Chapter 28
Kess
The mountain pass is steeper than I remember, or maybe pregnancy has made everything harder.
I stop for the third time in an hour, one hand pressed to the small of my back where a persistent ache has settled, the other curved over my belly where the twins are restless.
They've been moving constantly since I left the village—rolling, kicking, pushing against each other in the cramped space of my womb.
Like they know where we're going. Like they can sense their father getting closer.
The bond certainly can.
Without the tea suppressing it, the connection has grown almost unbearable.
Every step closer to him pulls the thread tighter, until I can feel him like a second heartbeat in my chest—his longing, his grief, his desperate hope that I'm really coming back.
The emotions bleed through whether I want them or not, mixing with my own until I can't always tell where I end and he begins.
I hate it.
I hate that my body still wants him. That even now, exhausted and angry and carrying the evidence of his betrayal in my swollen belly, some treacherous part of me aches to close the distance.
To let him hold me. To pretend the last month never happened and we're still building something worth keeping.
The air is different here already. Thinner. Colder. It tastes like stone and old smoke, nothing like the herb-scented breeze around the omega village. This is the boundary between territories—omega lands falling away behind me, dragon lands rising ahead.
I should have brought more water. My waterskin is already half empty and I'm maybe a third of the way through.
The twins are making me thirstier than normal, and the climb is taking more out of me than I expected.
Legs burning. Lungs aching. Sweat soaking through my borrowed dress despite the mountain chill.
When I pause to drink, I catch sight of my hands wrapped around the waterskin.
The purple tint under my nails has deepened since I left the village—darker now, almost violet in certain light.
The contamination is progressing faster without him near, or maybe the pregnancy is accelerating it.
Either way, I'm changing. Becoming something else.
Something dangerous.
"Keep moving," I mutter. To myself. To them. To the daughter who needs me to do this. "Just keep moving."
The path curves around an outcropping of black rock that's warm to the touch—volcanic stone, glassy surface catching sunlight and throwing it back in fractured rainbows. Dragon lands are built on volcanoes, on mountains that still remember being fire.
I round the outcropping and stop.
The view opens up like a wound—dragon territory spreading in all directions, painted in blacks and golds and deep forest greens. Mountains piercing clouds, peaks crowned with snow that never melts. Forests so dark they look almost black. Rivers cutting through valleys like silver veins.
And in the distance, barely visible through the afternoon haze, his castle.
Black stone rising from black rock, impossible to tell where mountain ends and structure begins. Towers that look like they grew from the earth rather than being built by hands. Walls thick enough to withstand dragon fire.
The bond surges at the sight, pulling so hard I actually sway on my feet. Home, something whispers in the back of my mind—not my thought, or not entirely. His longing bleeding through, his desperate need for me to come back to him.
I shove the feeling away. It's not home. It's the place where he lied to me for months, where he dosed my tea with poison, where he hid my pregnancy while I suffered through symptoms I couldn't understand.
But my chest aches anyway. And lower, in places I don't want to acknowledge, my body remembers other things. His hands on my skin. His mouth on my throat. The way he felt inside me, thick and hard and so deep I couldn't tell where I ended and he began.
I press my thighs together against the sudden pulse of heat and hate myself for it.
Through the bond—stronger now, clearer with every step—I feel his sudden awareness of me.
Like a string being plucked, vibrating between us.
He knows I'm here. Probably knew the moment I crossed into his territory.
His emotions flood through—shock, hope, desperate relief, fear, and underneath it all, a wave of want so intense it makes my knees buckle.
He's been starving for me.
The realization hits like cold water, sobering and unwelcome. All those weeks apart, he's been feeling the same pull I have. The same ache. The same desperate need that the tea had been muting for months.
No wonder he couldn't think straight. No wonder he made terrible choices. The bond is overwhelming when it's not being poisoned into submission.
That doesn't excuse what he did.
But it makes it harder to hate him.
I force myself to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. The path descends now, switchbacking down the mountain face. My legs shake with exhaustion but I keep moving. Can't stop here. Can't rest where I'm exposed and vulnerable.
The bond aches. He's moving. Coming toward me. I feel his urgency like heat through glass, his desperate need to see me, to touch me, to make sure I'm real and not some grief-born hallucination.
"Stay away," I mutter, even though he can't hear me. "Just stay away until I'm ready."
But the bond doesn't care what I want. Just keeps pulling tighter.
I reach the tree line as the sun starts its descent, painting the sky in shades of orange and gold that remind me of his eyes.
The forest here is nothing like the light, airy woods around my village.
These trees are ancient—massive pines that block out the sky, trunks so wide three men couldn't link arms around them.
The air smells like resin and smoke and something else underneath, something that makes my contaminated blood sing with recognition.
Dragon territory. Where his kind has lived for millennia. Where the old magic still runs through the ground like groundwater.
I find a fallen log covered in soft moss and sink down, my legs giving out with relief. The twins settle slightly, as if they too recognize this place. I press both hands to my belly and feel them there—both still alive, both still moving.
For now.
"Almost there," I whisper to them. To her. "Just a few more miles. Then we can start figuring out how to save you both."
A shadow passes overhead—too large to be a bird, too fast to be anything except dragon. My heart kicks against my ribs. The bond flares bright and hot, recognition singing through my blood.
It's him.
He circles once, twice, a massive black shape against the darkening sky.
Scales catching the fading light and throwing it back darker, shot through with veins of deep purple and gold that I never noticed before.
Beautiful. Terrifying. Mine, something whispers, and I don't know if it's the bond or my own traitorous heart.
Then he descends, landing in a clearing about fifty yards away. The ground shakes with impact, birds screaming from nearby trees, and I feel the moment his claws touch earth like it's my own body meeting stone.
The shift happens fast—scales rippling into skin, wings folding into shoulders, the massive form compressing into something human-shaped and achingly familiar.
He stands at the edge of the clearing, naked because his clothes don't survive the transformation, and I can't stop my eyes from traveling over him.
Broader than I remembered. Or maybe I just forgot. Shoulders that could block out the sun, chest carved with muscle, skin pale gold in the fading light. Scars I've traced with my tongue, planes and hollows I've mapped with my hands in the dark. And lower—
I wrench my gaze back to his face, heat flooding my cheeks. But not before I notice he's half-hard already, his body responding to my presence the same way mine is responding to his. The bond pulses between us, thick with want neither of us is acknowledging.
"Kess." My name carries across the distance—rough, broken, raw. Like he's been screaming it in his sleep for weeks. "You're here. You're really here."
"I told you I was coming." My voice sounds steadier than I feel. "Through the bond. You felt me."
"I thought—" He stops. Swallows hard. His hands clench at his sides like he's fighting not to reach for me. "I thought maybe I was imagining it. That grief was making me sense things that weren't real."
"I'm real." I don't stand. Don't move toward him. Don't trust myself to be any closer. "And I'm exhausted. And I need to get to the castle before dark."
His eyes drop to my belly, to the visible swell that wasn't there when I left. Something complicated moves across his face—wonder, grief, guilt, desperate tenderness all tangled together. When he looks back up, his golden eyes are wet.
"You're showing."
"I know."
"It's—" His voice cracks. "It's really in there. Growing."
"Both of them." I press my hand protectively over the curve. "For now."
He flinches at that. At the reminder of why I'm here, what's at stake, what his curse might do to our daughter.
"You can ride," he says, visibly pulling himself together.
"On my back. In dragon form. It's faster than walking and you—" His eyes trace over me again, cataloguing the changes.
The darker purple under my nails. The faint red ring that probably shows around my pupils now when I'm emotional.
The exhaustion carved into every line of my body.
"You shouldn't be on your feet. Not after walking all day. Not carrying them."
"I can walk."
"You can." No argument. No pushing. "But you don't have to. Please, Kess. Let me just get you home safely. That's all I'm asking."
Home.
The word lands like a blow. I see him realize what he said, see the flicker of hope that I might not reject it.
"It's not my home," I say flatly. "It's yours. I'm just here to use your library."