I made it useful.
In the first six months of my career, a woman who had survived a long-form interrogation taught me that distress signals had to be owned quickly, before they started making decisions for you. So I listened.
The pull sat in the center of my chest, steady and impossible to ignore. When I followed it, I realized Dominic was no longer in the council chamber but somewhere below me, farther than the corridor outside my door and closer than the courtyard, moving through the compound with a purpose I could feel but not quite make sense of.
His emotions came through as pressure: heat held under discipline, anger forced into stillness, possession sharpened almost into pain, and beneath all of it, need.
I pressed my hand over my sternum in an attempt to make the sensation less intimate.
Then the distance between us changed. The pressure in my chest spiked, hot and frustrated and urgent. My eyes opened.
He was going somewhere he wasn’t supposed to.
I went to the window.
Below me, the central courtyard lay in a rectangle of pale stone. My room was on the fourth floor. Escape would require rope, wings, or no serious commitment to gravity.
The pull angled sharply beneath me. A moment later, the side door at the south corner opened, and Dominic came out in dragon form.
He had shifted somewhere I couldn’t see and emerged complete, fast, and entirely outside the limits of compound behavior. Dragons didn’t shift inside the compound unless they had permission or a very good reason.
Dominic, apparently, was finished behaving for the evening.
He was forty feet long, green-gold under the wings and so dark across the back that he almost read black. His shoulders blocked the courtyard light, his claws struck black against the pale stone, and his gold-dark eyes fixed on my window.
I had seen dragons that week, but I hadn’t seen him. Not like this, with the full force of his body given shape in scale, wing, and lethal grace.
He launched, not away from the building but up the wall. His claws struck the stone below my window. The sound carried through the glass and the bond in my chest went still.
My breath caught as I realized that now the building made sense. The pressure grid in the stone ran all the way up the walls.
Not decorative. Reinforcement against giant, furious lizards with boundary issues.
Dominic climbed toward me, claws finding purchase, and every impact rang through the room like the compound itself was being reminded what it had been built to survive.
When he reached me, he pressed his head against the window. Onegold-dark eye filled the glass two feet from my face, the vertical pupil wide and black and impossibly focused.
I didn’t move. I stood there and looked back at him while the bond reordered itself around the fact that he had brought himself to me in his real body. The form he had been hiding from me for a week.
A public act ofI am here.
Slowly, I put my hand on the glass.
The dragon on the other side shifted his weight, claws flexing against the stone, and in the dark mirror of his pupil I saw myself: a small dark-haired woman in a green dress, blood on her throat, hand pressed to glass.
He held the position. His wings were partly furled, his body balanced half on the wall and half on the narrow ledge beneath the window, all that impossible strength held still because he had chosen stillness.
Then he pushed off.
He fell backward from the wall in a single controlled drop, opened his wings three feet from the ground, and climbed.
I hated that it was beautiful. I hated that he was beautiful.
He turned in the courtyard and made a slow circuit of the perimeter, not patrolling so much as announcing. The woman in the fourth-floor room was under his claim, his guard.
He flew the perimeter three times before landing in the courtyard and shifting back.
Human shape returned quickly, and when he stood in the courtyard again, his eyes found my window with the same unnerving precision they had in dragon form. He caught my gaze from below, human now, but not softer for it.
