“More,” she demanded, not caring that he couldn’t hear words in this form. “Give me more.”
He gave her more.
They dove toward the ocean and pulled up at the last moment, close enough that she could have trailed her fingers through the waves. They climbed until the air grew thin and cold, then plummeted in a controlled fall that should have terrified her but only made her feel alive. They chased the lightning Cassia called, and raced the wind Aero commanded, and somewhere in the middle of it all, she stopped thinking about tsunamis and sirens and the battle looming on the horizon.
She stopped thinking about anything except this moment. This feeling. This man—this dragon—who’d chosen to share something precious with her.
Eventually, the flight began to slow. Aero angled back toward the shore, descending in long, unhurried spirals until the beach appeared below—the same dark stretch of sand where they’d started.
He landed with surprising grace, his massive body floating onto the shore. Cassia slid from his back on legs that trembled—partly from exertion, mostly from exhilaration.
The shift back to human form was as fluid as the transformation had been. One moment, dragon. The next, Aero stood before her, naked and unconcerned about it, his eyes glowing faintly with residual lightning.
“That was—” Cassia started.
She couldn’t finish. There weren’t words big enough.
“I know.” His voice was rough. “I felt it too.”
He stepped toward her, and she met him halfway.
The kiss wasn’t like their first. That had been explosive—all desperation and barely contained power, property damage waiting to happen.
This was intentional. Deep. The kiss of someone who’d stopped fighting the inevitable and started embracing it.
His mouth moved over hers with devastating thoroughness, one hand buried in her wild curls, the other pressed flat against her lower back to hold her against him. She felt the heat radiating from his bare skin, the lingering crackle of storm energy, the powerful rhythm of his heart beating against her chest.
The wind rose around them. Not violently—gently, almost playfully, stirring her hair and cooling the flush on her cheeks. Their magic hummed in harmony, a resonance she felt in her bones.
When they finally broke apart, she was breathless and laughing and more alive than she’d ever felt.
“I’ve seen empires rise and fall,” Aero murmured against her lips. “I’ve watched stars die. But I’ve never seen anything as magnificent as you.”
Cassia’s breath caught. “That might be the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“I’ve been practicing.”
“Have you?”
A hint of color touched his cheekbones—barely visible in the moonlight, but there. “Delos made me write flashcards.”
She stared at him. Then the laughter burst out of her—bright and joyful and completely uncontainable.
“Flashcards. You wroteflashcardsfor romantic declarations.”
“It was either that or keep making speeches that sounded like research presentations.” His mouth curved. “Delos was very insistent. He said no one wants to hear “your aesthetic qualities are statistically significant” during an emotional moment.”
“He’s not wrong.”
“He’s annoyingly correct about most things involving interpersonal communication.” Aero’s arms tightened around her. “I’m learning. It’s harder than anything I’ve studied in eight hundred years. Saying things without making them sound like data analysis. Not knowing how to find the words but needing to say them anyway.”
“You don’t have to be good at it.” Cassia reached up to trace the line of his jaw, feeling the rasp of stubble beneath her fingertips. “You just have to mean it.”
“I mean everything.” His voice dropped, rough and raw. “Every awkward flashcard word. Every clumsy declaration. I mean all of it, Cassia. You’re the first person I’ve wanted to say things to in longer than I can remember. The first person who made me want to try.”
She kissed him again—softer this time, a promise rather than a question.
When she pulled back, lightning cracked across the sky overhead. Neither of them flinched.
