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I drag us back up the slope, claw by claw, until there is solid ground under both of us and fir trunks all around. Only then do I lift my foreleg. She is lying in the snow with her hair half out of the gold comb and her boots scuffed from the ice, looking up at me.

At all of me.

I am aware of what she is seeing. Forty feet of gold dragon in a dark forest, eyes wide, scales catching the last of the light like coins in a fountain. Most humans who have seen this form did not stay to finish looking.

Nina sits up. She reaches out, slowly, and lays her palm flat against the side of my jaw.

“You’re gold,” she says. “Like, actually gold. I thought it was going to be a color. You’re a material.”

Mate likes our scales, my dragon announces, overcome.

I let the shift go. It takes longer than it should, because he does not want to leave her, but eventually I am a man again, crouched in the snow in front of her with steam rising off my bare skin in the freezing air.

She looks me over. “You’re naked.”

“The suit did not survive.”

“That was a really nice suit.”

“It was adequate.”

She starts to laugh and it cracks in the middle, and I pull her into my arms and hold her against my chest while she shakes. I hold her until my heat has soaked into her and her breathing has slowed and the fear has gone out of her scent entirely.

“I stayed on the walking path,” she says into my neck. “I only stepped off it because I heard you coming.”

“You were falling,” I say. I cannot keep the image of that edge out of my head. “I saw the ice give way beneath you. For one moment I thought I would not reach you.”

Her fingers tighten against my back. “But you did.”

“Yes.” I breathe her in, needing proof that she is here. “You did nothing foolish by taking the path. I should have warned you about the runoff beside it.”

She draws back enough to look at me. “I wanted you to catch me, Silas. I didn’t want to scare you.”

“You did both.”

She kisses me, brief and fierce. When she pulls away, there is no teasing in her eyes. “Take me home.”

I pick her up and carry her home through the dark.

I do not take her to my bedroom.

I take her to the third floor.

The gold room is warm. I lit the fire in its small iron stove this morning when I moved her things upstairs, and the lamplight turns every surface amber. I set her down on the thick rug in the center of the room, between the bathtub of escudos and the columns of stacked coins, and I start taking her clothes off.

They are damp and cold. I remove them one at a time. Sweater. Leggings. Boots, their laces damp and stiff from the snow. I look at every inch of skin I uncover, checking it for scrapes, cataloging it, warming it with my palms.

“Silas.” Her voice is soft. “I’m okay.”

“I am confirming that.”

“Very thoroughly.”

“I am a thorough man.”

She is naked now on a rug in the middle of my hoard, flushed from the fire, her hair spilling out of the gold comb, and my dragon is silent with awe. Mate in hoard, he says at last, and nothing else, as though there is nothing left in the world to want.

I kneel over her. I kiss her mouth, her throat, the place where her neck meets her shoulder, and I stay there, breathing her in, until she arches up against me.