Page 30 of Blood Singer

"This is Amy," Sanyra said, and something in her voice softened in a way I'd never heard before. "My mate."

I tried to keep my face completely smooth, but Amy caught the momentary flicker of bewilderment and laughed. "I get that reaction a lot. Yes, I'm human. Yes, I'm female. And yes, Sanyra is also female. Surprise."

"I'm sorry," I said quickly. "I didn't mean to be rude. I'm just... surprised. Given the birthrate issue, I would have thought..." I trailed off, realizing I was digging myself deeper.

"That female Drakhoni would be expected to mate with males and produce offspring?" Sanyra's tone was dry but not unkind. "It's a common assumption. And a wrong one."

"Drakhoni mate for life," Amy explained, her hand finding Sanyra's with easy familiarity. "The bond is sacred. You can't force it or fake it or choose it based on political necessity. When you find your person, that's it. Everything else comes second."

"Even species survival?" I asked.

"Even that." Sanyra's expression grew serious. "Many female Drakhoni are mated to human females, and a few to human males. It's not uncommon. We follow our hearts, not breeding quotas." She paused, her golden eyes meeting mine. "When two females are bonded, there's often a male who steps in to father children with one or both of them. It's an arrangement of family, not romance. Everyone benefits—the bonded pair gets offspring to continue their line, and the male provides for his genetic children even if he's not their primary partner."

The weight of that reality shifted into place. If Drakhoni females formed lifemates with both human men and women based entirely on the heart's calling, the number of available female shifters for the male population grew even smaller. Their survival crisis was not simply a genetic bottleneck, but a profound consequence of how deeply and unyieldingly they loved.

Amy squeezed Sanyra's fingers, a fleeting shade of concern crossing her face. "We have children," she said quietly. "Two sons. And I want them to grow up in a world where their people survive, where they can find their own mates and be happy. That's worth fighting for."

"Yes, it is," I agreed wholeheartedly.

The conversation turned to pleasantries about Earth, with Amy asking how the world had changed since she left fourteenth-century France. Yet my gaze inevitably slipped back toward the terrace doors.

Kavan stood alone now, the surrounding nobles having drifted away. His hands rested on the stone balustrade as he stared out into the velvet night, the hard line of his shoulders radiating an aura of solitary grief that pulled at my chest.

"He won't take a mate, you know," Sanyra said quietly, and I realized she'd been watching me watch him. "My cousin."

I pulled my gaze back to her, trying to look unbothered. "Why not?"

"Because of what happened with Marion." Sanyra's expression was sad, sympathetic in a way that made my throat tight. "Has anyone explained blood singers to you?"

"A little," I said. "Binwee mentioned it was a rare type of mate bond."

"It's more than rare—it's sacred. A blood singer is someone whose blood literally sings to a Drakhoni. Most Drakhoni recognize their mates through scent. That's how I knew Amy was mine. But a blood singer is more than just scent recognition. It's the melody of the blood moving through the veins, something that sounds like music. An instinct so primal it overrides everything else." Sanyra paused, her gaze distant. "That recognition is immediate and powerful. The moment a Drakhoni hears a female's blood song, the dragon believes it has found its mate. Or so our lore has always taught us."

A solemn darkness shadowed her face as she looked toward the floor. "Kavan heard such a song seven hundred and fifty years ago. A woman named Marion. He believed immediately that she was his—her blood called to him, and his dragon recognized the resonance as belonging to a bond-mate. But before he could complete the envenomation, before he could seal what he believed was already between them, her husband discovered she was planning to leave with Kavan. He killed her rather than let her go."

A sharp pang tightened in my chest at the sheer tragedy of it. "That sounds horribly sad."

"It destroyed him," Sanyra said simply. "He burned entire villages in his grief. Killed thousands. And when we woke up three months ago, the first thing he said to me was that he could still hear her blood song in his memory."

Her words struck me like a physical blow, illuminating the anger and torment I had witnessed in Kavan when he first smelled me on the landing pad. But beneath that understanding came something else, something that twisted my stomach into knots. If he could still hear Marion's blood song in his memory, and if he'd heard it in me when I arrived, then what exactly was he hearing now? Was I just an echo of her, some ghost wearing her melody? The thought made my skin crawl. I didn't want to be a shadow of someone else, a pale imitation of a woman who'd captured his heart so completely that he'd burned the world down when she died. I wanted to be real to him. I wanted to matter as myself, not as some cruel reminder of what he'd lost.

But maybe that's all I was. Maybe the Alliance had known exactly what they were doing when they sent me, banking on the fact that Kavan would find Marion in my blood and be too distracted by grief and rage to think clearly about the politics. Or maybe it was just fate playing a sick joke, giving him the scent of his lost mate wrapped in a different body, a different life, a different woman entirely.

"The thing about blood singers," Sanyra continued, her voice dropping lower, "is that they're rare and sacred. Kavan has always believed that what he heard in Marion was the one true bond written for him." She paused. "Whether that belief is correct or not, it's the one he's held for seven hundred and fifty years. And it's the reason he won't allow himself to reach for anything again."

The finality in her tone settled heavily between us. I ought to have taken it as a clean exit, an indisputable reason to shut down my feelings before they wrecked me completely.

Instead, an ache settled over me, deep and complicated and impossible to untangle. I felt sorrow for the young king whose world had ended in flames, grief for Marion whose life had been cut short, and a quiet, hollow sadness for myself. But underneath all of that was something else, something that scared me more than any of it. I was falling for a male whose heart was locked away in a tomb of his own making, and I didn't know if I was the woman he wanted or just the closest thing he'd ever get to the one he'd lost.

And the worst part was that I wasn't sure which possibility terrified me more.

"I should probably talk to him," I said, trying to keep my voice casual. "About the dating app logistics. We need to figure out how to integrate the technology with your existing comm systems, and he'd need to approve any infrastructure changes."

Sanyra's expression shifted into something that looked suspiciously like amusement. "Is that what you need to talk to him about? The dating app?"

"Yes," I said, but even I could hear how defensive it sounded. "That's literally my job here. Diplomatic relations and solving the mate shortage problem."

"Uh-huh." Sanyra's tone was so dry it could have started fires. "And the fact that you've been tracking his location all evening like a compass pointing north has nothing to do with it?"