His hand tightened on her jaw, not to restrain her but to hold her in place as he learned her shape, her taste, and the way her breath mingled with his. She made a small sound against his lips and the vibration traveled through his body like lightning, waking every nerve ending.
She was smaller than he’d fully realized, even when she’d been standing in front of him with the top of her head barely reaching his shoulder. Her body was slight compared to the females of his kind who were built for battle and endurance, but she felt perfectly sized in his arms, as if she’d been crafted to fit precisely there.
His tongue brushed against her lips, seeking, and she opened for him without hesitation. The first taste of her was intoxicating—sweet and spicy and utterly perfect. He explored her mouth with deliberate care, memorizing the texture of her tongue, the shape of her teeth, the way she responded to each stroke of his tongue.
Her hands had found their way to his chest, her fingers splayed across the scales there. The contact was tentative at first, but as he continued the kiss, her touch grew bolder, exploring the contours of his body with growing confidence. When they traveled lower over his abdomen, he finally drew back, fighting for control. The sensations she was producing threatened to overwhelm him, dragging him towards something urgent and instinctive.
Her eyes opened, dark and deep and slightly dazed. Her lips were redder than before, swollen from his kiss, and the sight sent a surge of primitive satisfaction through him.
“Is this… okay?” she asked, her voice husky.
“Yes,” he assured her. “Very okay. But if we continue, I will want more.” She didn’t pull away, but he caught the flicker of doubt in her eyes, and he gently shifted her away from him. “We will talk.”
“Really? That’s what you want to do?”
No.He wanted to claim her as his mate in the most ancient of ways. He wanted to strip away the ridiculous garments she wore and taste every part of her until she cried out his name. But he also wanted her willing and certain of her choice. “Yes. Tell me more. I want to know you.”
She hesitated at first but eventually she began to talk again, and he listened. Her words washed over him like water—somehe caught and held, turning them over in his mind until their meaning clicked into place, while others slipped past too quickly to grasp.
But it didn’t matter that he missed pieces. The shape of her story was clear enough.
She had built this life deliberately. The isolation, the distance from her kind, and the endless work that filled her days—all of it was by design. She spoke of choices and freedom and independence, and her chin lifted with pride when she described her claim and the years of planning that had led her here.
But beneath all of it, threaded through every word like a vein of ore through rock, was loneliness.
She didn’t name it. Perhaps she didn’t recognize it, or perhaps she had grown so accustomed to its weight that she no longer felt it pressing. But he heard it in the pauses between her sentences and felt it in the careful distance she maintained even as she let him hold her hand.
I know this,he thought.This ache. This hollow place.
His own memories were still fragmented things—shards of ice and shadow, faces that dissolved when he tried to focus on them, duties he remembered the weight of but not the shape. He knew he had not always been alone. There had been others. But they were gone now. All gone.
The knowledge sat in his chest like a stone, cold and heavy and inescapable. He did not remember how they had been lost. He did not remember choosing the long sleep. But he remembered pieces of the before—brief flashes of warmth and connection, of voices raised in song and council, of wings brushing against wings in the endless polar dark.
And then nothing. Centuries of frozen nothing, until a small, fierce female had dragged him into her dwelling and fought to keep him alive.
“Adjar?”
He blinked, realizing he had drifted into his own thoughts. She was watching him with concern creasing her brow, her eyes searching his face.
“You disappeared,” she said. “Where did you go?”
The question was simple, but the answer was not. How could he explain the fragments? The loss that he felt but could not name? The terrible suspicion that he had been preserved while others had perished, and the guilt that accompanied it?
“Remembering,” he said finally. “Trying to.”
Her expression softened. “The others? Your people?”
“Yes.” The word came out rough. “I remember… connections. Voices. Then cold. Then nothing.” He met her eyes. “Then you.”
“I’m not sure I’m much of an improvement over nothing.”
“You are wrong,” he said forcefully, and her eyes widened. But he did not take the words back. She needed to understand that whatever she believed about her own worth, she was everything to him in this moment.
“Before you,” he said, choosing his words with care, “I was… lost. Cold.” He pressed his free hand to his chest. “Empty here. Then I wake, and there is pain, and fear, and a female who fights to save me even though I give her no reason.”
“You were dying. I wasn’t going to leave you to freeze.”
“Others would.”
