Page 71 of Blood Singer

His mouth found mine again, softer this time, and through the bond I felt what he couldn't say aloud. The way he'd been terrified when Verrater had taken me. The specific flavor of his fear—not just that I might die, but that he'd lose me before I truly understood what I meant to him.

I kissed him back and let him feel my answer. That I knew. That I'd always known, even when he'd been fighting it, even when he'd tried to push me away.

The bond between us pulsed with warmth, golden and certain. This was what it meant to be mated to a dragon shifter, I realized. Not just the physical connection, though that was overwhelming enough. But this—the vulnerability of having someone feel your fears and your hopes and your desperate, aching love in real time.

It should have been terrifying. Instead, it felt like coming home.

My release tore through me with a force that ripped a sound from my throat I didn't recognize as my own voice. Every muscle locked and released in waves so intense they bordered on pain, and through the new connection between us I felt Kavan's control finally give way entirely. Felt the surge of his pleasure cresting and breaking, felt him shudder and groan against my neck as his cock pulsed deep inside me.

"Mine," he said, his voice barely recognizable, worn down to something older and more fundamental. Scales rippled across his skin where it pressed against mine. A brief, involuntary thing, his dragon surfacing at the edges of his control. His eyes, when I managed to look at them, had gone pure molten gold, lit from somewhere inside, and the sight of it made my chest expand with something fierce and certain.

"Yours," I said. It came out hoarse and breathless. "Always."

The waves receded slowly, and what remained was an exhaustion so complete and so clean that it felt almost debilitating. I was shaking. He was shaking. We were both breathing as if we'd survived something physically demanding, which I supposed we had.

He was still holding me. He hadn't stopped holding me, I realized. Through the bite and the venom and everything that followed, his arms had stayed locked around me with the same careful attentiveness he'd shown washing my hair. I could feel his heartbeat slowing gradually, and the new awareness between us was settling into something quieter now, less like a door thrown open and more like a window left ajar. A constant, low-level consciousness of him that I understood, instinctively, was permanent.

I traced an idle pattern on his forearm, one of the ones crisscrossed with old training scars. "What was that?" I asked, my voice still rough.

"The mating bond." He pressed his lips to the top of my head. When he spoke again, his voice carried something careful and wondering in it, as if he were still taking inventory of what had changed. "My venom's in your blood." A pause. "And it means I'll know, always, if something happens to you. I'll be able to find you anywhere."

"Good," I said. "That seems efficient."

He made a sound against my hair that was almost a laugh. Through the quiet current of awareness between us, I felt the way that landed in him. The way my tendency to respond to enormity with practicality consistently surprised him, and the way he'd stopped being annoyed by it at some point and started being charmed by it instead.

We lay quietly for a while, the candles burning down around us, the sounds of Argia settling into its nighttime rhythms coming faintly through the open balcony doors. Night-blooming flowers from the garden below had opened. I could smell them, something sweet and cool threading through the warm cedar-and-Kavan scent of his chambers.

Outside, a night bird called from somewhere in the ironwood trees beyond the garden wall. The candles guttered in a faint breeze from the balcony, sending shadows dancing across the stone ceiling.

"Kavan," I said quietly.

"Hmm."

"I'm glad the universe sent me here."

He was quiet for a moment, his hand moving in slow, absent strokes through my hair. Then, "So am I, Wildflower. So am I."

Through the quiet current between us, I felt the truth of it. Deep and certain and completely without ambiguity. Centuries of solitude ending here, in a room full of guttering candles, with a woman who'd talked back to him from the first moment and hadn't stopped since.

I pressed my palm flat against his chest, over the steady, unhurried beat of his heart, and felt him do the same over mine.

Outside, Argia dreamed on. And inside, for the first time in centuries, so did the king.

He was still inside me, the connection between us quiet and warm now rather than overwhelming, and I felt his renewed desire beginning to stir alongside my own. Less urgent than before, more deliberate, the difference between a storm and a tide. His hips moved in a slow, testing roll, and I heard him inhale as the awareness between us amplified the sensation for us both.

"Again?" I asked, though I was already shifting toward him.

"Again," he confirmed, drawing me closer. "How's your shoulder?"

"My shoulder," I repeated, honestly forgetting the handicap for a moment.

I moved it experimentally as I said it. A small rotation, testing for the muted ache I'd been managing all evening. But there was nothing. Not even a twinge. I rolled it again, more deliberately this time, lifting my arm above my head in a way that should've made me wince.

Nothing.

"That's—" I stopped, frowning, and brought my other wrist up to examine it in the candlelight. The bruises from Verrater's grip, the ones that had grown dark and ugly just hours ago, had faded to pale yellow-green shadows. Almost gone entirely. "Damn, that cream Kherra used is good."

He made a low, satisfied sound, his hand sliding up my uninjured arm to catch my wrist gently, turning it to see what I was seeing. "It's not the cream."