Her lips warm beneath my finger. That hasneverhappened before.
My breath fractures.
“I love you,” I say, and the words scrape out of me like a wound. This is a confession made at the edge of annihilation. “I love you, and I don’t care if you forgive me. I don’t care if you hate me. I don’t care if you raise a blade against my throat.”
The magic smoke tightens around us, coiling, demanding completion.
My wings shudder violently now, spreading despite my effort, their strength trembling under the force of fate correcting itself. Stone groans beneath my clawed feet as I lean over her, refusing to give the magic distance.
“I couldn’t make the world safe fast enough,” I continue hoarsely. “I killed everything that tried to reach you. I burned every future that didn’t have me in it. And still it wasn’t enough.”
My blood smears across her mouth as I push my bloody finger onto her tongue, then I lean down and place a kiss on her soft lips. Gently. Lovingly.
The final seal breaks. The cursescreams.
The sound is not heard so much as felt through bone, through wing, through the ancient bond that has been tightening around my heart for a hundred years. The castle convulses. Time itself seems to recoil, furious at being denied any longer.
Something deep and irrevocable snaps.
My tail snaps at the ground. My wings flare wide, shaking violently as the magic collapses inward, tearing itself apart in a last, desperate correction. I brace myself over her, claws digging into stone, refusing to be driven back.
I do not pull away. I stay. I watch. Because whatever wakes will be hers. Whatever she does next will decide whether I am monster, mate, or corpse.
And I will accept any of those outcomes, so long as she isawaketo choose them.
The truth settles into me as the last of the spell dies screaming:
No spell meant to preserve may outlast fate.
Awakening is not mercy.
It is reckoning.
CHAPTER 9
THE PRINCESS
I awaken on a gasp.
My lungs expand, actually expand, for the first time in a century, and the sensation is so overwhelming I nearly choke on it. Air.Real air. Not the phantom breath of dreams, but oxygen flooding my system, making my head spin and my vision blur. It smells lovely. Like stone and flowers.
I open my eyes slowly.
The world is too bright. Too sharp. Tooreal. I blink rapidly, trying to focus, and my tongue darts out to wet my lips. There's something on them. Something sweet and sticky and metallic.Blood?I taste it again, and a strange pull thrums through my body. A need to taste more, to drink it down, to—
What the fuck?
My vision finally clears, and I see him.
A monster.
A large dragon-man monster with iridescent scales that shimmer beautifully in the bright light, a thick tail coiled on the stone floor, and black eyes. They're completely black, no whites at all, staring down at me with an intensity that makes my breath catch.
He almost looks human. Almost. But his nose is too wide, his nostrils flared like a beast's. His build is more muscular than any human could ever achieve, all corded strength and raw power barely contained beneath scaled skin. He's tall. So tall that the tip of my head might only barely reach his chest. And he has wings. He has actual wings folded against his back, the membranes thin enough to see veins pulsing beneath.
He's beautiful.
He wears pants. Just pants, with a belt, as if that makes him civilized. As if that makes him anything other than what he is.
