Page 61 of Dragon Kissed

She did.

“All of me,” he said. “You take all of me.”

And she seated herself fully, and both of them stopped breathing.

For one suspended heartbeat neither of them moved. He was buried to the root inside her, throbbing, his whole body locked rigid with the effort of holding still, of holding the fire. She felt impossibly full. She felt the bond humming at the place they joined, a pressure, a presence, waiting. Sweat sheened his scaled chest. The sea crashed somewhere below. His hands shook.

“Nica.” Her name came out of him like a prayer in a language older than the church that had named her.

Then she moved.

One slow lift, and down, and Demetri’s control frayed like rope under a blade. She rode him, gaining confidence with every stroke, her palms braced on his scaled chest, her head falling back, and he watched himself disappear inside her over and over, watched her take him, and thought he would die of it. He reached between them and found her clit with the pad of his thumb, and her rhythm broke on a cry.

“Again,” she gasped.

He obeyed. Circled. Pressed. Her thighs began to tremble around him.

She leaned down over him, her breasts dragging against his chest, their mouths a breath apart. Her eyes on his. And she said the words that opened the gate.

“Give it to me.”

The fire came.

Not flame — magic. Ruby light rushed out of Demetri’s body and into hers where they were joined, and Nica’s eyes flew wide, her mouth falling open on a soundless cry. Fire movedunder her skin— tracing her veins in delicate lines of red, climbing her spine one vertebra at a time, spreading across her ribs, wrapping around her heart and squeezing. It didn’t burn. Itclaimed.And with it came him — all of him, poured through the open bond into her mind: snow and war and centuries behind glass, human graves he’d dug with his own hands, the crushing loneliness of watching everyone he’d ever known turn to dust, and then a warehouse, a ladder, a falling woman, and the exact instant the whole of that grief cracked open and let the light in.

And he felt her, too. The bond ran both ways. Baba Yelena’s kitchen and the smell of candle wax. Tasha laughing on a fire escape. A fourteen-year-old girl reciting the wrong apartment number while the ambulance came too late. Every loss, every locked door, every careful wall she’d built so no one could ever leave her again — and beneath all of it, small and stubborn and terrified, the thing she’d never once let herself want. This. Him. To be kept.

Mine,the dragon roared through both of them at once.

Home,the man answered.

Yours,Nica thought, and did not know which of them she meant, and did not care.

She cried out — not pain, recognition, her whole self meeting his in the space the bond had opened — and Demetri sat up beneath her and wrapped his arms around her and drove up into her as she came down, again, again, the two of them movingas one body now, one nervous system, every sensation doubled and shared. She felt his pleasure layered over her own. He felt her clench become his own release building. The fire made every point of contact unbearable and exquisite at once.

“I’m — Demetri, I’m going to —”

“Come for me.” His voice was pure gravel, pure dragon, smoke pouring from his lips. “Come for me,moya dusha.Take everything. Take all of it.Take me.”

She shattered. Her body seized around him, clamping down, and through the bond Demetri felt her orgasm crash into his own, felt it from inside her body and his both, and it broke the last wall in him. He roared her name into her throat — half human, half something that shook dust from the ceiling — and spilled into her, his cock jerking, the fire cresting through them in a final ruby flood.

Light filled the chamber. The first stage sealed.

For a long moment neither of them moved. Nica sagged against his chest, boneless, her heart slamming, and she could feel it — feelhisheartbeat inside her own mind now, close, steady, hers. The battle still thundered faintly through the stone. The sea still struck the rock below. But here, in the ring of ancient sigils, everything had gone quiet and enormous and complete.

“I felt you,” she whispered against his throat. “All of it. Everything you’ve lost.”

“And I felt you.” His arms tightened. His hand came up to cradle the back of her skull. “Every wall. Every door you locked so no one could leave you.” His voice broke on it. “No one is leaving, Nica. Not ever again. I have waited two hundred and seventy years to be trapped, and I would not trade this cage for any freedom in any world.”

She laughed, wet and shaking, into his skin. And then she lifted her head, because it wasn’t finished. She could feel itwasn’t finished — something still waiting, hovering at the edge of the bond, hungry to close.

“There’s more,” she said.

“The mark.” He drew back enough to look at her, and his eyes searched her face. “The final stage. It is permanent, Nica. It will be on your skin for the rest of your life — and your life will be very long. Once I set it, there is no world in which you were not mine.” His thumb traced her cheekbone. “You can stop here. The bond will hold as it is. You do not have to carry my mark.”

Nica looked at the man who had asked her permission at every single threshold, who was asking it even now, buried inside her, with the bond already sealed and singing between them.

“Mark me,” she said.