Don’t think about what that means.
Move.
The wind picks up. Drives snow into my face, into open wounds that burn with cold. My shoulder screams where the joint separated.
I adjust my grip. Pull her closer with my good arm.
Faster.
I knowwhat has to happen.
The knowledge has been building since the ice-scarred plains, since she named what we were facing, since the gods proved their willingness to commit everything to killing her specifically. I’ve fought it. Rationalized why it couldn’t work. Found every excuse to avoid crossing a line that can never be uncrossed.
No more excuses.
The poison is god-made. No healer can cure it. No magic can counter it. Her bloodline power—the Anchor magic that made her valuable, made her dangerous, made the gods want her dead—is being unraveled at the source.
She will die.
Unless I change what she is.
Unless I bind myself to her so completely that my fire becomes her fire, my centuries of accumulated power flowing into her dying body and forcing it to live.
Mating.
The word sits in my skull like a blade.
Dragons don’t seek mates.
The entire concept is destabilizing, humiliating, dangerous. The loss of control. The vulnerability. The way a mate becomes leverage—a weakness that enemies exploit, a pressure point that can be used to manipulate even the most powerful predator.
I’ve watched other dragons fall into that trap. Watched them destroy themselves protecting creatures they should never have claimed. Watched the madness that comes when the bond is severed—rage and grief dissolving into beasts that can’t remember they were ever capable of thought.
I’ve seen the aftermath. Bodies of mates left as bait, surrounded by the shredded remains of dragons who couldn’t walk away. Traps designed by creatures who understood that the mating bond overrides survival instinct, overrides self-preservation, overrides every rational thought a dragon has ever had.
A mated dragon is a dragon with a target painted on his back. A mated dragon has handed his enemies the key to his destruction.
I swore it would never happen to me.
I swore I would never become weak for anyone.
And now I’m carrying a dying woman through a snowstorm, my body failing and my mind calculating the exact sequence of steps required to bind her to me forever.
The truth is simplerthan tactics.
I cannot let her die.
Not because of her power. Not because of strategic value. Not because of anything I can frame in terms of survival or victory or the hunt that has consumed both our lives.
I cannot let her die because the alternative is unacceptable.
Because somewhere in the past weeks—between the ravine and the shrine and the ice and the canyon—she became the center of gravity I can’t escape. The presence I need to hear breathing. The scent I track without conscious thought. The body I position myself to shield before my mind generates a tactical reason.
I don’t want to feel this way.
I’ve fought it with every tool I have.
None of it matters.
