Her thoughts scattered like startled birds.
She couldn't focus. Couldn't think past the heat spreading through her limbs, pooling low in her belly, throbbing between her thighs with an insistence that bordered on painful.
She needed. . .something from Korin, but she didn't know what.
But her body did.
Her body desperatelyachedwith that knowing.
Sol pressed her face against Korin's shoulder, breathing him in—jasmine, stormwater, flame—and a soft, involuntary sound escaped her lips.
Not quite a moan.
Not quite a whimper.
Something in between.
Something wild and desperate.
Korin's arms tightened around her.
His stride didn't falter, but she felt the change in him—the way his muscles tensed, the way his breath hitched just slightly before steadying again.
He knew.
Whatever was happening to her body, heknew.
And from somewhere beyond the corridor, that other roar answered again—colder, hungrier, and closer now.
Your other king,Korin had said.
Sol's blood ran hot and cold all at once.
No one knew that Korin had a twin. How did the world not know this?
She was being carried toward a second dragon.
And her body—traitorous, burning,wanting—didn't seem to mind at all.
Then soon, Korin brought Sol through a new doorway lined with sparkling gold, and the world shifted into even more luxury.
Korin’s treasure hoard had been magnificent—mountains of gold, rivers of gems, thrones buried beneath centuries of wealth.
But his brother’s?
That was something else entirely.
Oh my.
Sol's breath caught as they emerged into a cavern so vast it seemed to hold the sky itself. The walls stretched upward for what must have been a thousand feet, carved from black rock veined with rivers of molten gold that pulsed like living arteries.
Crystals the size of huts jutted from the stone—some clear as frozen water, others dark as midnight, and still others that shimmered with colors she had no names for.
But it wasn't the walls that stole her voice.
It was the lake.
In the center of this impossible space lay a body of water unlike anything she had ever imagined. The surface shimmered with liquid gold—not just reflected light, but actual gold coins floating across the top like fallen leaves on a pond.
