My breath stutters. I don’t dare move. I strain to hear it too—the scrape, the slither, the proof that we’re not alone—but the sound doesn’t come again. Only the wind’s muffled hiss, sand whispering through ribs and cracks, filling the silence until it presses against my ears.
The temptation to lean in anyway—to steal the kiss, to cling to the heat before it fades—rises sharp in my chest. But his stillness roots me. His eyes are fixed on the shadows below, and I know better than to break the moment with my needs.
Slowly, he picks up his lochaber. The blade glints faintly, angled toward the field. His broad shoulders block me from the open ledge, a living barrier between me and whatever waits.
The weight of his hand lingers on my jaw a moment longer—steady, grounding. Not tender, not soft, but certain. Then it falls away.
The air it leaves behind feels raw and cold against my skin. There is a tingle where his touch had been, and my lips ache with the kiss we didn’t take.
The scrape doesn’t return. The suns are setting, dusk creeping in, but the promise in that half-second hangs between us—hotter than fire, sharper than fear.
I can’t stop trembling, though it isn’t from cold. My skin hums where his hand had been, my body aching for something I don’t dare name, but his gaze is locked on the graveyard below,lochaber steady in his hands, wings drawn half-wide as if ready to launch us both from the ledge. Every line of him is honed to a blade’s edge. I drag in a breath, sharp and unsteady.
“It’s gone,” I whisper, though I don’t believe it. My voice is too thin, too desperate, the words more for me than him.
He doesn’t answer. His tail lashes once, sending grit scattering down the rocks. That small, restless motion tells me more than words, affirming he doesn’t believe it’s gone.
My eyes keep slipping back to him—to the broad sweep of his shoulders, the scars carved deep across his face and chest, the raw power of him coiled and silent at my side. My chest tightens, not with fear this time but with want. Want tangled with awe.
I wrap my arms tight around myself, trying to smother the trembling in my limbs. My bandaged arm throbs, but not as sharp as this ache—this restless desire to reach for him again. To press my mouth to the place where scars meet jaw and find out if he tastes like smoke and steel.
Instead, I shift against the stone, pretending to adjust my clothing, pretending not to watch him.
The moonlight casts shadows that climb the canyon walls, swallowing the ribs and turning the graveyard into a field of jagged silhouettes. Every hollow looks deeper. Every creak of bone sounds like breath.
“Maybe it was nothing,” I try again, softer this time.
The words sound foolish the moment they leave me. He doesn’t even flick his gaze my way. Of course it wasn’t nothing. Of course it waits. I fall quiet, matching his silence. I press close to him, our shoulders brushing when the wind shifts. The scrape neverreturns, but the promise of it lingers, the same way the almost-kiss lingers. Both waiting. Both inevitable.
As the moon drops, the last of the light drains from the canyon, and with it goes the illusion of safety. The ribs below vanish into shadow, leaving only the faint outline of bone against bone.
The wind claws higher. Sand stings my cheeks and skitters in shallow drifts across the ledge. I pull my blanket tighter, but it’s not enough—the grit works into my teeth, into the burn of my eyes, into the bandage that throbs at my arm. He shifts—not away, closer.
He braces his body against mine, angling his shoulder to shield me from the gusts. His wings unfold wide enough to break the worst of the sand, curving around me like a barrier of living armor. His scent—stone dust and smoke and something darker, sharper—wraps around me with the same certainty.
My breath catches. He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t speak, but every line of him says what he does not.
Mine.
My throat tightens, too dry, too full of things I can’t speak either. I pretend to fix my clothing, but really I press closer, leaning into the cool, ridged plane of his side. My body finds the fit of him, and once there, I can’t bring myself to shift away.
The silence stretches. No scrape from below, no monster rising. Only the gusting winds and the slow rhythm of his breathing.
For the first time in days, my heart begins to ease its frantic pounding. Not from safety—there’s none of that here—but from something as good. Him.
And in this moment, I realize how blind I’ve been. I’ve spent so long clawing for space, fighting to prove I’m more than the “child” they shoved aside, that I never looked at the others. Joran’s curses, Harlan’s prayers, the younger Zmaj’s restless fire—names I barely held onto, faces I skimmed past.
But him? Every detail burns into me. Every scar, every flick of his tail, every line of his silence. And for the first time, it doesn’t feel like a trap. It feels like belonging.
I curl tighter beneath the arc of his wing, cheeks hot though the air is cool, and let myself breathe him in.
The winds ease for a breath, a lull between gusts. For a moment, I can almost pretend we’re alone. No bones, no storm, no hunger gnawing—just the cool of his body pressing against mine, the sweep of his wing breaking the worst of the sand, the rhythm of his breathing steady as a drum.
My eyes grow heavy. The scrape doesn’t come again. Maybe it really was nothing. Maybe?—
A sound carries up from below.
Not loud. Not sharp. But enough. A shift, a hollow creak, like something vast moving beneath the bones. My breath stills in my chest.
