“What’s that?” I murmured.
He lifted his head, his eyes still copper-bright, and smiled in a way I’d never seen before. Open. Unguarded. Young, somehow, despite the silver in his hair. “My scales. They’re responding to you.”
“Your scales,” I repeated. “Under your skin.”
“The shift isn’t just one thing or another. It’s a spectrum.” He pressed a kiss to my jaw. “You’ll understand better when you see it.”
My heart kicked. “When I see it?”
He rolled off me carefully, reaching for the tissues to clean us up with that same gentle efficiency he’d shown in the kitchen. But there was something new in his expression now—anticipation. Excitement, barely contained.
“Get dressed,” he said. “Something warm because it’s cold at altitude.”
The words took a moment to register. Then my pulse spiked so hard I felt dizzy.
“You’re going to—”
“I’m going to show you what I am.” He just pulled on shorts. Moving with that contained energy I recognized from game days, that sense of purpose barely held in check. “And then I’m going to take you flying.”
I scrambled out of bed so fast I nearly tripped over the sheets.
Twenty minutes later we were in his backyard—that sprawling property I’d noticed on the drive in, the one with no neighbors, the one positioned for privacy. The late-evening sun nearly completely gone. The mountains rose in the distance, snow-capped and massive against a sky so blue it hurt to look at.
Theron stood in front of me, ten feet away, wearing nothing but his shorts which he kicked off. I could see it now—the faint iridescent shimmer of his skin, like light catching on something just beneath the surface of his skin. His scale patterns, I realized. The markings Cinder had mentioned.
“You’re sure?” he asked, and for the first time, I heard uncertainty in his voice. Real, genuine fear that what I was about to see would change things between us.
I walked forward and took his face in my hands. Kissed him once, firm and certain. “Show me.”
He nodded. Stepped back. And shifted.
It wasn’t like anything I’d expected. Not violent, not grotesque. It was—beautiful. His body expanded, bones reshaping with a sound like distant thunder, skin rippling into scales thatcaught the sunlight and fractured it into a thousand copper-gold sparks. Wings unfurled—massive, membrane-thin, veined with the same metallic sheen as his eyes. His neck elongated, his jaw reshaped, and then he was there.
A dragon.
Sixty feet of copper and bronze and burnished gold, scales overlapping in patterns that seemed to shift and move like living metal. His eyes—those same gray eyes with their copper warmth—looked down at me from a height that should have been terrifying.
I couldn’t breathe.
Not from fear. From awe.
“Holy shit,” I whispered. Then, louder: “Holy shit, Theron.”
He lowered his massive head until it was level with me, those eyes—intelligent, warm, unmistakably him—watching me with an intensity that made my chest crack open all over again. A low rumble came from his chest, vibrating through the ground beneath my feet.
I reached out.
My hand touched his snout, and the scales were warm—not hot, but warm the way his skin always was when he held me. Smooth and hard and alive beneath my palm. I felt that same vibration I’d noticed along his spine earlier, amplified now into something I could hear as well as feel. A frequency. A song.
“You’re beautiful,” I said, and meant it with every fiber of my being. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and you’re all mine.”
And you’re mine.
I jerked back, my hand flying off his scales, and the voice vanished instantly. Silence. Just the wind and the distant sound of birds and my own ragged breathing.
“What the—” I stared up at him, my heart hammering. “Did you just—was that—”
He rumbled again, that deep chest-sound, and lowered his head further. Nudging my hand with his snout like a dog asking to be petted. Patient. Waiting.
