He doesn’t look up. “Because you crashed into my arms like the gods dropped you there. Because my dragon decided you’re ours before my brain caught up. Pick one.”
My heart does a ridiculous flip. “Yours, huh?”
“Don’t push it, elf.” But his thumb brushes my collarbone, lingering. “Name?”
“Gamble,” I answer, my heart beating hard and the nervousness in my voice making me almost choke on my own name.
“Of course it is.” He ties off a bandage with neat, efficient movements. “I’m Sarak, which of course you already know. You’re staying here tonight. Tomorrow we figure out how deep in the fire you’ve dragged us.”
The artifact pulses again, softer this time, like it approves.
I lean back against the warm stone wall and let my eyes drift shut. For the first time in weeks, the Night Hounds sound distant. And for the first time ever, I’m not sure I want to run.
But before I can feel anything close to settled, Sarak’s voice rumbles through the quiet.
“Rule one, Gamble: no more solo heroics,” Sarak barks. “You run, you tell me. You steal, you ask permission. Break myrules…” He taps the bench beside my thigh, a promise and a threat wrapped in one. “Consequences.”
I open one eye. “What kind of consequences?”
The look he gives me could melt iron. “The kind that’ll leave you breathless and begging, little elf.”
Heat pools low in my belly, unrelated to the forge.
I swallow hard. “Looking forward to it,Daddy.”
Sarak’s sharp intake of breath is the last thing I hear before exhaustion claims me, smiling like a fool in the glow of a dragon’s fire as my eyes gently shut and the true impact of my close escape and time on the run hitting home harder than any elf could be expected to handle.
But I know one thing to be true.
Sarak might think he’s my savior, my guardian, or whatever else his dragon brain can muster. However if he thinks he can keep me in check, he’s got another thing coming…
Chapter 2
Sarak
The elf is asleep before his head hits the pillow.
Gamble, he said.Of courseit is. The name tastes like mischief and smoke on my tongue, and I’m already in deeper than I have any right to be.
In all of the smoking wreckage of my life, I’ve never felt like this.
I stand over the bench, arms folded, watching the rise and fall of his chest. Snowmelt drips from his braid onto my floorboards, each drop hissing where it lands near the forge.
The fire stone rests against the boy’s bare skin, pulsing like a second heartbeat. Crimson veins crawl across the black glass every time he exhales, as if it’s drinking him in. My dragon snarls, low and possessive, claws flexing beneath my human nails.
Mine,it says again. Louder this time.
I shove the beast down, but it’s like trying to cork a volcano in the Asterian Kingdom. And I should know.
Outside, the village is quiet.
Too quiet. The hunters are gone—for now—but their stink lingers: wet dog, sulfur, and the copper tang of blood.
I scent the air through the cracked window.
No fresh tracks yet. Good. That gives me until dawn to decide what in the nine hells I’m going to do with a cursed elf who just declared meDaddyin a voice that went straight to my cock.
“Curse it all,” I grumble, my manhood hardening and my mind playing all kinds of wicked tricks on me as I imagine just what I could do to that damned elf.
