Page 35

“Yes. I will take my mate. Equinox, you can lead Otto back. Stand back, Melissa. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

He goes to a distance and becomes something so much more than himself. There is a flash of light, a certain magic that I feel as though I can smell.

I watch, astounded as Ornix shifts into his great golden form. He is the size of several elephants in his main body, and his wings have a span that would easily block out the sun in flight.

He reaches for me with his claws and picks me up, cradling me in a grasp that feels incredibly predatory and strong, as well as very strange. I am standing inside my mate’s clawed hands.

He looks down at me, his eye very nearly as big as the whole of me. I feel an internal tremor. I cannot help but react with some measure of fear; he is a massive ancient beast capable of swallowing me in a single bite. It is one thing to contend with his human form, but right now I am vulnerable in a whole new way.

His wings beat and I am swept up from the ground in a sudden gust. It is like taking off in a plane, but vertically rather than horizontally. We rise into the sky, me holding onto his claw with both arms. I know he won’t let me go, but it would be easy to slip through his fingers. As curvy and generously built as I am, I am so small compared to his dragon form.

Every time he beats his wings I feel us surge through the sky together at speeds that seem faster than any aircraft I’ve ever been in before, including Tempest’s private jet when she bribed the pilot to buzz the tower as if we were inTop Gun.

This is a thrill like no other. Surrounded by midnight sky, beneath clusters of foreign stars, I am carried in a grip powerful, gentle, and entirely possessive.

The notion of escaping him feels like a ridiculous dream right now. How could anybody hope to escape a creature who is this majestic, this powerful, and this absolutely massive?

We land at the very top of the keep just a few minutes later having made the distance small. There at the top of the castle, I am folded into his arms, then picked up again.

“I am taking you for a bath, and then bed,” he says. “You have had a very, very big day.”

Back in the bedroom at the top of the Golden Keep, I fall asleep in Ornix’s arms, absolutely exhausted by the efforts of the day. My dreams are wild, which makes sense given the situation. I dream of dragons, of kobolds, of blood, and of the kind of sex that destroys aging itself.

When I wake, the light has the quality of a warm afternoon. I have been left to sleep in the massive bed, though I can smell Ornix in the sheets, and I can even feel his warmth. I do not think it is long since he woke up.

I lie in bed for a while, just enjoying being safe and content and cozy. I can still feel the tender ache between my legs when I move them, and when I think of him and my lower muscles pull tight, there’s even more of a spark. I feel my clit tingle at the memory of being mated over and over, my pussy taking my mate and master. I never thought I’d have sex that much. Tempest talks about fucking all day, but she has no idea what that really means.

“Ornix?” I call for him from the comfort of the bed.

He emerges from somewhere nearby, almost as if he had been waiting. When he comes, he does so with a large platter of foods. There are cut fruits, cheeses, pastries, and more. Thereare several meats and some juices and cream to go on the baked goods. It is enough for an entire army, but it all seems to be for me.

“Eat,” he says. “You did not consume enough yesterday. You were too busy breaking every rule in the book, and, well. You know. You were there.”

“I was there,” I agree as I start to devour the offering. I know it’s probably some kind of weird coping mechanism from way back, but food really does feel like love sometimes. Right now, it feels like absolute adoration.

“You will need to keep your strength up for what is to come.”

“Why? What is to come?” I ask the question in between bites of flaky pastry.

“Your life in the keep is not going to be restricted to bed, though I admit I have been tempted to keep you here. Being my mate will eventually very much become about the tending of whelps, but…”

“Oh. See. I don’t want… I’m not really a kid person. My degree was in business, so. I was hoping to have a career. Maybe you could stay with the whelps and raise them.”

The expression on his face when I tell him that makes me giggle into my brioche.

“I will be doing some of the raising of the whelps, naturally. But my duties as leader, combined with the natural dependence of a young creature on its mother…”

“We can feed them milk and let the ponies raise them.”

I am somewhat joking, but only somewhat. I am not ready to mother anybody. I barely feel like an adult myself. The way Ornix treats me isn’t exactly like an equal either. He wants me to do as he says, birth his babies, accept my captivity. But it’s not going to be that easy.

I yearn for where I come from, and as spoiled as I might feel in this room of riches and delicious treats, I know I don’t belong here. Yesterday, I had no notion that this world even existed.

My shoulders are itching again. I thought I’d bathed pretty well last night, but maybe not.

“I’m going to take a bath,” I say.

He watches me go with an expression I can only describe as dangerously indulgent. He thinks I am trapped here. He doesn’t know I already have a way out. I go and I bathe, and I think of home while simultaneously pushing the thought of what will happen to me once I leave for Earth out of my mind.