Every step jars her wound. Every movement costs her pain. But her hand stays fisted in my shirt, holding on, refusing to let go even when the going gets difficult.
Good. She’ll need that determination for what comes next.
The shelter revealsitself through a gap in the ruined architecture—a natural cave enlarged by ancient magic, ice-veined but passable. Inside, the divine pressure that’s been constant since we entered the gate ruins fades to a whisper.
I set her down on the smoothest section of stone I can find. She’s still bleeding—the wound in her stomach reopening with movement, crimson spreading across her ruined clothes. But her eyes are bright, her breath steady, her body functioning in ways it couldn’t moments ago.
The partial bond is keeping her alive. The completed bond will make that permanent.
“This is going to hurt.” I strip off what remains of my shirt—shredded by combat, stained with blood and divine ichor. “The claiming mark isn’t gentle.”
She looks up at me. Steady. Certain. “Neither am I.”
My hands find the hem of her shirt. Pause.
“Zephyra.”
“If you ask me if I’m sure, I will stab you myself.”
The laugh that escapes me is rough, surprised out of me. Even now—dying minutes ago, bleeding on cave stone, about to be claimed by a dragon—she meets me with sharp edges instead of softness.
It’s why the obsession became devotion. She doesn’t let me protect her without fighting beside me.
I pull her shirt over her head.
TWENTY-TWO
TYR
Her skin is pale beneath the bloodstains. Scars mark her torso—old ones, from training and combat and the costs of her bloodline. The wound in her stomach is ugly, still bleeding sluggishly, but no longer fatal.
I don’t waste time looking. Don’t have time to appreciate what I’m claiming.
I grip her waist. Pull her toward me. Her legs wrap around my hips with a strength that surprises me—the partial bond is flooding her with borrowed power, keeping her body functional when it should have failed hours ago.
“The mark,” I manage, my voice barely human anymore. “Shoulder. I need?—”
“I know.” She tilts her head, baring her neck and shoulder in a gesture that’s both surrender and demand. “Do it.”
The dragon surges forward.
I bite.
Not a graze, not a symbolic gesture. My teeth sink into the muscle where her neck meets her shoulder, deep enough to scar, deep enough to mark permanently. Blood floods my mouth—her blood, hot and copper-bright, carrying the taste of her magic, her existence, her life.
Power explodes outward.
The mating bond completes itself in a rush of sensation that defies description. Her lifespan locks to mine—I feel it happen, feel centuries open where moments remained. Her magic tangles with my power, the two intertwining in ways that shouldn’t be possible but are. We become bound at a level deeper than physical, more permanent than any oath or promise.
She cries out. Not in pain—or not only in pain. Her nails rake down my back, drawing blood, claiming marks of her own. Her body arches against mine, demanding more than the bite, more than the bond, more than the magical claiming that’s rewriting both of us.
The bond wants consummation. Bodies tangled, power shared, the claiming made complete through flesh as well as magic.
I give it what it wants.
There’snothing gentle about what follows.
We crash into each other like violence, like desperation, like two people who almost lost each other and are determined to prove that loss impossible. Her wound protests—she gasps when I jostle it—but she doesn’t stop. Doesn’t slow. Her hands tear at my remaining clothes with a ferocity that matches my own.
