"It was just there," I said. "I didn't think about it."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she set it back down in the center of the nest with the same careful deliberateness she'd used to pick it up.
"Kael," she said. "What aren't you telling me?”
I looked down at my forearms and tried to swallow, my mouth feeling a little dry.
The glow had been building since around midnight, faint at first, easy to miss in the low light of the room. But it was stronger now and warm and gold. It was unmistakable, and spreading from my chest outward, tracing the lines of the scales that lived beneath my skin in that particular way that only happened in dragon biology under one very specific circumstance.
I had read about it once, years ago, in one of my father's old texts. He had described it to me when I was sixteen in the vague, slightly embarrassed way fathers described things they hoped their sons wouldn't need explained for a long time.
I had never thought it would actually happen to me.
"Amara," I said carefully. "There's something I need to show you. I'm not entirely sure how to explain it because I've never experienced it before. But when your heat sparked last night,my dragon biology responded in a way I wasn't prepared for." I paused, watching her face. "I think I'm starting to glow."
She stared at me. "What do you mean you're glowing?"
"I mean," I said, "exactly that. And the only way to explain it properly is to show you."
I reached up and pulled my rumpled tux shirt over my head.
The sound she made was very small and very involuntary and I would have found it gratifying under literally any other circumstances. As it was I watched her eyes move across my chest and arms and then go wide as she registered what she was actually seeing.
The scales were visible now, golden and luminous beneath my skin, tracing familiar patterns across my chest and down both arms. They glowed softly in the dim room like embers that hadn't quite gone out. Warm and strange and completely outside anything I'd been able to prepare her for.
"Oh," she said softly.
Then she said nothing else for a long moment.
"Can I," she started then stopped. Her hand lifted toward my forearm and hovered there, not quite touching.
"Yes," I said.
Her fingertips made contact with my skin and I stopped breathing.
The warmth that moved through me at the touch had nothing to do with dragon biology and everything to do with the fact that it was her. That she was here, in my nest, in my childhood bedroom, her fingers tracing the lines of something that had only ever existed in old texts and my father's stories until last night.
"It's warm," she said quietly.
"Yeah."
Her fingers moved slowly along my forearm, following the pattern of the scales, and my dragon went completely silent forthe first time in six months. Not the restless hungry silence of wanting, just deep and total stillness.
"What does it mean?" she asked, her eyes still on my arm.
I exhaled slowly. "It means my dragon recognizes you. Not just as an Omega. Not just as someone I..." I stopped, gathered myself. "My father explained it to me once when I was young. He said a dragon's scales will only glow for one person. The person their biology has identified as their mate. Not a compatible match. Not someone they've chosen consciously."
I watched her face carefully before speaking again. "The specific person their dragon has recognized as theirs. It bypasses everything rational. My body just knows."
Amara sat still, still admiring my newly acquired scales.
"Your body just knows," she repeated.
"Yes."
She looked up from my forearm and met my eyes and I saw her working through it. The nest built around her without a blueprint. The cardigans pulled from a wardrobe by hands that were operating on pure instinct. The book placed in the center of everything without thought or intention.
The six months of honey-ember tarts made specifically for her before either of us had the language for why.
