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My teeth sink into the curve where her neck meets her shoulder, careful and certain. The bond floods into her and out of her and into me, and suddenly I can feel her. I can’t hear her thoughts, but I can feel all of her: honey-warm and fierce and laughing and so full of love for me that it floods the mark like a lamp coming on in a dark house. My own feeling rushes back to meet it, a century and a half of waiting and wanting finally finding somewhere to go. Somewhere it was meant to be.

I come inside her with my teeth in her shoulder and her name in my chest.

And my wings come out.

Only the wings, bursting out of my back in a gold rush of membrane and bone, thirty feet of them in a room perhaps fifteen feet across. The left one sweeps the shelves. The right one takes out the columns of stacked coins in one long glittering arc.

The escudos come down like a landslide.

They pour over us. They roll across the rug, ring off the stove, spill out of the bathtub and over the edge in a shining wave, and keep coming for an unreasonable length of time. When the last coin finally spins to a stop against my knee, we are lying locked together, half-buried in Spanish gold, and very quiet.

I fold my wings away. Slowly. With dignity.

Nina lifts her head. There is a coin stuck to her cheek. She looks at the room. She looks at the bathtub, now half empty. She looks at me.

“Silas.”

“Yes.”

“Those were in columns.”

“They were.”

“I was going to count those.”

“You may still count them.”

“They were stacked, Silas.” She is starting to shake again, and this time it is not fear. “By denomination. You stacked them by denomination. And you just… you came so hard you knocked over the inventory.”

She dissolves. She laughs until she can’t breathe, her face pressed into my chest, coins sliding off her shoulders with every gasp. My knot is still locked inside her and I feel every peal of it, and my dragon, surveying the wreckage of a century and a half of careful stacking, offers a single observation.

More gold on mate. Good.

I pick the coin off her cheek and set it on the rug. Then I lie back in my ruined hoard with my mate laughing on my chest and my mark on her shoulder, and I discover that I am laughing too.

Epilogue One

Nina

The ice storm comes over the pass on Friday, exactly as Jess said.

By noon the whole mountain is glazed. Every fir branch wears a sleeve of glass, the power lines sag, and the road down to Blackridge is a luge run nobody sane would attempt. Silas has declared us “appropriately provisioned,” which means the pantry could feed a small army and there are now seven blankets on the window seat.

This morning, Mrs. Hughes came back from her vacation. She made it up the mountain at seven, a few hours ahead of the ice.

We did not know this. We were in the kitchen. I was on the island, the shirt I’d stolen from Silas was on the floor, and Silas was making a point about breakfast that had nothing to do with breakfast, when the side door opened and a small gray-haired woman in a rain hat walked in with two bags of groceries and stopped dead.

Nobody moved. The coffee maker gurgled.

Silas lifted his head. With his hand still spread on my bare thigh, in a voice that could have read the evening news, he said, “Good morning, Mrs. Hughes.”

She set the groceries on the counter very carefully. She looked at me. She looked at him. She looked at the ceiling.

“I’ll just put the milk away,” she said, “and then I believe I’ll go home.”

I did finally get to thank her for setting up my room. I did it from behind a dish towel. She said, “You’re very welcome, dear,” to a cabinet door, and left with a month’s pay in an envelope Silas pressed into her hand on the way out.

I am on the floor of the gold room in one of his dress shirts and the cashmere throw, with a legal pad, a laptop, and four thousand Spanish escudos.