Now.
It happens now, or it doesn’t happen at all.
I lean over her.Press my palm flat against her sternum.
Her heart flutters beneath my hand—weak, erratic, fading.
This is the point of no return.
Once I begin, I cannot stop. The mating bond doesn’t recognize hesitation or regret. It takes what’s offered and makes it permanent—permanent in ways that transcend death, that outlast bodies, that continue long after the minds that created them have forgotten why they began.
If I do this, I will never be alone again.
Will never be entirely myself again.
Will spend the rest of my existence—and it will be a long existence—carrying her inside me like a second heartbeat.
If I do this, she lives.
That’s the calculation.
That’s the cold logic.
Her death versus my freedom.
It’s not even close.
“I won’t let you go.”
The words come out rough. Barely audible. Not a declaration—a statement of fact. An acknowledgment of a reality that’s been true since the canyon, since the shrine, since the momentI positioned myself between her and danger and stopped pretending it was tactical.
She may not be able to hear me now—her body has abandoned most of its functions. But she chose this. The words are for her regardless.
I say it anyway.
“I won’t let you go.”
Because it’s the truth. The only truth that matters right now.
And because I need to hear it out loud before I do what comes next.
I call the fire.
Not the controlled bursts I use in combat. Not the sustained heat I’ve poured into these walls over decades. Deep fire. Core fire. The essence of what makes a dragon more than mortal—power that has been building inside me since I first drew breath, waiting for a purpose worthy of its release.
It rises through my body like lava through stone. Fills me until my skin glows, until the air shimmers with contained energy, until the cave itself seems to pulse with the rhythm of my exhausted heart.
This fire is not the orange warmth banked into the walls around us—that is old heat, stored, patient, the residue of decades. What I call now is white at its source: the deep color of a thing burning from its core outward rather than cooling at its edges.
I press my forehead to hers.
The fire pours out of me.
And into her.
Her body archesoff the stone.
I hold her down—hands on her shoulders, weight pressing against her convulsing form—as the dragonfire floods her system. It’s not gentle. It’s not careful. It’s raw power seeking purchase in flesh that wasn’t built to contain it, forcing itself into cells and blood and bone with the same relentless determination I showed killing the abomination.
