Page 58 of Dragon Kissed

A hunter lunged from the smoke, blade raised toward the female’s back, and the dragon killed him before the elf could turn, before the man inside even understood why the sight of steel near her had lit the whole beast white. The female did not run. She looked at the corpse, then at the dragon. “Thank you.” No one thanked a dragon for killing. Not anymore. Not in two hundred years. He lowered his head, and her scent reached him — tea, rain, skin, his, the scent that had unmade him on a warehouse floor — and it did what the elf’s words could not. The dragon stepped closer. The female shoved the elf aside, reckless, unafraid, and the dragon approved of her courage the way it approved of its own.

She came within reach. Every creature in the hall shouted. She ignored them all. “Demetri.” She touched his snout, one small warm palm against scales that had melted steel, and the world stopped.

Memory flooded him. A ladder. Falling. Her body in his arms and the whole of his long life reorganizing around the weight of her. Cold tea. A balcony. Her mouth. Her laughter. Her voicesayingI love youin a hall full of executioners. The man clawed upward through the darkness, hand over hand, toward the light of her palm.Nica.The dragon closed his eyes, her palm still on his scales, and for the first time the beast did not fight the surfacing of the man — it lifted him. “Come back.” He wanted to. He did not remember how. The road back to himself had washed out somewhere in the fire.

Nica pressed her forehead to his snout and spoke — Russian, the words from the old rite she’d read beside him at a workstation a lifetime ago. “Not by chain. Not by command. By breath freely given. By fire freely received.” The dragon knew those words. His mother had sung them, centuries ago, in a house of stone in a country that no longer existed, and the man stirred at the sound of them in a human woman’s mouth.Nica.

“I choose you,” she said. “Do you hear me? Not because of your king. Not because I’m afraid to die. Not because your Chain broke.” The man reached for her through the dark, and her voice was the rope. “I love you.”

Demetri returned in agony. His dragon form collapsed inward — bone compressing, wings folding into flesh, the vast body reeling itself down into a man’s — and he fell to his knees before her, naked and bleeding and himself. “Nica.” She dropped beside him. His control lasted only seconds; scales moved over his spine, the beast still too close to the surface, still reaching. “We cannot do this here.”

“What do you need?”

“Privacy. Protection.” Caelen appeared, blood covering one side of his face. “The sea chamber.”

They half-carriedhim through a narrow stone passage while the battle raged behind them, the sound of it dropping away as the rock closed around them. Nica kept talking — not soothing nonsense, orders, the brisk practical voice of a woman who steadied herself by staying useful. “Stay with me.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t crush me.”

“I will attempt restraint.”

“You’re terrible at jokes.”

“Caelen disagrees.”

“I do not,” the elf said.

They entered a circular chamber carved into the cliff, one wall opening to the sea through a stone arch, waves surging beneath a platform of black rock, the air thick with salt spray and the deep organ-note of water moving in stone. Ancient ruby sigils covered the floor, catching the low light and holding it — a mating sanctuary. His family had built the house around it generations ago, waiting for a mate who might never come. Always waiting. Two hundred years he’d thought the room an heirloom of someone else’s hope, and now he stood in it with her.

Caelen sealed the door, golden light spreading across the stone. “No one enters until you open it. If you lose control?—”

“Nica will bring you back.” The elf left, and the door sealed, and silence descended. Not complete — battle thundered faintly through the stone, and the sea struck below, and the two sounds made a strange music around the small pool of quiet where they stood.

Nica stood in front of Demetri, smoke marking her face, her sweater torn, blood at one knee. Still beautiful. Always, and the dragon agreed with a low reverent rumble. “You’re injured.”

“So are you.”

“I heal.”

“I know.” The words changed everything — because they were true now, because she’d said them as fact and not fear, becauseI healmeantI will be here, and here, and here, as long as you are.Demetri swayed, and Nica caught him, small and certain under his weight, and he buried his face against her neck, her pulse beneath his mouth, the whole of his fractured mind narrowing to that one steady beat. “Tell me again.”

“That you’re an idiot?”

“That you choose me.” Her hands entered his hair. “I choose you. Knowing what you are. Knowing the bond is permanent. Knowing I’ll hear the dragon for the rest of my life.” The dragon growled, delighted. Nica smiled against his temple. “Yes.”

“Knowing you may outlive every human you know?” Pain moved through her face — he felt the edge of it, the old grief that had taught her never to want anything — and she met it and did not look away. “Yes.”

“Knowing I will love you until the world ends?” Her eyes filled. “Yes.” Demetri touched her cheek, and made himself ask for the last of it, the piece that mattered more than his sanity. “And not because I will die.”

She covered his hand with hers, and when she spoke it was the bravest thing he had ever heard, from a woman who had spent fifteen years believing that loving anything was the beginning of losing it. “I’m choosing you because I want to live.” The dragon roared approval, and the man, for the first time in two hundred and seventy years, felt the whole of himself agree.

Demetri kissed her.

Fire moved between them before their mouths even touched — waiting, banked, not yet released — and then his lips came down on hers and it was nothing like the careful man who had stepped out of every doorway she’d tried to walk through. This was the dragon and the man both, two hundred and seventyyears of hunger with the leash finally cut, and Nica opened to him and let it take her.

He tasted of smoke and salt and something darker underneath, something with no name in her language. His hand fisted in her hair. The other spread wide and hot across her lower back, hauling her against the hard length of him, and she felt him everywhere at once — the fever-heat of his skin, the iron of his chest, the ridge of his cock through what was left of his clothing. A growl rolled up out of him and into her mouth, and she swallowed it, and it lit her from the inside.