I reached out, lacing my scarred fingers through his. “She wanted you to think you were the villain.”
“She needed me to believe that my love was weaponized,” he said, his voice tight. “She convinced me that connection equaled destruction. That if I let anyone close, especially you, I would hurt them.” He looked at me then, his eyes searing.
“Well,” I said, squeezing his hand until my frost-scarred knuckles turned white. “Reviewers are calling her narrative structure derivative and her character development lacking.”
A startled laugh broke from him. “Uninspired, truly.”
“And the dragon?” I asked, looking at the stillness of his chest where the silver-black mass used to writhe. “The one I saw in the chamber. The silver one. Is that... plumbing too?”
“No.” He shifted, a faint, proprietary heat rising in his skin. “That’s me. The parasite... it needed a power source. It latched onto my natural magical core, my inner beast, if you want to be dramatic about it, and corrupted it. It mimicked the shape, wore my magic like an ill-fitting suit.”
“So the horns? The scales?”
“Standard equipment, I’m afraid. Stormgarde legacy.” He smirked, the expression wicked and entirely too attractive. “The Shadow Dragon was a distortion. A muted, strangled version of the real thing. The parasite fed on the magic; therealdragon produces it.”
“So,” I said, running a bold finger down the front of his shirt, tracing the hard line of muscle beneath. “If the shadow was the governor valve...”
“Then the real dragon is the engine,” he said, his voice dropping an octave, slipping into a velvety, dangerous tone. “And the engine runs very, very hot.”
“Is that a warning, Lord Stormgarde?”
He leaned in, his teeth grazing the sensitive cord of my neck, making me shiver. “It’s an operational manual, Lysa. I suggest you study it thoroughly.”
“You think my interest began in the study?” Fenrik murmured against the sensitive skin below my ear. His hand hadslid under the hem of my nightgown, his palm hot and rough against my legs. “You think I only wanted you when the walls started shaking?”
I gasped, arching into his touch despite the chill air. “Well, you certainly weren’t sending flowers.”
“I was incapacitated by envy,” he growled, biting lightly at the junction of my neck and shoulder. “Do you remember the first night you laid hands on my familiar? When you Quietened him?”
“He almost bit me,” I managed.
“I felt it,” Fenrik said, pulling back to look me in the eye, his pupils blown wide. “The bond between us, between me and Kirion, it’s a conduit. When you poured that peace into him, it flooded me, too. For the first time in so long, the noise stopped.” His expression darkened, looking almost petulant. “And I was jealous of my lizard.”
I blinked, a laugh bubbling up. “You were jealous of your familiar?”
“He was curled up in your arms, blissfully intoxicated by your magic, while I was upstairs trying not to claw the wallpaper off the walls.” He slid his hand higher, cupping me firmly through the fabric, making my breath hitch. “I wanted to be the one you were handling with such... competence.”
“I thought you were watching me like a hawk because you didn’t trust me,” I said, my hands tangling in his dark hair as I struggled to process this new reality. “You were always there. In the corridors. Listening.”
“I wasn’t suspicious, Lysa. I was addicted.” He pressed a kiss to the corner of my mouth. “I stood outside your door listening to you hum off-key while you brushed your hair because it was the only thing that made the shadow settle. I was drinking you in like a man dying of thirst, terrified that if I took a real sip, I’d drown us both.”
His other hand found my hip, squeezing possessively. “That letter you found—the rejection. That was Kelda’s desperation, not mine.”
“It looked like your handwriting,” I said, the old hurt thrumming faintly.
“Because she used my hand to write it while my mind was fogged,” he said fiercely. “But I wrote others. Dozens of them. ‘Run, Lysa.’ ‘Don’t trust the potions.’ ‘I am losing my mind, but you are the only thing keeping me tethered.’ I wrote them in the dead of night, and by morning, the pages were wiped clean.”
He kissed me then, hard and deep. “I never wanted you to leave,” he breathed against my lips. “I wanted to lock every door in this manor and keep you here until the end of time. Which, ironically, the house seemed happy to facilitate.”
“The house is a matchmaker,” I said breathlessly. “A very pushy matchmaker.”
“Remind me to thank it later,” he smirked, shifting me so I was straddling his lap, the cold air forgotten.
I looked down at my hands, my fingers tangled with his. His were large, elegant, warm, the hands of a lord that grew up playing the piano. Mine were webbed with silver frost-patterns,the scars from the dragonheart extract shimmering in the pale winter light. They looked alien.
“The illusions,” I said, the words catching in my throat. “In the chamber. She didn’t just show me false memories, Fenrik. She showed me what I was terrified was the truth.”
“It wasn’t truth,” he said firmly, though his hold on me tightened.
