My older brother looked at me with something that might have been sympathy. "Then you'd better be fast."
The string quartet shifted into something softer, more romantic, and the ballroom filled a little more. My mother moved through the crowd with the effortless grace of someone who had been doing this her entire life, working the room in a deep emerald gown, pausing to speak to guests, her laugh carrying warmth across the space.
A dragon queen if I ever saw one, I thought.
She caught my eye from across the room and gave me a look that said everything.
Be present. Be ready. Tell her.
I nodded once, and then the doors opened again.
My dragon went absolutely still in its pacing, and completely alert.
She was wearing burgundy!
The same deep, rich color I'd tucked into my breast pocket tonight without even realizing why. The dress was off-the-shoulder, soft fabric flowing over her curves in a way that made everything else in the room disappear. Her hair was up, dark and silky, with a few soft curls left loose around her face. Her warm brown skin glowed in the candlelight like she'd been made for exactly this room, this light, this moment.
She walked in beside her mother, her chin lifted, her shoulders set with the particular kind of bravery that only people who are genuinely terrified possess.
My chest cracked open.
She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Her eyes moved across the room the way they always did in the bakery when she was trying not to be noticed. Taking everything in quietly, carefully, from the edges. Lila appeared at her elbow almost immediately, saying something that made Amara's jaw tighten almost imperceptibly.
When it came to this woman, I saw everything it seemed, down to the nervous tremor in her fingers that I saw her shake away. Then the breeze shifted and her scented wafted over to me and I inhaled her deeply.
Through all the roses and perfume and candlewax, through the two hundred bodies filling this space, and through every competing sensation the room could throw at me, I scented her.
Lavender and old books.There even seemed to be something sweeter underneath that had always driven my dragon to the edge of reason. But tonight it was different.
Tonight it hit me like a fist to the sternum. My dragon didn't pace ad it didn't whisper. It stopped completely, drew itself up to its full height inside my chest, and said one thing with absolute, irreversible certainty.
Fated match.
The realization moved through me like a current. Every nerve ending lighting up at once. Six months of obsession suddenly making a different kind of sense. The way I'd known her coffee order before she'd told me. The way her scent had clung to me for hours after she left. The way my dragon had never once looked at another Omega the way it looked at her.
It wasn't justwant.
It had never been just want.
She was mine in the oldest, most fundamental way a dragon could recognize.Fated.Written into stars or some beautiful reason like that.
And she was standing across a crowded ballroom about to find out I'd been lying to her. I set my glass down on the nearest surface and started moving.
Caspian caught my arm as I passed. "Kael."
"I see her," I said.
"I know." He released me. "Go to her.”
I moved through the crowd with more purpose than grace, murmuring apologies when I had to, sidestepping clusters of guests who wanted to stop and talk. My eyes never left her.
She was looking at something across the room, her brow slightly furrowed, that small line forming between her eyebrows the way it did when she was processing something difficult. A woman I assumed was her cousin,Lila said something beside her, and Amara's shoulders pulled inward, just slightly.
I moved faster.
I was ten feet away when she turned.
