She snorts. "Sweet talker."
"I try."
The bond hums between us—not the damaged, weakened thing it was when she first returned, but something stronger. Growing. I don't know if it's the proximity or the pregnancy or just time doing what time does, but I can feel her more clearly now than I have in weeks. Her determination. Her fear, buried deep where she thinks I can't sense it. And underneath both, something warmer that she's not ready to acknowledge in daylight.
She told me she loved me. The night before we thought the ritual would happen, before we realized we needed more time—she said the words out loud.I love you. I hate that I do.
I'm holding onto that like a rope thrown to a drowning man.
The second week, the riders return from the eastern monasteries with three more texts.
One is useless—a philosophical treatise on the nature of divine punishment that spends forty pages debating whether curses are moral correction or cosmic cruelty. I throw it across the room after page twelve.
"Feel better?" Kess asks without looking up from her own reading.
"Marginally."
"There's a whole shelf of religious commentary if you want to keep throwing things. Might be therapeutic."
"I'll keep that in mind."
The second text is more promising—fragments of a ritual that references "the willing vessel" and "blood calling to blood." But the key passages are damaged beyond reading, the ink faded to ghostly shadows that no amount of candlelight can illuminate.
The third text is the one that matters.
"Rhystan." Her voice is sharp, urgent. "Come look at this."
I'm at her side before she finishes speaking, close enough that her scent fills my lungs. She doesn't pull away—too focused on what she's found to maintain her usual distance.
"Here." She points to a passage near the bottom of the page. "It's talking about curse transfers, but look at this part. 'The strength of the vessel determines the nature of the transformation. A weak vessel shatters. A strong vessel adapts. The strongest vessels do not merely contain the curse—they metabolize it. Change it. Make it their own.'"
"Metabolize," I repeat. "Like your contamination."
"Exactly like my contamination." She looks up at me, and for a moment we're just two people working toward the same goal, the animosity between us forgotten. "I'm not just containing your curse effects, Rhystan. I'm processing them. Adapting to them. That's why I'm still alive when I should be dead."
"So when you take the full curse?—"
"My body might do the same thing. Not just hold it, but transform it. Make it survivable."
Hope is a dangerous thing. I've learned that lesson too many times to trust it blindly.
But looking at her face, seeing the fierce certainty in her eyes, I let myself feel it anyway.
"Keep reading," I tell her. "Find everything this text says about metabolization. I want to know exactly what we're working with."
The third week, she starts practicing the ritual words in earnest.
The old tongue is brutal—harsh consonants and guttural stops that were never meant for human throats. She practices for hours, repeating phrases until her voice goes hoarse, starting over when I correct her pronunciation.
"The third syllable is too soft." I demonstrate, letting the sound rumble up from my chest. "It needs to come from here. Like a growl."
"Easy for you to say. You're part dragon."
"And you're part warrior omega. Your ancestors spoke this language. It's in your blood."
She tries again. Better this time—the consonant sharp and decisive, the vowel that follows dark and resonant.
"Good. Again."
