I know avoidance. I’ve practiced it myself—the careful architecture of not-seeing, the deliberate blindness that lets you share space with someone without acknowledging their existence. Izan does it with the same precision he brings to everything else. When I enter a room, he finds a reason to study maps. When I speak, he addresses his responses to Seravax or Kaelreth or anyone else who happens to be present. When our paths cross in corridors, he nods once and keeps walking, as if I’m a servant he barely recognizes rather than the woman whose taste is still on his lips.
He hasn’t touched me since.
Hasn’t looked directly at me since.
The guards whisper. The servants exchange glances. Even Seravax, with his cold pragmatist’s mask, watches ourinteractions with calculation I can almost feel. They all saw the throne hall declaration. They all know what the Enforcer claimed in front of the entire Cinder Flight.
And now they’re watching him pretend I don’t exist.
I’m done waiting for him to stop being a coward.
The strongholdat sunset is beautiful in the way volcanoes are beautiful—dangerous, unpredictable, capable of destroying everything in its path while painting the sky in shades of orange and gold. The light filtering through volcanic glass turns the corridors into rivers of amber. Shadows deepen in corners where the fire can’t reach.
I know where he’ll be. He retreats to the observation balcony when he needs to think, when the weight of ruling becomes too heavy, when he needs to remind himself of what he’s protecting. I’ve watched him go there a dozen times over the past weeks, though I’ve never followed.
Tonight, I follow.
The guards at the corridor entrance don’t try to stop me. They exchange glances—the kind of looks that say they know exactly why the Enforcer’s witch is seeking him out, and they’re not stupid enough to interfere. I pass them without acknowledgment and climb the final stairway to the balcony.
He’s standing at the edge, silhouetted against the dying light. The city spreads below him like a tapestry of fire and shadow—Lower Pyraeth’s industrial glow, the middle tiers climbing toward cleaner air, the upper reaches where we stand above it all. The wind carries ash and smoke and the distant sounds of a city preparing for war.
He knows I’m here. His shoulders tense at my approach, a subtle shift that betrays awareness even as he refuses to turn around.
“The council is reconvening in an hour.” Flat. Professional. The voice he uses to keep the dragon at bay. “If you have intelligence updates, they can wait until?—”
“Stop.”
The command surprises us both. I didn’t plan to say it, didn’t know I had the authority to demand anything from a dragon who could burn me to ash with a thought. But my feet carry me forward anyway, across the stone platform toward the man who kissed me like I was air and he was drowning.
“Alerie—”
“No.” I stop three feet away from him. Close enough to see the tension coiled in every line of his body. Far enough that he can’t use proximity as an excuse to run. “You don’t get to kiss me like that and then pretend I don’t exist.”
His teeth grind audibly. The fading light catches the sharp planes of his face, the ash-black hair he hasn’t bothered to tie back, the eyes that burn ember-gold even in profile.
“What happened in your chambers was a mistake.”
“Was it?” I keep my tone steady. The wound there is healing—properly now, after I finally let the healer do her work—but it still pulls when I breathe too deeply. “Which part? The part where you kissed me, or the part where you walked out?”
He turns then. Faces me with an expression I can’t read—a combination of fury and hunger and what looks terrifyingly like fear, if dragons were capable of fearing anything.
“Both.” Bitten off. “I lost control. I put my hands on you while you were injured, while you were vulnerable, while you had no realistic option to refuse. That’s not—” He stops. Swallows. “That’s not who I want to be. Not with you.”
“Who I want to be.” The phrasing catches my attention. Not “who I am.” Who he wants to be.
“And what exactly are you offering?”
The sun sinks lower, turning the volcanic peaks into silhouettes against a bleeding sky. Pyraeth burns below us in shades that match his eyes.
“Permanence.” He says it like he’s testing its weight. “I’m offering permanence. Not tenderness—I don’t have that in me. Not softness or poetry or the kind of romance that humans write about. But if you choose me, I will never unchoose you. Never waver. Never leave. The world can burn, empires can fall, gods themselves can descend to challenge me—and you will still be the fixed point around which everything else orbits.”
“You’re offering to build your existence around me.”
“I’m offering the truth.” His hands flex, release, flex again—a tell I’ve learned to recognize as barely-contained violence redirected inward. “I could lie to you. Tell you I’ll try to be gentle, try to give you freedom, try to be a different man than what I am. But you deserve better than lies. You deserve to know exactly what you’re choosing.”
“A dragon who will cage me.”
“A dragon who will burn worlds to protect you.” He steps forward. One step. “A dragon who will kill anyone who threatens you, destroy anything that stands between us, rearrange reality itself to keep you safe. You’ll have everything you need—power, resources, protection. But you’ll have it because I want you to have it. Because keeping you is keeping myself.”
