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“No, you don’t understand. I want you to know, for the rest of your life, that you’re the best fucking friend anyone could ever have, and if you don’t marry someone who makes you feel like that, I will haunt you.”

Tempest laughs. “I’m not getting married right now, silly.”

“Not now, maybe. But you will, one day. And when you do, I want you to choose a man who loves you the way your friends do, but more. Okay. Because…”

“We have to go,” Ornix says, interrupting me.

“Not yet! I’m talking to my friend.”

“It’s okay, we’ll talk tomorrow,” Tempest says.

But we won’t. I know it. And she can’t know it. And it’s all too much and I just start sobbing.

Ornix sweeps me up into his arms. “Come on, we’re going.”

“No!”

“If I have to carry you out of here tantruming like a toddler, I will…” He spanks me, but not hard. Just hard enough for me to feel it, and to remind me that I am a grown woman acting out.

“I love you, Tempest!”

The last I see of my friend, she’s smiling to herself and shaking her head.

“We are going to go back to the dragon realm and you are going to get a spanking to settle you,” he says, stepping back into his world like walking into another room. He grabs the tech guy too, by the collar, like he’s an animal and drags him through with us.

We step into the main hall, where dragons are assembled with weapons and armor. I hear Mikey make some faint sounds of shock as his perception of reality is forever twisted. Then I remember it’s possible this is not actually the first time he has been here.

“Take the boy,” he says, pushing Mikey toward the guards. “Make him comfortable, and make him secure. I have business with my mate.”

I am carried to the bedroom where Ornix puts me over his knee and starts paddling me lightly, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to get my attention and settle me down, just as he planned.

“I’m sorry you are losing so much in this war,” he says. “But I am still here, and I still have you. You won’t lose me.”

“Fuck you,” I curse. It’s a gut reaction, a bitter sound that comes from knowing he has forever changed me. He fucked me and made me a thing with wings and now I’ll never see my friend again. We were gonna find matching guys and have kids together and raise them and now I’m going to lay a fucking egg or something. I don’t know the details. I haven’t asked.

“I want to go back home. I want to be normal again.”

“I know,” he says, smoothing his palm over my burning ass. “I know it would be easier if you could go back to the world you came from and be the girl you were, but that can’t happen anymore. You’re here. You’re mine. You’re already changed. This is what life does. It changes us all, over and over, again and again. We make our choices, and then the consequences of those choices change us.”

“I didn’t make any choices! You made the choices. You took me here. You fucked me. You made me grow wings!”

“That was an unforeseen consequence, and I am sorry. Not for the wings, but for taking so many choices from you all at once and so completely.”

His hand slides down over my mound. His fingers drift lightly over my aching sex. He fucked me roughly so recently and I am sensitive. My fury is real, but so is the way he changes the chemical composition of my brain when he touches me.

“It is not easy,” he says. “But remember there are benefits to being mine, to being owned, to being taken as my mate and transformed.” His fingers slide into my pussy, just a little, teasing me.

It is so hard to stay sad and angry when I am aroused by his fingers dipping inside me, toying with my pussy and driving me wild, out of my mind with need.

“I’m going to make you happy,” he growls. “I’m going to take every bit of pain you’ve been suffering and alchemize it into pleasure and joy. I promise you, my love. You are going to be taken care of in ways you could not possibly previously have imagined.”

He strokes me to an orgasm that feels irresistible, a climax that makes my legs shake so much that my toes feel slightly numb when it is all over.

I fall asleep in his arms with an ache in my chest and another in my pussy. I miss my world. I miss my friends. I wish I could have told Tempest what was going on.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I hear Ornix being roused. He gets up, presses a kiss to my head, and leaves me to sleep.

Ornix