A rhythmic pulse throbbed beneath my feet, beating so loudly that it threatened to drown my own heartbeat in its fury.
I stepped deeper into the oppressive darkness, my boots echoing against what I had assumed was stone flooring. The acrid smoke burned my lungs with each shallow breath I took, and I found myself moving more cautiously as the sulfurous stench grew stronger. Something felt wrong about this place—terribly, fundamentally wrong.
Was the ground beneath me moving?
Dropping down on my haunches, I extended my trembling hands to feel the stone beneath my feet, desperate to orient myself in this nightmare realm. But instead of cold stone or even damp earth, my fingertips encountered something else entirely: scales. Massive, overlapping scales that were warm to the touch and slightly damp with condensation from the humid air.
My heart hammered as I pressed my palms flat against the surface, trying to comprehend what I was touching. Beneath the thick, armor-like scales, I could feel the slow, rhythmic twitching of enormous muscles, the subtle shifting of bones that seemed to stretch endlessly in all directions. The pulsing I'd felt through my feet wasn't coming from some distant source—it was a heartbeat, steady and powerful, reverberating through the massive form beneath me.
Whatever this creature was, it was undeniably alive—terrifyingly, overwhelmingly alive. And I was standing directly on top of it, balanced precariously on what I now understood was the broad expanse of its slumbering back.
Every instinct screamed at me to run, to flee this nightmare, but my legs had turned to lead beneath me. The creature's breathing created a gentle rise and fall that made me sway with each massive inhalation, as if I were adrift on some primordial sea. Its warmth seeped through the soles of my boots, a heat so intense it felt like I was standing near a forge.
Then, as if stirring from the deepest slumber, something shifted beneath me. The surface I stood on rippled like disturbed water, and suddenly a massive eyelid peeled back just inches from my right foot. The eye that revealed itself was larger than my entire torso, its iris a swirling maelstrom of molten gold and crimson that seemed to hold the fires of creation itself. Ancient intelligence gleamed within those depths, older than kingdoms, older than the stones of Camelot.
The pupil contracted as it focused on me, and in that moment of terrible recognition, I understood exactly what manner of creature lay beneath me. The legends whispered in hushed tones around Logres firesides, the stories Merlin had told me during my training, the nightmares that had plagued warriors since the dawn of time—all of them paled before this reality.
A dragon. I was standing on the back of a living, breathing dragon.
You are ours, daughter of Twilight,the voice resonated through my consciousness, each word rolling through my mind like distant thunder. A voice that belonged to the dragon.
It was a voice that carried the weight of eons and spoke with the authority of something that had witnessed the birth and death of civilizations.
Our treasure,it continued, and I felt the possessive hunger behind those words, a need so profound it made my knees buckle.To guard. Tohoard.
"To mate."
I turned at the sound of a man's voice and found Arthur standing before me. He took a few steps toward me, and suddenly a realization slammed into my consciousness: the dragon's hunger wasn't separate from the king's—they were one and the same. Two consciousnesses woven so tightlytogether that I couldn't distinguish where one ended and the other began. The dragon's possessive need rippled through Arthur's expression, and as both man and beast fixed their attention on me, I understood that they shared everything.
Including their desires.
I stood frozen as Arthur closed the distance between us, my breath coming in shallow gasps. The heat radiating from the dragon beneath my feet paled in comparison to the expression burning in Arthur's gaze as he looked me up and down with raw assessment. He circled me slowly, deliberately, like a hunter evaluating prey.
Or a dragon inspecting a treasure it meant to claim.
"You woke something that's been sleeping for a very long time." His voice carried that same resonance I'd heard in the dragon's mental roar, rougher than it should have been.
My heart hammered as he completed his circle, stopping directly in front of me. The golden swirl in his eyes flared brighter.
Then his hands moved with sudden violence, gripping the front of my tunic and ripping. Fabric tore like parchment, the sound obscenely loud in the cavernous space. He didn't stop there—his fingers found the laces of my braies, tearing through everything until scraps of cloth fell away and I stood naked before him.
A deep, rumbling growl emanated from the dragon beneath us, vibrating through my bones and making my teeth ache. The sound held hunger—feral, wild, ancient. The kind of hunger that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with possession.
Mate,the dragon's voice thundered through my mind.
Arthur's pupils had blown wide, nearly swallowing the blue entirely. His chest rose and fell with heavy breaths ashe stared at my exposed body, and I could see the dragon's consciousness moving behind his eyes like smoke beneath glass.
"The beast wants you," Arthur said, his voice dropping to a dangerous rasp. "And what the dragon wants—"
His hand wrapped around my throat.
"—I take."
The beast's consciousness pressed against mine, overwhelming. I could feel its memories bleeding through—glimpses of hoarded gold gleaming in vast caverns, the satisfaction of protecting precious things, the deep contentment that came from knowing its treasures were safe. But there was something else, something that made my blood run cold. In its ancient mind, I wasn't just valuable—I wastheirs.Property to be claimed, collected, and kept forever in the depths of whatever lair this creature called home.
"Our mate," Arthur interrupted my thoughts. "A vessel for our seed."
At that, white-hot anger poured through me. The rage was pure and clean, burning away the last vestiges of fear that had been clouding my judgment. And suddenly it didn't matter that I was standing there naked, my body exposed and vulnerable to his hungry gaze. It didn't matter that his hand was wrapped around my throat like a collar of possession, or that he could obviously overpower me with his superior size and strength. It didn't matter that the dragon's ancient consciousness was pressing against my mind like a suffocating blanket, trying to remake me into something I would never be.
