Page 62 of Dragon Kissed

Demetri lowered her onto the silk, and she went, and she watched him with a trust so complete it terrified them both.

He shifted further.

It rolled through him like a tide — wings unfurling out of his shoulders, vast and ruby and half-translucent in the sigil-light, horns curving back from his brow, his face going part-man and part-dragon, scales sweeping up his throat, his eyes twin coals. He was enormous above her. He was the shape in the fog she’d feared, the creature Rook had put on a screen to frighten her, and Nica looked up at all of it and felt no fear at all.

“You’re beautiful,” she said.

The dragon preened so violently that Demetri nearly lost the shift. “She called us beautiful,” he said, and it came out doubled, both voices at once, thick with wonder.

Nica laughed. “You said that out loud.”

“An unfortunate side effect.” He gathered her, gentle despite the claws, despite the wings, and turned her over onto her belly — not from shame, for the mark — and swept her pale hair aside, baring the long line of her back. She felt him settle over her, theheat of him rolling down her spine, his breath stirring the fine hairs at her nape. His mouth came to her ear.

“This will not burn,” he murmured. “I swear it on the whole of my life. Trust me.”

“I do,” she said. And she did. Completely.

“Say you are mine. One more time. So the fire hears it.”

“I’m yours,” Nica breathed into the silk. “Yours, Demetri. All of me.”

Demetri opened his throat.

Fire poured over her back — controlled, a ruby wave of it, a heat that should have flayed the flesh from her bones and insteadenteredit, sank into her skin like sunlight into water. Nica cried out, her hands fisting in the silk, as the sigil bloomed across her back: wings of silver-red light unfurling from a spiral at the center, branches spreading over both shoulders and down the length of her spine, glowing, alive. She felt it lock into place. She felt it lock intohim— the mark settling into his soul at the same instant it settled into her skin, a single thing now, written in two bodies.

The bond opened all the way.

Her mind flooded his. His flooded hers. And a third presence stepped forward inside them both, ancient and vast and, right now, almost shy.

You took long enough,the dragon said.

Nica went utterly still. She felt Demetri’s shock, then his indignation, ripple through the bond. “That was you?”

Obviously.

Her laughter spilled into the bond, warm and bright, and the dragon — the terrible ancient beast that had melted steel in the hall an hour ago — softened around the sound of it like a great animal turning toward a fire.

We have waited for you our whole life,it said.Both of us. All of it. Do not run from us again.

Nica’s laughter broke into a sob. Demetri shifted back — wings folding away, horns receding, the man returning to hold her — and gathered her against his chest as the mark faded from blazing ruby down to a soft permanent silver, cool now, settled, her skin beneath it perfect and unburned.

Marked. Bonded. Chosen. Free.

He pressed his lips to the silver wings on her shoulder, to the mark that said what he was and what she’d let herself become. Her heartbeat lived in his mind. His lived in hers. Two hundred and seventy years of silence, and for the first time, Demetri was not alone inside his own head — and neither, for the first time in her life, was she.

“Mine,” he said against her skin. Out loud. No longer a secret. “Moya.Wife, soon. Mate, now. Mine always.”

“Yours,” Nica whispered, and felt the word drop into him like a coal into a banked fire. “And you’re mine. Dragon and all.”

Especially the dragon,the beast said smugly.

She was still laughing when the chamber door shook on its hinges.

A violent impact shook the chamber door. Caelen’s ward flickered. The battle had reached them. Nica sat up, and through the bond Demetri felt her fear — not for herself, for everyone above, the reflex of a woman who had always worried about others precisely because she’d trained herself not to hope for herself. “We have to go.”

“You remain here.” Her anger hit him directly, through the new-opened channel between their minds, and Demetri winced at the pure, unfiltered force of it. “That is unpleasant.”

“Good. Get used to it.” The dragon laughed. Nica reached for her clothes, and Demetri shaped new ones around them with magic — black for him, a fitted red tunic and boots for her. She looked down. “You dressed me.”