Her lips part, then press together again. Wariness flickers.
“You already took something from me,” she says hoarsely. “What else could you possibly want?”
I bow my head, absorbing her pain.
“To give you my truth.”
She cautiously nods. “Show me.”
I raise my hands slowly, palms spread, offering rather than demanding. “May I?”
She hesitates. Then, with visible effort, she lifts her hands and places them in mine.
The moment our skin touches, everything shifts.
Her pulse stutters below my thumbs, and her warmth floods my senses. The bond hums, unmistakable, like a harp string brushed by tentative fingers.
I close my eyes and open myself in a way I never have before.
The world tips, and the cave dissolves into light.
Aura gasps as the vision takes her. She stands within my memories.
I show her cities sparkling beneath foreign suns. Tall spires and never-ending walls. Mountain strongholds carved directly into stone. The slow march of centuries unfolding in moments. I show her wars fought, alliances created,civilizations emerging and collapsing like sand beneath the tide.
I reveal the weight of my immortality and the loneliness of it.
Then she sees herself through my eyes, wild-haired, fierce, broken, and burning with too much magic. A woman fractured by her determination to survive, held together by will alone. She sees how beautiful I find her. How every scar is like a story etched into flesh. How her defiance makes me ache with reverence. She witnesses my shame during the moment we sealed her magic, and the sinking feeling that I have betrayed her trust. She absorbs the knowledge that I would do it again if it meant keeping her alive.
And under it all, I show her my loneliness and longing for her: the desperate ache for a mate that has stretched over ages, the hollow place inside my heart where a mate's warmth and love should have been, and the despair of believing I would never know what it meant to belong to another.
Until her.
My hands shake as I open myself to her.
When I finally pull back, my breath is uneven and my vision swims.
Aura stares at me as though the world has cracked open. Tears streak down her cheeks, unchecked.
“Oh,” she whispers.
Before I can speak, she surges forward, clutching my shoulders with small, desperate hands. Her mouth crashes against mine, her soft lips stealing my breath. The kiss is passionate and full of an aching need that parallels my own, so raw it nearly breaks me open. I kiss her back without thought or restraint, pouring everything I am into that singlemoment.
Her lips are so warm, and the press of her body is perfection I have never known.
My dragon surges, roaring in triumph, claws raking against the inside of my ribs while instinct screams to claim, to protect, tonever let go.
But I have to pull back because this isn’t only about me.
I draw away, panting like I ran ten miles, my forehead pressed to hers. Parts of me have shifted: my eyes, my wings, my horns, and the scales that cover my body like spiraling blood tattoos. Fire rises to the surface of my skin, but I’m not ashamed. Aura knows what I am, inside and out. She knows, and she wants me.
“I want you, Aura,” I say hoarsely. “I want to claim you, but I won’t take what isn’t freely give.”
Her eyes search mine, shimmering. She shows no fear of the beast revealed to her.
“I felt you,” she whispers. “Your loneliness. Your fear. Yoursoul.”
Hope surges inside me. “I’ve waited centuries for you. And I would wait centuries more if it meant you chose me willingly.”
