Page 64 of Dragon Kissed

“I have no control over him.”

Correct.

Nica pushed Demetri back, laughing, and the laugh went straight down the bond and she felt it settle in him, felt howmuch he still marveled at being the cause of it. “We have a meeting in ten minutes. With Margaret. She knows we’re sleeping together.”

“She does not need evidence.” Demetri adjusted his cuffs, and Nica watched, and he knew she watched — the bond made privacy difficult. It also made lying impossible. Not technically. Emotionally. Every time he tried to hide worry, the sensation pressed against her mind like heat behind a closed door, and she’d learned to knock on that door until he opened it. It was, she thought, the opposite of every relationship she’d ever run from; there was nowhere in him left to hide, and nowhere in her, and the terror of that had somehow curdled into the only safety she’d ever trusted.

The Chain no longer existed. He did not need it; their mating bond anchored the dragon without muting either of them. Demetri smiled now. Argued. Laughed occasionally, though he still treated the activity as if it might damage his reputation. He’d also entered her rooms without knocking — once; Nica had made the consequences memorable — and the dragon still complained about it.

Margaret arrived precisely on time, her bruise faded to yellow, her anger at WMS not faded at all. She took the chair across from Nica and looked around the new restitution office. Pacific Meridian had converted an entire floor into conservation labs, secure archives, and research space, the Crowe objects occupying only one section. Faelar’s weapon map had identified dozens of other stolen collections. The work would last decades. Possibly longer. Nica planned to be there for all of it — and, for the first time in her life, the worddecadesdid not frighten her. She had them now. She had been given time, the one thing she’d never had enough of, in quantities she was still learning how to hold.

Margaret opened the contract Demetri had placed in front of her, and her eyebrows rose. “This salary is obscene.”

“Yes,” Demetri said.

“Triple my WMS compensation.”

“Yes.”

“Full research authority.”

“Under Nica.” Margaret looked at her. Nica smiled. “Welcome to the team.” Margaret turned another page. “Pension?” Demetri looked toward the ceiling. “We can adjust the structure.”

“Why?”

“Because you may find the vesting timeline unexpectedly complicated.” Margaret narrowed her eyes. Nica kicked him under the table; he did not react. Margaret signed, and Nica felt an absurd swell of joy at it — the one person from her old life, the closest thing she’d had to family before all this, choosing to stay in the new one.

She had not yet been told the full truth. Her exposure remained limited, and Ryker’s revised ruling allowed selected humans to work with sanitized records under magical protection. The king had begun rewriting the disclosure law — slowly, painfully, with Nica sending him annotated objections every morning. He’d stopped replying after the fourth day. She considered that progress.

Margaret left with Caelen to tour the facility, and Nica watched them through the glass wall. Caelen had returned to work quickly. Too quickly. His grief lived beneath every movement, in the particular care he took with each object, as though every stolen relic were a brother he could bring home in Faelar’s place. They’d found Faelar’s final chamber in Crowe’s underground estate — no body, only a self-binding mark burned into stone and a message hidden in the forge.Brother, follow the road I could not walk.Faelar’s weapons now guidedcoordinated raids against the remaining hunter cells. Some surrendered. Some fought. The global network had cracked, not vanished. But a dead man had reached across two decades to arm his own rescue, and Nica thought that was its own kind of immortality, the kind that did not need scales.

Benedikte had left the estate two days after the battle. Stellan came for him, and father and son stood on the western cliff for nearly an hour without speaking before Benedikte allowed Stellan to embrace him. He was resting somewhere in Norway now. Ryker had rescinded the death order but not absolved every killing; judgment would wait. Grief had waited eight years. It could wait a little longer.

Demetri came up behind Nica and placed his hands on her shoulders, his touch moving warmth through the bond. “You are sad.”

“For Caelen.”

“Yes.”

“And relieved.”

“For Benedikte.”

“Yes.”

“And worried.”

“For you.” His hands tightened. Nica leaned back against him, letting his heat and the low steady hum of him through the bond settle her. “About the rotations.” Demetri had used new identities for two centuries; every twenty years he disappeared and returned as a son or a cousin, and the current Demetri had two years left before he was supposed to die. Publicly. Nica hated the thought with a fierceness that startled her — the idea of him vanishing, even in fiction, even on paper, touched the oldest wound she had. But Ryker had approved a new plan. Demetri Vasiliev would age — slowly, magic and altered images creating the illusion over the coming decades — and he would remainhimself. No disappearing. No leaving her behind to preserve the lie.

“I am not going anywhere,” he said.

“You say that because you can hear me spiraling.”

“Yes.”

“Cheating.”

“The bond is useful.”