So why does it feel like I'm suffocating?
The bathing chamber is all marble and gold, a massive tub in the center that could fit six people. There are mirrors everywhere, reflecting my face back at me from a dozen angles. I look the same as I did a hundred years ago. Young. Unmarked. Perfect, by their standards.
I look like a stranger.
My hands are shaking. I press them against the cool marble of the sink and try to breathe, but all I can think about is him. My dragon. The way I could feel that his wings would spread wide when he was inside me, creating a world that contained only us. The way his hands, those massive hands tipped with obsidian claws, could hold me with such devastating gentleness. The way his mouth knew every secret place on my body, his tongue doing things that made me scream with pleasure in my mind.
His kindness. God, hiskindness. The way he'd read me thousands of books from raided libraries and his own library. Books about romance and adventure and spells and fighting techniques and anything in between. The way he'd sit and talk to me for hours about nothing and everything as he played with my hair, the way he'd curl his massive body around mine at night, his tail wrapping around my thigh, and his heavy wing draping over our bodies in a protective blanket.
The way his cock would fill me so completely that I could feel my body reshaping itself to accommodate him, that exquisite stretch and burn that somehow always transformed into pleasure so intense I'd forget my own name.
I press my hand to my lower belly, remembering. Missing it. Missing the way my insides would shift and adjust, the way I could feel him so deep it was like he was touching my soul. Benedict’s pathetic little dick barely registered. I felt nothing. Nothing except absence.
And there's something else. Something I've been trying to ignore since the prince dragged me away from the castle and haunted forest.
There's a sickness in my core. A wrongness. It started as a faint nausea, easy to dismiss as stress or fear. But it's been getting worse. Every hour away from him, it intensifies. A hollow ache that's spreading through my chest, my limbs, my bones. Like something vital has been severed, and I'm slowly bleeding out from a wound no one else can see.
The bond. It has to be the bond.
Dragons mate for life. I knew that. He told me that. He told me that if I accepted him, truly accepted him, we would be bound together in ways that transcended flesh. Soul-deep. Permanent. He had told me the story of how his parents met. How they had soul-bonded early. That when his mother was killed centuries later his father fell into a depression and grew crazy being separated from his mate.
I thought it was a metaphor. Poetry. The kind of thing males say when they want to sound romantic.
But this feeling in my core, this wrongness that grows with every passing hour… this is real. This is physical. This is my body recognizing that it's been separated from its mate and slowly shutting down in protest.
Will it fade? Can I survive this? Or will I waste away in this golden cage, married to a prince who thinks I should be grateful, dying slowly from the absence of the only being who ever truly saw me?
I don't know. And that terrifies me more than anything.
I splash cold water on my face and force myself to breathe. I can't fall apart. Not yet. I have to be smart. I have to survive long enough to find him, to kill him... maybe. I'm not sure what I will do when I find my dragon. But staying in this castle with this prince is not an option I choose.
I do not belong here. I do not want to be here.
When I finally return to the bedchamber, Prince Benedict is asleep, sprawled across the bed like a child, snoring softly. Thank God. I can't endure any more of his attention tonight.
The bed is too soft, the pillows too numerous, the blankets too light. Everything about this place is too much and not enough simultaneously. I lie on my side, as far from the prince as possible, and close my eyes.
Sleep comes slowly, reluctantly. But when it finally takes me, I dream.
I dream of an impossibly tall figure with midnight-blue scales that shimmer like starlight. I dream of wings that spread wide enough to block out the sky, then fold around me in a cocoon of safety. I dream of a tail wrapping around my leg, anchoring me, claiming me. I dream of obsidian eyes that see straight through to my soul and love what they find there.
I dream of home.
And when I wake, I will begin planning how to get back to it.
CHAPTER 10
THE PRINCESS
I have been living with Prince Benedict in his castle for three months. Three very long months. Our wedding happened a week after he kidnapped me. It was an embarrassing spectacle. Dignitaries and royalty from all over came to witness the wedding of the Sleeping Beauty to the knight in shining armor who gallantly saved her from the treacherous throws of the Deadly Dragon.
They toasted to my rescue. Myrescue. As if I'd been languishing in misery rather than living with a dragon that actually saw me. As if being dragged back to this gilded prison and paraded before strangers was somehow my salvation.
Our wedding night was as awful as our first time having sex.
Prince Benedict couldn't find a pleasurable spot on my body even if I drew him a detailed and colored map. Even if I guided his clammy, too soft hands directly there. He doesn't try. He doesn't ask. My pleasure is not even an afterthought. It simply doesn't exist in his conception of what sex is supposed to be. I am a vessel. A womb with a decorative exterior. Something to be filled and forgotten.
My dragon's words from that first decade with him echo in my ears.
