“It’s what I have.” I pull back enough to meet her gaze. “I don’t do soft. Don’t know how to express what I experience when I look at you.”
Her eyes glitter in the starlight. Moisture, maybe. Emotion I can’t name.
“That’s enough.” Her hand finds my face. Traces my jaw with the same deliberate attention I give to reading threats. “For someone who claims to have no words, you’re remarkably effective with the ones you do have.”
“I’m efficient.” My mouth curves. “Economy of expression. Maximum impact with minimal vocabulary.”
“Is that what this is?”
“This is me telling you that you’re mine.” The words emerge simple and absolute. “That no matter what comes—other gods, other threats, centuries in territory no one contests—you’re the center around which everything else arranges itself. That’s not going to change.”
She stares at me for a heartbeat.
Then she kisses me.
Not gentle. Not tender. Fierce, demanding, the same intensity she brings to anchoring death directed at my mouth instead. I respond in kind. Let the kiss become another form of claiming, another declaration without words, another way of saying what I can’t quite articulate.
When she pulls back, both of us are breathing harder than the exertion warrants.
“Fixed point.” She repeats my words back to me. “I can work with that.”
“Good.” I pull her against me again. Let the darkness settle around us like a blanket. “Because I’m not letting you work with anything else.”
I wake before dawn.
Old instinct. Training that doesn’t vanish with a single peaceful night. My body surfaces from sleep with combat readiness already engaged, senses extending outward to assess threat levels.
Nothing. The valley remains quiet. No movement except wind through grass. No sound except birds beginning their morning calls. No threat except the lingering habit of expecting one.
Soreia sleeps against my side.
Her breathing is deep and even. Her body relaxed in a way I’ve rarely seen—not the collapsed exhaustion of magical overextension, but genuine rest. The kind of sleep that comes when nothing hunts you in your dreams.
I don’t move. Don’t want to wake her.
Instead, I lie still and watch the sky lighten through the shelter’s entrance. Pink at first, then gold, then the ordinary blue that will hold all day. Birds grow louder as light spreads. Small animals begin their morning routines.
Life, going about its business in a world that no longer contains the god who wanted us dead.
My hand rests on her hip. Possessive even in stillness. She shifts against me, mumbles incoherent syllables, settles back into sleep without fully waking.
I examine the phrase in the growing light. Consider what it means to have rearranged everything around another creature.A year ago—a month ago—I would have called the vulnerability unacceptable. Attachments create leverage. Leverage gets people killed.
Other dragons will sense this territory being held. They’ll read the markers I leave and understand what they mean—mated pair, established claim, not a challenge worth making. After centuries of solitary hunting, that calculation has changed shape.
But she’s not leverage anymore. She’s not weakness or liability or tactical complication.
She anchors my endings. Fights at my side when divine forces attempt our extinction. The bond I forged out of necessity has become the choice I remake every time I look at her.
I’ve hunted across centuries. Killed threats that gods designed specifically to destroy dragons. Survived encounters that should have ended me. None of it feels as significant as lying in this shelter, watching her sleep, knowing that my life contains this now.
Contains her.
Contains us.
The sun rises higher. Light fills the valley. Soreia stirs, her breathing changing as consciousness returns. Her hand tightens on my ribs before her eyes open—checking that I’m still here, maybe. Or holding on because holding on has become automatic.
Either way, I tighten back.
