And then he began to come.
His release wasn’t a violent surge, but a deep, pulsing flood. His taste—richer and more potent now—filled my mouth and ran down my throat in a river of salty-sweetness.
As he pulsed in my mouth, I swallowed instinctively, again and again, drinking him down. Ryse’s seed was even more delicious than his precum—a hot, decadent essence that was uniquely his.
And as I swallowed, he trembled above me—his groans low and hoarse as I milked him with my mouth, making sure to get every last drop.
“Gods, little one!” he gasped, his hand fisting in my hair again. “Gods, I can’t believe you’re taking it all. Such a good girl to take me so deep and swallow everything I give you.”
I liked feeling like his Good Girl…and I liked feeling powerful, too. I had never imagined doing such a thing, not even when I fantasized about him at night and touched myself. But now that I knew how much he liked it, I was definitely going to want to do it again.
When Ryse was finally spent, I released him slowly, licking him clean and sucking the very last drop of salty sweetness from the tip of his shaft. Then I sat back, looking up at him.
His eyes were hazy with pleasure and something else—a profound, overwhelming tenderness.
“Little one,” he murmured and sank to his knees in front of me, gathering me into his arms. Though he was kneeling by the side of the bed and I was sitting on it, he was still so much taller than me that the embrace felt perfect.
He kissed me deeply, tasting himself on my tongue, and then buried his face in my neck.
“My Auri,” he murmured against my skin, his voice thick with emotion. “My brave, curious, perfect girl,”
I held him, my heart so full I thought it might burst. The shadows of the past—his guilt over Georges, my fear from the dive—were still there, but in this moment, they were quiet.
There was only this—his arms around me, the taste of him on my lips, and the unshakable feeling that in exploring him, I had found a new part of myself.
61
AURORA
We spent the next few weeks going to classes, caring for our dragons, and—in Ryse’s case—doing more research.
“Here—look what I found,” he said to me one evening, after we’d both gotten into our sleep clothes—I in my nightshirt and him in his sleep trousers. “It was hidden behind some of the older books at the back of the library.”
He was sitting at his desk, and he handed me an ancient looking manuscript, bound in soft leather.
I took it carefully, wondering if I would even be able to read it. But though the language and phrasing were antiquated, it was also most definitely in the Common Tongue. After a moment of puzzling it out, I realized what it was.
“This is someone’s journal!” I exclaimed, flipping carefully through the yellowed pages. The dates were from more than a century ago and the handwriting was neat and rounded.
“Not just someone—I believe that was written by a female rider—a woman who rode a Golden Queen.” Ryse’s eyes danced with excitement. “Read what she says near the end.”
I wanted to start at the very beginning, but Elleena—for that was her name—seemed to have been a very prolific writer. There were pages and pages about her dragon—a Golden Queen named F’reya—including her weights and measurements and how much she ate every day.
All of that would be extremely useful—it would give me a point of reference to refer to as L’eesha grew. But if Ryse told me to look at the back of the journal, I knew he must have a reason.
“We are leaving,” I read aloud, as I looked at the very last page. “Head Master Jorgen says that the Madling threat is no more and so there is no more use for the Golden Queens.”
“What? They kicked them out after she and her dragon helped defeat the Madlings?” I exclaimed, incensed on behalf of the ancient rider.
“Keep reading and you’ll see why,” Ryse said grimly.
“Jorgen says it is a burden to keep feeding the queens, who are far and away the largest of dragonkind,” Elleena had written. “But I believe his true motivation is to gain complete control of the Academy. He does not like it that a single Golden Queen can command all of the Wings at once as a woman rides and guides her. He feels—as do the other Professors and the Heads of the Academy—that it is wrong to let a woman have so much power over men. And so, though I and my fellow Queen Riders have never used our power for anything but directing the Wings to dispel the Madling threat, we are to be exiled for the sin of not being male.”
“That’s awful!” I exclaimed, when I looked up from the journal again. “They were kicked out just for being women!”
“Not just women—women in power,” Ryse corrected me. He frowned. “There have always been men like that Head Master Jorgen who think women are beneath them. I’m not surprised that as soon as they had no more use for the Queen Riders, they sent them away.”
“And then they made rules that women could never be dragon riders,” I said indignantly.
