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More specifically, between the sheets, where Sebastian claimed him repeatedly.
If this was how a dragon went about manifesting a mate bond, Peregrine could hardly wait.
* * *
A week passed, then two, during which Sebastian bred him every day. Peregrine did not know how long it would take before his body was recovered enough to go through another heat, but not knowing did not deter Sebastian, who lusted for Peregrine like he was at the peak of his cycle.
They made love in their bed, in the dining room, in the pool. The Attendants quickly learned to listen before they entered a room, and while Peregrine felt guilty for his indiscretion, it felt too good to stop. Better yet, the pain didn’t return—Everard had finally chased the rot away. Everything was looking up, but still, the mate bond did not form, and though Peregrine routinely scoured his body, he never found a mark.
“Do not worry,” Sebastian told him a month into his recovery. “Mark or not, you are mine. I feel it in my soul.”
But Peregrine kept searching anyway, hopeful that he’d find it on some forgotten part of him, like the back of his arm, or the crease of his knee.
Three months following his recovery, in the early afternoon following a dip into the pool that hadn’t stayed innocent for long, Sebastian threw Peregrine onto the bed belly down and kissed his way from his ankle all the way up to his inner thigh. Peregrine, aroused beyond belief, adjusted his position to get his knees beneath him and lifted himself up so Sebastian could touch him wherever he pleased.
But all at once, Sebastian stopped, and neither touched Peregrine, nor spoke.
“My lord?” asked Peregrine. “Is there something the matter?”
Sebastian was eerily silent.
“My lord?” Peregrine looked over his shoulder to see what was the matter and spotted Sebastian behind him, a look of awe on his typically emotionless face.
“Perry,” Sebastian uttered. “It’s there. I see it.”
Sebastian traced a thumb along a spot near the inside of Peregrine’s cheek, and Peregrine’s heart started to race. It couldn’t be, could it? But why else would Sebastian stop?
“What is it that you see?” he asked urgently. “You must tell me. I have to know.”
“It’s a mark,” Sebastian breathed, then growled in triumph. “You are my mate. You bear my mark, and you will be mine forevermore.”
27
Sebastian
1509
Sebastian tried to remember everything he’d been told about marks and mate bonds, but came up with very little. They were rare to the point of being nearly legendary, and therefore not talked about very often. And while it had always been possible that, theoretically, Sebastian might find a mate, it was also theoretically possible he’d be struck by lightning and that had yet to happen.
But there it was.
A strawberry-shaped mark on Peregrine’s skin that hadn’t been there before.
A physical manifestation of their bond.
Sebastian was nearly paralyzed by the implications of it. Peregrine would not be his until the end of his short human life, but forever. For always. It was a heady notion. He traced his thumb over the mark and felt equal satisfaction radiating from his dragon.
Mine. Ours. Forever.
Mate. Mate. Mate.
“I am branded with your mark, then?” asked Peregrine, who craned his neck in an attempt to see. “It’s true? You do not jest?”
“Aye.”
Peregrine’s lips twitched into a tentative smile. “And where is your brand, my lord, to show you belong to me?”
“I’ve never heard of a mate mark appearing on a dragon. Granted, I know very little about mating at all. Perhaps we are also changed, but in a way that’s not so readily seen.”
