I had read it a thousand times as fantasy and once too many times as policy. On the page, it was something I chose when I wanted it and set down when I didn’t. In the briefing files, it was a clinical category: permanent bond formation, visible throat mark, jurisdictional complications.
A beautiful little lie in one place. A bureaucratic warning label in another. This was neither.
This was the same word with the distance stripped out of it, in a room full of witnesses, with my throat under his mouth and my body already speaking before anyone thought to ask.
Breath came back first, thin and ragged.
Then sound. A chair scraping. Someone’s glass touching wood. A held breath from somewhere across the room.
Then him. Still there. Teeth at the bite. Pulse under my skin. Hand at my hip. Heat everywhere he touched me. My fingers were still twisted in his coat like I had put them there on purpose. Like I had chosen this.
I hadn’t.
The room arrived all at once. A hundred and twenty faces. The U.S. ambassador’s senior trade representative. The Norwegian delegation. Yuki at the head of the table. Three council elders. Two Japanese observers. A press secretary. An ambassador’s assistant. The lighting. The cameras. The European cultural attaché who had kissed my cheek.
I had come on Dominic’s teeth in front of all of them. My hands were still on his shoulders. My body had been climbing him for one full second of public-record time, and I hadn’t stopped it.
I hadn’t consented to any of this. I had been claimed in public by a dragon who had decided I was his, and my own body had thanked him in front of the United States ambassador.
I had read pages on the claim, the bite, the fated pull, and not a single one had warned me that a claiming came with an orgasm and that my own body would answer the theft as if it had been waiting its whole life to do it.
The shame arrived first. The fury arrived a quarter second behind it. The training arrived behind that. Of the three, only the training was something I knew how to use.
My fist came up at the precise angle I had been drilled on for years, aimed at the soft cartilage of his throat with every ounce of power my five-foot-two frame could generate.
He blocked it at the last inch.
He was fast.
I was almost fast enough.
My brain connected and I realized where I was. I didn’t loose the second strike. A second strike would’ve made a different kind of public record. Somewhere inside the bond, the fury, and the collapse of the next four years of my career, the training kept moving.
So I stood very still, though my body still desperately wanted to move toward him. I worked to override it.
Cordillera.
The consulate was fifteen blocks. The line was four syllables to a regional security officer. The exit existed.
Not now.The dismissal came in agency cadence.
The bite mark on my throat was warm. Bleeding. Dominic’s teeth had gone in clean.
I wouldn’t look at it. I wouldn’t touch it. Touching it might pull the wave back up, and I had a council, a U.S. ambassador, and ten cameras to walk past in the next minute. I wasn’t going to come publicly for asecond time tonight.
His hand was still at my neck. I made myself meet his still-slitted eyes. “You don’t get to do that.”
The briefing had used the wordunprecedentedtwice. I had read it in D.C. and assumed it was a corner case.
I said the next sentence flat. For my own ears first. For the room’s second. For his last. “You don’t get to take that from me.”
He looked at me. He didn’t apologize. He didn’t flinch.
The new pulse in my chest ran at his rhythm, which was a fact I couldn’t yet do anything with except note.
Looking at him, I could see he didn’t regret a thing. He had spent the week building toward this and had decided it was time.
“You aren’t sorry.”
