through me—not the gentle warmth of comfort but something sharper, more urgent.
Daddy.