Page 154 of Flames and Blood

It starts where her mouth is and goes outward. Not down through me the way heat travels, but up into my scalp and out along both arms to the ends of my fingers and down through the soles of my feet, every part of me finding out at once that it can still feel something new. She’s still moving on me while she drinks, her pussy squeezing and releasing around my cock with every pull of her mouth. I choke out a sound. Nobody has put their teeth in me since the night I was made, and that was a man taking something. This is a woman giving it back.

And then I see it.

The flash. The same one I’ve been carrying since the first time I saw her. Her teeth. My throat. The heat of her against me.

Here’s what I’ve been getting wrong.

From the start, I thought it was a warning, a message, something to be alert to.

I treated it as evidence. I turned it over and looked at it from every angle and asked myself what was coming for her, because that is the way a man like me thinks.

It was never coming for her.

It was her. Not Kalli—her dragon, the one who came to me in the dark that first night because she’d already made up her mind and wasn’t going to wait around while the rest of us caught up. She’s been telling me the same thing since before I knew her name, in the only way she had, and I’ve spent months reading it as a threat, because a threat is the only thing I know how to read.

She wasn’t warning me about anything.

She was telling me she’d chosen.

She comes apart on me while I’m still understanding it, everything in her locking down at once, her pussy clamping tight around my cock in rhythmic pulses, and it takes me with her. I get both arms around her back and hold her against my chest through all of it with her mouth still at my throat, and for a while afterward neither of us can do anything at all.

She lifts her head eventually. There’s blood on her mouth, mine, and she doesn’t wipe it off.

“Let me see,” she says.

I let her see.

She goes quiet. She’s frowning.

“I marked you.”

“You did.”

“And it’s going.”

“Yes.”

She sits back with my blood still on her mouth and works at it.

“Then I’ll do it again,” she says.

“All right.”

“I mean tomorrow.” She isn’t asking. “And the day after that. As often as it takes. If your body’s going to take it off you, it can spend the rest of your life doing that, because I’m going to keep putting it back.”

“You realize I’m immortal? That’s a lot of biting.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Hell, no.”

“Good. Because whether anyone can see it or not, you’re my mate; we chose you,” she says, but it comes out ragged, and I get her down against my chest and tighten my arms around her. It’s probably the first time I’ve ever hated my ability to heal quickly.

We stay like that a while. The lamp is out, and the fire’s down to nothing, and her hand keeps going back to my throat, checking.

“Say it to me,” she says. “I want to hear it out loud.”

“I’m your mate, Kallista Ondrathe. You and the dragon both.”