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She looks at me.

Holds my gaze.

Then, slowly and deliberately, she reaches out, tracing a single, featherlight touch over the edge of the table, close to where my hand rests. Not quite touching.

Not quite not.

I feel the heat of it, the teasing whisper of something that shouldn’t be there.

The tension between us stretches, tight and coiling.

And then… she steps back.

That damned smirk plays on her lips again. “You’ll just have to wait and see.”

I watch her as she turns, slipping toward the exit, the sheer fabric of her robe trailing behind her.

She’s toying with me.

And the worst part?

I think I like it.

Sleep does not come easily.

It never has.

When I finally close my eyes, I am dragged under—not into rest, but into memories.

The past rises like smoke, curling around me, thick and suffocating.

I am standing in the ruins of the first war, the air thick with the scent of ash and iron. My people—my kin—lay in heaps, their scales blackened, their wings torn. The battlefield stretches endlessly, bodies scattered like broken dolls, their golden eyes staring lifelessly at a sky that has forsaken them.

I remember this place.

The valley where my mother fell. Where my father’s last roar shook the heavens before he was brought down by a rain of steel.

Where I became queen.

I turn, and he is there—the first king.

The man who swore he would stand beside me. The man who traced fire over my skin with his lips, who whispered oaths of devotion into the hollow of my throat. The man who made me believe, for the briefest moment, that I could trust a human.

That I could love one.

The memory shifts.

His face is close to mine, his hands gripping my waist with practiced familiarity. “We could end this together, Nyxara,” he murmurs. “We don’t have to fight.”

Lies.

I know now that every touch, every whispered word, was designed to tame me. To make me his.

And when that failed—when I refused to become some docile creature he could leash—he drove a blade into my ribs.

I feel it again, the cold kiss of steel splitting through me. The betrayal in his eyes when I did not fall.

He did not know what I was.