Page 39 of Dragon Kissed

“It is mine to make.”

“You have a mate.”

“She has not chosen me.”

“She will.” Lirien’s control finally broke, twelve hundred years of it, all at once. “I have watched you exist without living for two hundred years. I watched the Chain mute you until you became a shadow wearing my boy’s face. She has been here three days, and you smile. You argue. You break walls. Youwant.”

“She is afraid,” Demetri said.

“So are you.”

The words struck. Caelen stepped closer to his wife, his hand settling at the base of her spine, and Lirien leaned into the touch for half a heartbeat before she straightened. Demetri looked away from the small private gesture of a bond twelve centuries deep. Nica had gone still watching that same gesture yesterday,and he understood why now. It was not romance she feared. It was permanence — the risk of having something worth losing. He had spent two hundred years arranging his life around the identical fear. They were, the two of them, the same wound wearing different faces, and he did not know whether that made him the last person who could reach her or the only one.

A chime sounded from the communications panel. One of the guards. “Mr.Vasiliev, Benedikte Nord is at the western perimeter.”

Benedikte waitedon the western cliff beneath a sky the color of hammered steel, a dark coat open over a gray shirt, no visible weapons, the ocean beating against the rocks far below in long white detonations. Wind came off the water hard enough to flatten the grass, carrying salt and the green iron smell of coming weather. He looked less like a madman than most kings Demetri had met, which made him more dangerous, not less.

“You found her,” Benedikte said as Demetri crossed the lawn.

“What do you want?”

“To keep you from making the mistakes I made. You broke my Chain, you say. I broke what was already killing you.” He reached inside his coat — six guards behind the wall raised their weapons, and Demetri lifted one hand without turning.Hold.Benedikte tossed a black data drive onto the grass. “Names. Financial transfers. Safe houses. Photographs of the weapons Crowe’s network moved through Europe over the last eight years. The people on that yacht were hunters, Demetri, every one. The woman you called a civilian arranged the sale. The man with the blade killed two werewolves in Rotterdam and an elven child outside Lyon.”

Demetri’s jaw tightened. “Why come here?”

“Because the blade recovered at the auction house carries the same mark as the others. And because Crowe’s people murdered my wife.” The name entered the air between them. “They captured Sigrid in the Ardennes. Used an elven blade to cut her wing. Kept her alive for six hours. Then they moved her body to a ravine and altered the council reports to call it a flight accident. Two councilors signed the false findings. A third sealed the evidence. The names are on the drive.”

The ocean struck the cliff. Demetri remembered Sigrid Nord at a wedding in Brussels — dark hair, gold scales at her temples when she laughed, and Benedikte beside her whole and easy in a way the man on this cliff would never be again. Not a fated mate. Loved all the same. “I am sorry,” he said.

Benedikte closed his eyes, and the grief that crossed his face was raw enough that Demetri looked away, because he recognized it now for what it was, and because he had spent three days learning exactly how much a man could have to lose. When Benedikte spoke again, the cold had returned. “The hunters believe your mate can be used to control you.”

“They are correct.”

“Then teach them they are wrong.” The wind shifted, and Nica’s scent reached them both from the open window above — and Benedikte inhaled, a reflex, nothing more, and Demetri’s dragon exploded. A growl tore from his throat, ruby scales flashing across his neck, every ancient instinct in him screamingmine, mine, get away from her scent.Benedikte’s eyes turned ocean blue as he held up both hands. “I looked at a window.”

“Leave.”

“You need to bond her.” The words struck like a blade, and Demetri crossed the distance between them before thought could intervene, his hand closing around Benedikte’s throat. “She is not a solution to my damaged Chain.”

“No,” Benedikte said calmly, unresisting, a man who had already survived the worst thing the world could do to him and found nothing left to fear. “She is your mate. Do not wait too long. You do not have time.” He looked pointedly at Demetri’s covered wrist. “The old texts say breaking a false anchor calls the true one closer.”

Demetri stared at him. “What old texts?”

“The kind the council prefers forgotten.”Nica’s manuscript.The thought came instantly. Anastasia Drakovich’s book might hold more than marriage rites and bloodlines. Demetri released him and picked up the drive. “Verify everything,” Benedikte said. “Then decide whether I am mad.” He stepped back toward the cliff. “If any hunter comes near Nica?—”

“That is my responsibility.”

“No.” Blue light filled Benedikte’s eyes. “It is our war now.” He shifted, wings snapping open over the cliff, the downdraft flattening the grass in a wide ring, and the dragon launched into the gray sky and vanished into the fog.

Demetri returnedto the house and found Nica at the top of the stairs — fully dressed, hair tied back, face carefully blank. Her gaze moved from him to the data drive in his hand. “Was that the man from the yacht?”

“Yes.”

“Is he dangerous? To me?”

“No.Because if he wanted you dead, he would not have warned me the hunters were coming.”

Her face tightened. “Hunters.” The word sounded strange in her mouth, a word from a genre she hadn’t agreed to live inside. “You can’t tell me.”