My throat is raw from screaming... and from drinking his blood, hot and acidic as it chewed its way through me. I swallow experimentally and taste copper—dried blood coating the inside of my mouth like rust, cracked on my lips.
His blood. Mine. Ours. I can't tell the difference anymore, and maybe that's the point. Maybe that's what the mating does anyway. My stomach turns at the thought of what we did.
The memories surface in fragments, sharp-edged and merciless.
The altar at my back, warm with centuries of dark magic. His body covering mine, blanketing me, skin to skin from shoulder to ankle. Pain and pleasure so tangled together that I couldn't have separated them with the sharpest blade. The knot locking us together, sealing us, his seed claiming me in ways I still don't fully understand.
His blood pouring down my throat while mine pooled on ancient stone. The darkness pulling me under while his voice begged me to stay, to breathe, to live, his throat raw and his voice surprisingly vulnerable and panicked.
I survived.
The realization settles in my chest, heavy and unthinkable. Like a stone dropped into still water, down and down until it hits bottom and stays there.
I survived the claiming that killed forty-seven others.
I'm not number forty-eight.
Not yet, anyway.
So I raise my head and look around at everything.
The room swims into focus like something surfacing from murky water. High stone ceiling with massive wooden beams dark as old blood. Narrow windows letting in afternoon light—golden and warm, telling me I've been unconscious for hours, maybe longer. A fireplace against one wall with embers still glowing like sleeping eyes, waiting to be stirred back to life. Tapestries hanging everywhere I look, depicting dragons in flight, dragons hunting, dragons locked in combat with each other over burning cities.
His room, of course, just like the too-comfortable bed beneath me ishisbed.
I sit up to get a better look, and my body screams in protest like I've been hit by a dragon and not fucked by one. Every muscle locks tight. The wounds in my hips pull with the movement, sending white-hot pain radiating through my core.
I bite back a gasp and freeze, hovering halfway between lying down and sitting up, waiting for the agony to recede so I can gather my strength and push through it.
It takes longer than I want to admit.
When I can think again—when the world stops being nothing but pain—I notice what I'm wearing.
Not the ruined white dress, shredded by his claws until it was nothing but ribbons of blood-soaked silk. Not my own skin, sticky with blood and slick and seed.
A nightgown. One made of soft gray linen that falls to my thighs. It's clean and simple, and warm from my body heat. Someone put this on me while I was out of it. What's more, they washed the blood and the evidence of the claiming from my skin. I was touched while I was vulnerable and unconscious and out of it.
Him. It washim, I have no doubt of that. Not servants—he's an alpha, a dragon king, he wouldn't let anyone touch me, not while his scent was on my skin.
He undressed me, not that peeling the rest of the bloodstained silk off me would've taken much effort. He washed the blood from my skin with the same hands that tore me open. Bandaged my wounds with the same fingers that sank claws into my hips while he knotted me on an altar built for sacrifice.
The knowledge makes my skin crawl and fills me with a sick kind of nausea. To my horror, something else stirs beneath it—a strange and tender sense ofbelonging. A kind of intimacy that comes from being touched softly and gently, a warmth that has no place in my chest, no right to exist after what he did to me.
Violation and tenderness tangled together. Just like the claiming itself.
I throw the bedsheets off and yank the nightgown up with shaking hands, needing to see. Needing to know the full extent of what was done to me.
The wounds on my hips are bandaged. Clean white linen wrapped carefully around my hips and abdomen and tucked at the ends. No blood seeping through. No angry red of infection visible at the edges. Just neat, careful work.
I probe the bandages gently with my fingertips.
The wounds underneath should scream at me. His claws went deep—I felt them scrape against bone, felt muscle tearing in ways that should take weeks to heal, should leave me bedridden and feverish and maybe dead from infection.
But the pain is manageable, dull and distant, as if I started mending overnight.
That's wrong. Bodies don't work like this. Human bodies, anyway. Omega bodies. Even dragon shifter bodies don't heal this quickly from wounds this deep.
I shove the thought away like pushing something dangerous into a closet and slamming the door. One problem at a time. That's how I've survived this long, and I'm not about to try something new now.
