I watched Corvin instead, watched him look at her, watched his hands open at his sides, and watched the thing between them, the weight of it, the obvious years of it. There was love in the way he looked at her, like she was the center of the world he’d incorporated into himself without meaning to.
I hated that too. With everything in me.
I am in charge,I reminded myself.I ordered this. Every action in this room was happening because I’d willed it to happen. Because I am the king.
I kept saying so to the thing in my chest until it almost sounded true.
But now I wasn’t sure what I’d done. Regardless, she moved toward Corvin with the kind of calm that I recognized as courage, as though she was deciding to move through any fear she might have had. Her hand found his arm, and her fingers curled around his forearm just above the wrist. She rose up on her toes and put her mouth near his ear, and I heard the words despite myself.
“It’s just us,” she said. “Just like it was in the tavern.” She paused for a breath. “It’s just you and me.”
Corvin’s eyes closed for a moment, then his head came down slowly, like he had every right in the world, and he took her mouth.
The dragon inside me went very, very still.
For a single breath, there was nothing but silence in my chest. No roar. No fire. Just the kind of stillness that comes before a storm breaks, before lightning splits the sky, before everything that was held in check comes loose all at once.
I watched his mouth close over hers, watched the way his hand slid up to cup the back of her neck, his fingers threading through that silver-white hair like he’d done it a thousand times before. And I watched the way she yielded to him, her mouth parting, her body going soft against his in a way that spoke of trust and intimacy. Of a history I hadn’t known existed until I’d first seen them together.
The dragon’s reaction was something almost overpowering. The force of it came up through the soles of my feet, through my spine, and cracked into the back of my skull like I’d just been hit in the head with an axe. I put my shoulder against the stone wall and held my ground. And the cold of the wall was the only real thing for a moment; everything else became noise, heat, and the relentless hammering pressure of a hunger I hadn’t asked to carry.
OURS,it screamed.OURS. OURS. OURS.
Every repetition was louder than the last. I pressed my shoulder harder into the wall and breathed through my nose as I forced myself to watch them, forced the dragon to watch them through my eyes.
She kissed him back, eagerly and with both hands fisted in the front of his tunic, her body arching up toward him the way a flame leans toward a draft. And he was taking everything she offered. His arm had wrapped around the small of her back as he pulled her flush against him. One of his hands was in her hair, tilting her head back, and the kiss had gone deep and unhurried in the way that intimacy does when it’s been building for longer than either party will admit.
Her hands moved. I watched her fingers find the ties of his tunic and work them loose. She pulled at the fabric as he reached back and grabbed a fistful of it, pulling it over his head himself.
He was broad across the shoulders, but that was no surprise. Corvin had always been built like someone who had earned his body rather than been given it. Old scars mapped his torso in silver lines: a record of every battlefield I knew by name because I’d been there too, bleeding alongside him.
She pressed herself against him, those round and beautiful tits now thrust up against the wiry hair of his chest. At the feel of her, the sound Corvin made came from somewhere below speech. It was a low, broken thing that barely made it past his teeth, and the moment it reached me, something inside my chest answered it with a rage so complete that my vision went narrow and red.
END HIM,the dragon screamed, but the words were no longer urgent. They were inevitable. It was the voice of a thing that had stopped asking and started expecting.THOSE SOUNDS ARE OURS ALONE! HER BODY AGAINST HIS IS OURS. HER BARE SKIN IS OURS. TAKE HER BACK.
The wall was the only thing keeping me upright. I pushed off it.
Now panting, I crossed the cell in four steps, took her by the shoulder, and pulled her away from him. I had to. Because I had to touch her. And not gently. I had to touch her with the intention and the force of a man reclaiming something he believed to be his. She didn’t fight me. That was the thing that caught me sideways, the thing I hadn’t expected. She simply allowed me to turn her, coming away from him without resistance, and ended up with her back against my chest.
The contact hit me like stepping off a ledge, and the dragon rose toward her with a sound in my chest that I contained only through enormous effort.
Corvin’s expression was several things simultaneously, but what stood out most was the fury as he watched my hands with a kind of cold attention that I recognized as threat assessment.
I reached down, below the hem of her braies.
There was no warning, no ceremony. I shoved my hand between her thighs and slammed two fingers inside her without preamble. She gasped against me, but it wasn’t a gasp of pain. And it was followed by a groan. The sound came out against my shoulder, muffled but real, the groan of a body responding before the mind had caught up, and I felt her knees buckle fractionally before I caught her, holding her upright.
The dragon stopped shouting. And in that silence, I felt the animal satisfaction of the thing inside me, vast, wordless, and terrible. I hated it because it wasn’t only the dragon’s reaction, but it was mine. That was the part I refused to examine closely.
She was wet; fuck, she was dripping wet. And she was so tight. I pressed deeper, feeling the way her body clenched against the intrusion of my fingers. Her breath came apart in short increments.
I looked at Corvin over the top of her head, and he looked back at me with eyes that had gone flat, still, and dangerous. There was something in that gaze I recognized, a reflection of what I’d become, perhaps. A recognition of the line I was crossing.Had already crossed.
But it was the dragon’s reaction that pulled me away from her. The creature’s satisfaction felt like a low, rolling purr of pleasure that moved through my chest. It was approving, savoring the feel of her wrapped around my fingers. It wanted more. It wanted me to fuck her, and I wanted to fuck her.
That realization leveled me with a hatred so visceral I tasted copper. I hadn’t come here to appease the dragon. I’d come here to teach it a fucking lesson, and that fucking lesson had backfired on me.
I thrust her away from me. The movement was violent, uncontrolled, and I watched her stumble forward with enough force that she would have hit the floor if Corvin hadn’t moved. His reflexes were instantaneous; he caught her against his chest, steadying her even as his eyes stayed locked on mine, measuring, calculating, deciding whether I’d completely lost my fucking mind or if there was still something of the man he’d once known buried beneath the monster.
