Page 38 of Dragon Kissed

The bathroom lock clicked, and Demetri lowered his hand. Nica stepped out wrapped in one of his towels, damp hair clinging to her shoulders, her eyes dry, her face composed. Too composed — the specific, terrible composure of someone who had a great deal of practice putting herself back together alone. She looked at his hand. “You’re bleeding.”

“It will stop.”

Nica gathered her clothes without a word. The dragon snarled.Stop her.

No.

She is leaving.

She is allowed.

Demetri forced the words out before she could close the bathroom door. “I am sorry.” She stopped, her back to him. “For what?”

“For asking you to hear more than you were ready to hear.”

The line of her shoulders stiffened. “I’m not upset.” The lie was poor; he did not expose it. “I will not repeat the mistake. You owe me nothing because we shared a bed. You may return to your rooms. You may leave this house. If that is what you want, I will respect it.”

Nica stared at him, and he could not read her. The dragon could.She does not want distance. She ran from what she wants.

That did not give him permission to pursue her. Nica looked away first. “I need to get dressed.” Demetri stepped aside, and she closed the door between them. This time the lock did not engage. That small mercy — the unlocked door, the trust she couldn’t bring herself to withdraw even now — was not enough to save him, but he held onto it anyway, the way a drowning man holds a plank.

He spentthe morning in the secure room beneath the eastern wing with Caelen and the enchanted weapon. It was a cold room, windowless, the air still and mineral, lit by a single hard light that gave the stone the gray of a tomb. The knife rested under a glass dome — narrow, double-edged, unremarkable in daylight — and only the sigil betrayed it: a spiral with three branching lines, hammered into the metal near the guard. The same mark as the blade on the yacht. Even sealed under glass, even inert, the thing put a low wrongness into the air, a note his dragon heard and hated.

Caelen stood with both hands braced against the table, silent for nearly five minutes. His composure had cracks few would have noticed — shoulders too rigid, breathing too measured, pale green light moving beneath the vine markings at his wrists — and Lirien watched him from across the room. Not hovering. Near. Always near.

“Have you seen the sigil before?” Demetri asked.

Caelen’s gaze stayed on the blade. “No.” A lie. Not a smooth one. Demetri knew better than to push. Not yet.

“The rune lets the blade bypass natural magical defenses,” Caelen said. “Dragon scale. Fae glamour. Werewolf hide. Vampire bone. This was made by an elf. The metal was married to the spell during forging. The process requires blood, breath, and a true name spoken into white heat.”

“Willingly?”

Lirien looked away. Caelen did not. “Not necessarily.”

The room cooled, or seemed to. If Crowe had possessed weapons made by an elven smith, the method mattered. Prisoner. Hostage. Torture. The possibilities were not unfamiliar to Demetri — only, this time, personal, because everything had become personal the moment a woman fell off a ladder into his arms.

A sharp pressure built beneath his skin, and the Chain reacted. The broken links tightened as though heated wire had been drawn through them, and his vision blurred, and for one heartbeat the room disappeared and Nica replaced it: naked beneath him, pale hair spread across dark sheets, the heat of her around his cock, her voice saying his name.Mine.Scales rushed over his spine. Demetri gripped the table, and the glass dome cracked.

Caelen stepped between him and the knife. “Look at me.” Demetri focused on the elf’s face, on the ancient calm there, and the room returned piece by piece.

He pulled his sleeve back. The split link had widened, a second fracture running along the inner band, and Caelen swore in Elvish.

“How long?”

“You already know.”

“I want the truth.”

“You have days at this rate.” Lirien moved closer. “The rate may slow if you remain calm.” The dragon laughed inside him, low and mirthless.Calm.Nica had come apart in his arms lessthan ten hours ago; her scent still covered his skin; the memory of her was a live coal he carried behind the sternum. Calm no longer existed. Calm had walked out of his life in a towel an hour ago.

“Can the Chain be reforged?”

Caelen’s expression gave the answer before he spoke. “Not without mate-anchor blood.” Lirien closed her eyes. Nica’s blood. Nica’s bond. Nica’s willing choice. Without it, the Chain would fail, and the dragon would take him — memory first, then judgment, then language, then identity, until nothing remained but appetite, territory, rage, and the certainty that every creature near him was either threat or possession. The king would order his death. And Nica would become the center of a feral dragon’s obsession, hunted for it, never free of it.

I would kill myself before I allowed that.The decision came without fear, cold and clear and already made.

Lirien saw it cross his face. “No.You will not make that choice alone.”