"I don't know. Days, maybe weeks. The bond is fighting it—I can feel our connection wrapping around the corruption, tryingto contain it. But this magic is old, older than dragons, older than anything should be." His arms tightened around me. "It was designed to break bonds, to corrupt connections between souls."
"So I'm going to die." The words came out matter-of-fact. After everything, it seemed almost anticlimactic. Survive the temple, escape the cultists, find my mate, only to be consumed from within by something I couldn't fight.
"No." The word was absolute, carved from certainty. "You are mine, and I protect what's mine."
"Caelus—"
He pulled back enough to look at me, and his eyes blazed with determination that burned through the bond. "We have libraries full of ancient knowledge, allies who predate human civilization. Someone, somewhere, knows how to remove this mark."
"And if they don't?"
His hand came up to cup my face, thumb tracing my cheekbone with impossible gentleness. "Then I'll find another way. I'll break into the Unnamed's prison myself and force it to release you. I'll tear apart reality if I have to. I've waited three thousand years for you, Wren. I'm not losing you to some parasitic void that thinks it can claim what's mine."
The possessive fury in his voice should have frightened me. Instead, it made me feel safer than I had since the mark started burning. This wasn't false hope or pretty lies—this was a Dragon Lord declaring war on something that dared touch his mate.
"We're going to remove it," he said again, softer but no less certain. "You are going to live, and be free, and The Unnamed is going to learn what happens when it marks someone under my protection."
The mark pulsed again, sending fresh cold through my body. But Caelus held me through it, his warmth fighting back thechill, his presence in the bond a steady anchor against the void trying to hollow me out.
I wasn't alone. After three weeks of darkness and death and isolation, I wasn't alone.
That had to count for something.
*
That night, I dreamt.
But it wasn't like normal dreams. It had weight, substance, presence that pressed against my mind like cold fingers looking for cracks to pry open.
I stood in absolute darkness—not the absence of light but the active consumption of it. The void wasn't empty. It watched. It breathed. It wanted.
"Little vessel." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, made of sounds that predated speech. "You bear my mark. You are mine, claimed before the dragon touched you. His bond is a lie painted over truth."
"You're wrong." My voice sounded thin in the vast darkness. "I chose him. He caught me when I fell."
Laughter rolled through the void like dying stars. "He caught meat and memory. I marked your essence, the part of you that exists before body, before choice. You've been mine since the moment my servants pressed their fingers to your skin."
The Unnamed began to take form—not shape, exactly, but presence made visible. It had voids where eyes should be, spaces that pulled at my vision, trying to drag me into depths that had no bottom. Its mouth was a wound in reality itself, opening onto nothing that had ever been something.
"I am the First Darkness," it said, and each word felt like truth forced into my skull. "Before the dragons, before your kind, before light presumed to exist, I was. They imprisoned me, these inheritors who call themselves lords, but prisons are just delayedinevitability. Your blood will break my seals. Your body will be my doorway."
"I choose him," I repeated, holding onto the words like anchors. "I choose Caelus."
"Choice is an illusion born of ignorance. You'll understand soon, when you're more mine than his. When you look at him through eyes I'm wearing, when you speak with a tongue I'm moving. He'll try to love what's left of you, and that will hurt him worse than death." The presence moved closer, and cold beyond description flooded through me. "The mark grows, little vessel. Feel it claiming you, nerve by nerve, cell by cell. By tomorrow's sunset, you'll be hollow enough for me to pour myself in."
"No—"
"Yes. And through you, I'll touch him. Dragons can't be marked directly, but their mates? Their precious, fragile, human mates? You're the door I'll walk through to corrupt his bond from within. He'll rot from the inside out, and the last thing he'll see before madness takes him is your face wearing my intentions."
I clawed for the surface of waking and hit ice. My eyes wouldn’t open. My body wouldn’t answer. I was pinned beneath a weight that had no mass, a pressure that lived inside my skin.
Breathe, I ordered myself. Move a finger. Anything.
Nothing moved. Not even a twitch.
Chapter 3
Ifinallybrokethesurfaceof waking like drowning in reverse—one moment pinned beneath the Unnamed's weight, the next gasping in tangled sheets with my heart trying to punch through my ribs. But the terror that should have followed me out of the nightmare never came. Instead, heat flooded through me with the force of a tidal wave, turning every nerve ending into a live wire that sang with need so intense it stole the air from my lungs.
