“You’ll be summoned when needed,” he said, his voice rough with something that almost sounded like an apology.
When the door shut, Serenya sat on the edge of the bed and finally let her shoulders sag. The binding sigil pulsed in a slow, steady rhythm, each throb a reminder of the dragon whose curse she’d just touched. If she concentrated, she could almost sense the shape of him at the edge of her awareness.
She lay back without undressing, staring at the ceiling as exhaustion dragged at her bones. Shock, anger, a treacherous flicker of empathy—her emotions spun too fast to untangle.
At some point, the pulsing at her wrist blurred into her heartbeat, and the city’s distant rumble became a lullaby made of stone and fire.
FOUR
VAELRIK
The door closed behind Serenya with a soft click that lingered in the air. His quarters felt wrong without her. Too quiet. Too aware of absence. He exhaled once, sharp and uneven. The space around him seemed to shrink with every passing breath. The black basalt walls loomed like they meant to cage him, the air still holding the faint, electric residue of her lumen magic. Where her palm had pressed to his chest, the memory still thrummed: structured light sinking into the roaring maw of his curse and... calming it.
Not silencing. Not healing. But containing it with a precision he hadn’t felt in a century.
And beneath that quiet, something older stirred. Instinct. Recognition.
The mate bond.
The words burned through him like a secret he’d been keeping from himself. He’d crushed that instinct ruthlessly the moment it sparked in the Council chamber—he had decades of practice denying himself the luxuries of feeling, of wanting, of imagining anything beyond violence and service. But the stabilization ritual had made resistance nearly impossible.
Her hand on his bare skin had been intimate in a way she couldn’t comprehend, her magic threading into him like a key slipping into a lock that had been rusted shut for centuries. The connection had been immediate and absolute—her light finding every crack in his armor and settling there like it belonged.
He wanted to snarl at himself for even thinking about it. Cursed weapons didn’t get futures. They got assignments until they broke.
Vaelrik began to pace the length of the chamber—a slow, controlled stalk that did nothing to quiet the storm inside him. The shadowfire curled under his ribs, testing the boundaries of its cage with restless hunger. But where it usually clawed for release, tonight it had grown... still.
Stillness was almost worse. It felt like the pause before lightning struck.
He pressed a hand to his sternum, his fingers splaying over the place where her palm had rested. The quiet there didn’t feel natural. It felt borrowed. It felt like a fragile peace handed to him by a woman who shouldn’t have been able to stand in a room with him without flinching—and yet she had.
She’d glared. She’d insulted him. Called him the Council’s lapdog. He respected that more than he should.
His pacing grew sharper, boots striking stone with military precision. The binding sigil on his wrist pulsed faintly, tugging like a heartbeat that wasn’t his own. Serenya’s presence flickered there, distant and unwilling, but unmistakably connected to his soul.
Dragons were built on instinct—hunt, protect, claim, destroy—and his instincts were now shifting around her like metal bending under heat.
He could still feel her magic against his chest, the way it had probed into his curse with clinical precision and found something worth saving. He could still smell the faint scent ofparchment and lightning that clung to her clothes. He could still see the stubborn lift of her chin when she’d called him a weapon she didn’t want to be tied to.
A witch. His mate.
No. He refused that word. Refused what it meant. Refused what it demanded of him.
The curse seethed in response to his denial, coiling tighter around his ribs like a serpent testing its grip. Itwantedher light again. It wanted the structure of her sigils. It wanted the steadiness she had brought into his chaos. And that terrified him more than anything the Council could devise.
If the curse ever surged while she was touching him... If it ever lashed outward instead of inward... If he ever slipped—just once—she would be the first thing it consumed.
“Damn it,” he murmured into the empty room, his voice low and jagged.
He dragged both hands through his hair, the dark strands falling forward to shadow his face. The familiar gesture did nothing to ease the tension coiled in his shoulders or the way his pulse hammered against the new sigil on his wrist.
The memory of her face when the ritual concluded struck him deeper than it should. Her green eyes had been wide with something that wasn’t quite fear—more like recognition of a trap closing around her. The sight had awakened something protective in him that he’d thought the curse had burned out long ago.
He’d ordered Kyr to take her somewhere quiet, somewhere safe, because watching her process what had been done to them both felt like witnessing something too raw.
Vaelrik pressed a hand flat against the basalt wall, its volcanic heat grounding him as he forced a long breath through his tight lungs. The stone radiated warmth that reminded himof her palm against his chest—steady, unyielding, alive with purpose.
I will not let this bond destroy her.
