Page 66 of Dragon Kissed

“They can leave.”

“It’s my office.”

“Then they can still leave.” She laughed, and Demetri smiled against her mouth — no hesitation now, no unfamiliarity, the expression finally worn in, finally his.

Later, after champagne and Caelen’s dry toast and Lirien crying openly, Demetri took Nica home. The estate’s damaged western wing remained under repair, scaffolding pale against the old stone, but the balcony stood intact, fog moving across the Pacific the way it had the first night she’d stood here and watched a shape move through it. Nica waited beneath the stars while Demetri crossed to the stone wall. “You’re sure?” he asked.

“No.”

“That is not reassuring.”

“I’ve never flown on a dragon.”

“You have never done many things.”

“I’m beginning to notice.” He shifted — ruby scales flowing through human skin, wings spreading across the balcony, theenormous ancient shape of him unfolding where the man had stood — and lowered his body and extended one foreleg. Nica approached. The first time she’d seen him fully, he’d been bleeding in a bunker, and she’d been too frightened and too in love to look properly; now moonlight moved over his scales like light over water, and his eyes watched her with Demetri’s intelligence and the dragon’s absolute devotion, and she let herself look, and found nothing in her afraid. She touched his face.Beautiful, she sent through the bond. The dragon preened.You encourage intolerable behavior, Demetri sighed inside him.He got it from you.

The dragon lowered one wing to make a path to his back, and Nica climbed. Magic shaped a secure place between his shoulders; she settled against the warm scales and gripped the ridge in front of her.Ready?Demetri asked. No walls between them. No hidden truth. No locked doors, no bracelet, no law standing between his mind and hers. Nica looked toward the distant lights of San Francisco — the city where she’d learned not to need anyone, where she’d lived twenty-nine years so carefully that three people would have noticed her gone, the city where a dragon had caught her falling out of the air and refused, ever since, to let her fall alone.Yes.

Demetri launched. The balcony vanished beneath them. Wind rushed around Nica, cold and enormous, then warmed as his magic closed over her, and they climbed through the fog, above the dark water, higher until the city appeared beneath them like scattered gold spilled across black velvet. Nica laughed, the sound torn away by the wind and carried, somehow, straight into him through the bond. The dragon answered with a roar that shook the night. Demetri banked toward the stars.

And for the first time in her life, loving someone did not feel like falling. It felt like flight.

EPILOGUE

Lirien: Did you arrive safely?

Nica: it’s snowing. the house has actual dragons in the portraits.

Lirien: Welcome home, my lady.

Nica: don’t you start too

St.Petersburg in winter smelled like snow, river ice, and woodsmoke — the last of these so like Demetri’s own scent that Nica had breathed it in on the drive from the airport and felt, absurdly, that the whole city smelled of him. She stood beside him beneath the carved entrance of the Drakovich estate and wondered whether immortal dragons ever considered central heating a sacred invention.

We do, Demetri answered through the bond.

Stop listening.

You sent the thought directly into my mind.

Details.

The dragon stirred.Cold.

“You breathe fire,” Nica muttered.

The ancient doors opened, and an elf in formal black bowed and led them through halls lined with icons, armor, and portraits that did not blur — faces held in crisp paint across centuries, the way no human family’s records survived. The Drakovich family had not hidden its history inside the estate. Only from humans. Demetri carried Anastasia’s manuscript in both hands, the book that had started it all, come home at last; Nica held the smaller case with her recovered pendant, letters, and personal relics, the sum of Baba Yelena’s whole guarded life.

At the end of the long gallery, an old man waited. Not old by human standards — he appeared perhaps sixty, white hair, severe face, pale blue eyes — and dragon power filled the room around him, dense and old, bending the air the way Ryker’s had. The Elder Drakovich. He looked first at Demetri, then at the manuscript, and his composure broke. Only for a second. “Anastasia’s book,” he whispered, a hundred years of loss in the single word. Demetri bowed. “We brought home what we could.” The elder touched the leather cover, his fingers trembling, and Nica looked away, giving him the dignity of private grief, because she knew exactly what it was to hold the last object of someone gone.

Then his gaze found her. Everything stopped. The old dragon stared at Nica’s face — not the mate mark, her eyes — and crossed the distance without looking at Demetri again. “What was your mother’s name?”

Nica blinked. “Elena Sokolov.”

“And her mother?”

“Yelena. Baba Yelena.” The elder’s face went white. “Yelena Sokolov was your grandmother?”