“You’re a pretty good guy, you know that? You must have been a really great king.”
“I’m just a man, Mara.”
“Dragon, actually.” She gives a little smile. Slipping into humor, the way she does when things get too deep.
“Yes, that too.” I agree. “But dragons also feel. Maybe more than others.”
“I can get that.” She nods. “You guys are very…extra.”
My lip twitches. “I suppose you could say that.”
Mara shifts again. Closer now. Her shoulder against my arm. “What would you have been?” she asks abruptly, changing the topic. “If you hadn’t been king. If you could have just been… you.”
No one has ever asked me that.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I was born to rule. Raised for it. Trained for it. The person I might have been without the crown—” I stop. “I never had the chance to find out.”
“And now?”
“Now I have the chance.” I look down at her. Take in the sweeping forehead and high cheekbones. “If I choose to take it.”
“Do you want to?”
“I think so. But I don’t know what that looks like. Don’t know what person exists beneath it all.”
“Maybe you figure it out as you go.” She shifts, looking up at me. “Maybe you don’t have to know who you are. You just… try things. See what fits.”
“And if nothing fits?”
“Then you make something new.” Her hand finds mine. Fingers curling around it. “That’s what I’ve been doing my whole life. Making it up as I go. It’s messy, and sometimes I fuck up spectacularly, but it’s mine.”
Her hand in mine feels inevitable. Like we’ve done this before. Will do it again.
The bond hums approval. But beneath that—something else. Something that has nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the way she looks at me. The way her thumb traces absent patterns on my palm.
“Mara,” I say quietly.
“Yeah?”
“I need you to understand something.”
“Okay.”
“Whatever happens tomorrow—whether what we felt was real or just compulsion—this matters.” I gesture between us. “This conversation. This moment. It matters apart from magic.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” I turn slightly, facing her fully. “Because I don’t want you to think that if the bond breaks and we feel differently, it means none of this was real. It was real. You are real. What we survived together is real.”
Her eyes are bright. Too bright. “You’re saying goodbye.”
“I’m saying that tomorrow might change everything. And I want you to know—before it does—that knowing you has changed me. Made me want to belong to now instead of mourning then.”
A tear slips down her cheek. She doesn’t wipe it away. “Damn it, K. You can’t just—”
I don’t let her finish.
My hand moves to cup her face. Thumb catching the tear. And then I’m leaning in, and she’s rising to meet me and—
