“This is your game, baby. You go first,” he murmured, brushing a kiss against my temple.
I took a deep breath, and although I ached to say thenext words, the weight of them lay heavy with hope. Confession number one. “I love you.”
The silence that followed weighed on my lungs, thick enough to drown me. He froze for several long beats before crushing me closer, burying his face in my hair. A groan tore from him, low and wrecked.
“I love you, too.” The words scraped out of him. “So much. I started falling the first moment I saw you in this palace. This impossible, fire-blooded fantasy made real. I tried to fight it. But when you kissed me, it was over. Every quip. Every act of kindness. Every bit of your fury and fire. All of it. Daggers shoved straight into my heart. That must count for at least six secrets.”
His confession unleashed an ocean of delight. Grinning, sheepish, I brushed my lips over his chest, a soft and reverent show of my adoration. “Ready for my confession number two?” I asked, voice low as I curled my fingers against him. “It’s a big one.”
He tightened his hold on me, his voice rough with conviction. “I am beyond ready.”
“Good,” I whispered, lifting on my elbow to study his expression. “Because I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
His grin unfurled, all slow, toothy and unfairly adorable. “Are you asking me to marry you, Lyssa?”
“That depends on your next secret.”
His grin deepened into something infinitely tender. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
“Then ja.” My lips quirked in kind. Time for number three. “I’m asking you to marry me…but only if you burn me.”
The smile dropped. Hard. “No,” he said, a fierce growl behind theword.
“I’ll die if you don’t.” The words cut my tongue on the way out. “A little detail I skimmed over when you asked me to burn you. For that, I apologize with every fiber of my flame-stripped, now deeply vulnerable being.”
“You willnotdie,” he roared, as if sheer willpower could decide my fate.
“It’s not optional, love. If not by aging, then by enemies who live only to torment me. If not by enemies, then by the next power-hungry dragon who wants my crown.”
“I’ll be your shield,” he snarled, fists clenching.
Sweet, infuriating man. “Youcan’tfight challenges issued to me.”
“Ican.Battles issued to you are battles issued tome.As my wife, you’ll be mine, and I’ll be yours. We’ll be one.”
Oh, but his stubbornness had come out swinging. So adorable. So irresistible. So mine.
His shoulders stiffened. “That look,” he growled.
Something must have given away my thoughts. Time to bare scale and flame. “I can’t live that way, Taron. I’ve never known weakness, not once in all my centuries. But this? Thismortalfragility?”
“Fragility is not weakness, Lyssa. It’s meaning. Every breath, every action costs something, and that’s why it matters.”
A shudder tore through me. “Please don’t make me stay this way.” I lowered once more and pressed my cheek against his chest, his heartbeat hammering into me. “I allowed fear to stop me before. Don’t do the same. Please. I’m not afraid anymore. Not of you. Not of the future.”
“I can’t, baby,” he rasped. “Ican’trisk you.”
“You must. Cedric and Lorik march with an army. You’re new to your dragon. Raw and untrained. And my people—our people—are without an active queen. Theyneed me. Just likeyoudo. If I stay human, I will lose the throne, and Ashmorra will bleed for it.”
“But if you die and don’t revive…”
I hooked my leg tighter around his, anchoring us both in the words he’d once said to me. “I love you too much to die forever in your fire.”
The silence that followed was thick as tar. His fist clenched and unclenched. Breath sawed from his lungs. I could feel the dragon pacing inside him, snarling, wanting out.
I pushed, soft but sure. “They thought they destroyed us with that bond-breaking tonic. To make us part. Let’s prove them wrong. They didn’t ruin us. Theyreforgedus.”
In the fire, I would be remade. Immortal and transcendent. Maybe still a queen. Maybe something else entirely. Honestly, I didn’t know what I’d become. But I knew who I wanted to see waiting for me on the other side.
