Page 34 of Heartflame

“Stay close to him,” she advised. “Keep your eyes open. And if you notice anything unusual, anything that suggests he’s in trouble or that something bigger is happening, you come to me immediately. Understood?”

I nodded, though my stomach was churning as thoughts raced through my head.

“And Quill?”

“Yeah?”

“If you see anything trying to break through the wards again,” she said, a warning in her tone. “Take your dragon and run.”

Chapter 15

Aeron

Mate.

That word had haunted me since the night of the ward breach. Three days had passed since then, and I still heard it echoing in the back of my head all day long, whether I was asleep or awake. And while I liked the way I felt when I thought of Quill in that way, logically I was spiraling.

Dragons only had one mate. Ever. While they could live for millennia and beyond, only one creature would come along during that time that would truly be their mate. And it was almost always another dragon. My grandfather, nearly one thousand years old, had never come across his true mate as far as I knew, though he had managed to procreate. My parents had found one another in their five hundreds, a relatively young age as far as dragons were concerned.

But I was only eighty-five, practically a toddler. And my mate, by some cruel twist of fate, was a witch that wouldn’t, even with all the magic in the world, live past one hundred and ten.

The math made my head hurt. A hundred and ten years if he was lucky, if nothing happened to him, if he didn’t get caught in another ward breach or attacked by the Purity Front or any of the thousand other ways a human could die before their time. Against my own lifespan, which would stretch on for centuries, possibly millennia, it was nothing. A blink of an eye. A single breath in an eternity.

I’d spent the last three days trying not to think about it. Trying to focus on classes, on the assignment with Quill that we still hadn’t actually made any real progress on, on pretending that everything was normal when absolutely nothing was. But the word kept surfacing, kept dragging me back to the same uncomfortable truth.

Mate.

Which meant that what I’d been feeling wasn’t just attraction or possession or the simple desire to claim something beautiful that had caught my attention. It meant that on some fundamental, biological level, Quill was meant for me. That somewhere in the magic that made me what I was, his name was written into my very being.

It also meant that he probably would hate me even more if I told him. What was I supposed to say? “Hey Red, funny story, but you’re my one true mate and you’re going to age and die while I’m still basically a teenager, so buckle up for an emotional roller coaster?” Yeah, that would go over great.

I was sitting in Magical Theory when Quill walked in, and my entire body reacted immediately. My scales prickled, my heart rate spiked, and my cock stirred in my jeans like it had a mind of its own. He didn’t even look at me as he took his seat three rows over, keeping deliberately distant. But I could smell him anyway. There was nothing else in the world that smelled like him, like my mate.

Professor Blackwood began her lecture, something about binding spells and their applications, but I couldn’t focus on a word she was saying. My attention was entirely fixed on the back of Quill’s head, on the way he took notes with careful precision, on the occasional strand of red hair that stuck out of place.

Three days. Three days since I’d held him in my arms and realized what he was to me. Three days of torture, knowing that I couldn’t just tell him, that I had to somehow navigate this without scaring him off completely. And three days of me not noticing a single other person on campus besides him.

The problem was, I’d never been good at patience. I’d never been good at waiting for anything. My entire life, I’d taken what I wanted when I wanted it. And now I wanted Quill more than I’d ever wanted anything, but I couldn’t just take him. I couldn’t just claim him the way every instinct in my dragon nature was screaming at me to do.

After class ended, I watched him gather his things and head for the door. I let him get a head start before I followed, keeping my distance as he made his way across campus. He was heading toward the library, which was our usual meeting place for the assignment we weren’t doing. Part of me wanted to leave him alone, to give him space, to let him figure out whatever was going on in that brilliant red-haired head of his.

But the other part of me, the part that was roaring with the need to be near him, overruled the sensible part.

I caught up to him just as he was pushing through the library doors, falling into step beside him like I’d been there the whole time. He shot me an annoyed glance but didn’t tell me to leave. Progress, maybe?

“So,” I said, keeping my voice casual despite the way my heart was hammering. “We should probably actually work on this assignment at some point.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, his tone carefully neutral. “We should.”

We made our way to our usual corner on the third floor, and I noticed the way he kept his distance from me. And the way he was avoiding looking at me. I wondered what he was thinking, whether he was replaying that night over and over in his head the way I was, or if he was trying desperately to forget it had ever happened.

“About the other night,” I started, unable to help myself.

“Don’t,” he cut me off sharply, pulling out his textbook with more force than necessary. “We’re not talking about that.”

“Why not?” I leaned back in my chair, studying him. “We had a good time, Red. You can’t just pretend we didn’t.”

“I can try,” he muttered, not meeting my eyes.