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“You ran,” I say against her skin.

“I did.”

“You ran because you wanted me to catch you.”

“Yes.”

“Then you should know what this means.” I lift my head and look at her, and I know my eyes are gold to the edges. “I want to mark you, Nina. Here. Tonight. Permanently. I want every dragon on this mountain to know you are mine from a mile away, and I want you to feel me every moment of every day for the rest of our lives. I am asking. You may say no.”

She holds my gaze. She does not hesitate, and she does not look away.

“I choose you. Mark me, Silas. And then, for the love of God, please stop talking and do something about how I’m feeling.”

I do not need to be asked twice.

I part her thighs with my hands and taste her until she is shaking, then slide two fingers into her.

“Extraordinary,” I murmur while my tongue works her clit. “Every inch of you, honey.”

Her fingers tighten in my hair.

“Do you understand what you are to me? The finest treasure in a room full of the finest things on earth.”

“Silas…”

“Mine,” I whisper. “My beautiful, extraordinary mate. And I intend to spend the next hundred years making certain you never forget how much I adore you.”

She comes with her hands fisted in my hair and my name breaking on her lips.

I rise over her and push into her while she is still pulsing, slow and deep, and she wraps her legs around my waist and pulls me the rest of the way in.

“Look at you,” I tell her. My voice is barely a voice. “Lying in my gold. Taking all of me. Do you understand that there is nothing in this room I would not melt down for you?”

“Don’t you dare melt the escudos,” she gasps. “I haven’t counted them.”

My dragon is so in love with her I feel it as heat behind my eyes.

There is a chest open beside the rug, spilling gold chain and seed pearls and things that once belonged to empresses. I reach into it without looking, draw out a long rope of heavy old links, and lay it across her breasts.

She gasps at the cold. I lower my mouth and warm it link by link, my tongue following the chain over the curve of one breast and across to the other, and her back bows off the rug and she clenches around me so hard I have to stop moving.

Gold on mate, my dragon breathes. Mate in hoard. Gold on mate.

“Silas. What’s your dragon saying?”

“That I have spent a century and a half gathering the most beautiful things in the world,” I tell her, and drag the chain lower, over her stomach and between us, so the metal slides cold against her clit while I move inside her, “and not one of them has ever looked the way you look right now.”

I pull out of her slowly, ignoring her protest, and turn her over onto her hands and knees between the stacked columns of coins. I take her from behind in one long stroke to the hilt, and the sound she makes rings off the gold.

“Look,” I tell her, and turn her face toward the tall gilt mirror on the far wall so she can see us. Her flushed face. Her parted lips. My hands on her hips. My scales climbing my shoulders, catching the firelight, and the gold in my eyes burning steady. “That is what I see. Every time I look at you.”

She watches. She does not look away once, and I take her slow and deep with her eyes on mine in the glass until she is shaking and pushing back to meet me, begging, my name and please and more all tangled together.

I give her more. Then I turn her onto her back again, because I need to see her face when I mark her, and I sink into her and her legs lock around me.

I move harder. Deeper. Her nails drag down my back where the scales are rising, and she presses her palms flat to them like she is memorizing their shape, and every time she does it I lose another fraction of my control. My knot begins to swell. She feels it and pulls me closer, rocks up into it, takes it, and when it locks she cries out and comes around me so hard I see stars.

Then I bite her.