That one made me bristle. "I survived three days running from cult hunters. I think I can—"
"You carved intelligence into your own spine with an obsidian blade," he interrupted. His voice carried thunder underneath. "You gave your last money to a starving child when you were starving yourself. You crashed into me in a public plaza knowing there were assassins on your trail." His eyes flashed silver. "Your self-preservation instincts are oriented toward saving others at your own expense. Which means I can't trust you to prioritize your own safety. So I'm taking that choice away until we fix it."
He wasn't trying to control me. He was trying to keep me alive long enough to heal.
"Understood?" he repeated.
The bond mark pulsed. I felt it echo in his temple. Felt the weight of his protective authority pressing against my consciousness like gravity—natural, inevitable, impossible to fight.
"Yes," I whispered. "Understood."
"Good girl."
The praise hit me through the bond like lightning. Warm and electric and completely unexpected. My face flushed. Heat flooded my chest that had nothing to do with embarrassment and everything to do with how desperately I wanted to hear those words again.
Zephyron's expression shifted. Something knowing. Understanding. He'd felt my reaction through the bond.
"We'll establish more structure as needed," he said, his voice returning to that gentle authority. "But for now, those three rules are non-negotiable. Follow them, and we'll get through this together."
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
"Now." He stood, offering his hand. "You're exhausted. Your body has been running on adrenaline and desperation for three days. It's time to rest."
Chapter 3
Thebedswallowedmewhole. Not the thin temple cot with its scratchy ritual cloth, not the forest floor where I'd stolen hours of terrified half-sleep—this was actual softness. The kind that let you sink and kept sinking, quilts piled so thick I couldn't feel where one ended and another began. My body gave up the second my head hit the pillow. Just surrendered.
I didn't dream. Didn't surface. Just fell into darkness so complete it felt like dying except peaceful.
When I woke—hours later? a day? days?—soft morning light filtered through the glass walls. My back didn't scream when I moved. Didn't even ache. I reached behind myself carefully, fingers finding the carved wounds through my thin shirt.
Closed. Not healed—I could feel the raised edges where infection had been eating at me—but sealed. Scabbed over. Days of healing compressed into one period of sleep.
The door whispered open. Zephyron entered carrying a tray, his storm-gray hair slightly mussed like he'd been running his hands through it. Through the bond, I felt his relief spike when he saw me awake.
"Good morning." He set the tray on the bedside table. Bread. Cheese. Tea steaming in a ceramic cup. "How do you feel?"
"Different." My voice came out rough from disuse. "My back—"
"The bond accelerates healing. Dragon mates gain enhanced regeneration, among other gifts." He sat on the edge of the bed, close enough that I could feel the electric hum of his presence. "You'll notice more changes over the next few days. Some pleasant. Some disorienting."
He wasn't kidding.
The first day passed in a haze of sleep and brief waking periods where Zephyron coaxed food into me. My body demanded rest with an insistence I couldn't fight. Between sleeping, he helped me to the bathroom—mortifying, having him support my weight while I was too weak to walk alone, but his hands stayed clinical and his expression never showed anything but patience.
I noticed the first real change when I woke on the second day. The light through the glass walls was too bright. Not painfully so, just more. I could see individual dust motes dancing in the sunbeam across my bed, could track their spiraling paths with perfect clarity. When I focused on the bookshelf across the room, I could read the spines from here. The letters were crisp and sharp despite the distance.
I sat up carefully. My back pulled but didn't hurt. I lifted my shirt, craning to see over my shoulder in the mirror mounted on the wall.
The carved intelligence—the spell fragments I'd etched into my own spine with an obsidian blade—was nearly healed. What should have taken weeks, maybe months, had closed in two days. The scars were still there, raised lines following my vertebrae, but pink and new rather than infected and weeping.
I pressed my fingers against the wall beside the bed. Felt something beneath the surface. A hum. A vibration. Electricityflowing through conduits hidden in the steel framework, powering the lights and locks and all the modern innovations that made this citadel function.
I could feel it. The current. The pathways. Like touching someone's pulse and feeling their heartbeat.
"That's new," I whispered.
But stranger than the physical changes was the bond itself.
