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He was all slow burn, eyes feasting on the awkward expanse of pale human limb, the wild contrast of hips and breasts and shivering belly. “I have imagined, veshari ,” he said, voice sharpened by awe and need. “But reality—Karys’s flame.”

There was that word again. I was beginning to know what it meant when a Drakarn called you something special, but I couldn't let myself think about that right now.

“Your turn,” I said.

He hesitated, his first true show of uncertainty. “My form is not—” he started.

“I want to see you.”

Dark amusement lurked behind his hunger. He slid his trousers down, unhurried, letting each inch of scale and muscle appear in the dim light. When at last he stood bare, I forgot language for a long second.

His cock emerged from a nest of dark red scales at the base, thick, too thick, impossibly so, glistening with translucent slick.

Veins knotted under the surface, a tangle of vermillion and gray.

The head … God. A flexible, ridged lip curled protectively over the glans, a living, quivering fringe that gleamed wetly.

It wasn’t just a difference of shape; it was a new discipline—a lesson in evolutionary innovation.

“You stare.” There, a heartbeat of vulnerability, splintered through the rough growl.

“Just … um, wow,” I wheezed. “Alien cock, one. Vega, zero.”

A rare, genuine laugh burst out of him. He lowered himself back into reach, letting me trail my curious, shaking hand along the base, where the scales grew softer, heat pouring off him in savage waves.

Higher—the flesh smoothed to living velvet, rigid beneath my thumb, that strange, suckling ridge at the tip curling like a sentient thing.

His hiss vibrated through the stone and up my arm, a threat or a warning, I wasn’t sure. “Almost too much.”

I worked my hand over his length, learning his architecture through touch—slick heat, impossible thickness, pulsing, quivering. The ridge at the tip curled against my thumb, living, questing. He bucked, claws gouging fresh canyons in the rock, restraint nearly atomized.

God, what would it feel like to have that thing in me?

“Feels good?” I tested, daring, and the sound he made was seismic, a deep, demonic groan, full of things older than words.

His tail, until now coiled, whipped violently against the bed. I might have been scared if it didn't make me shiver with want. I'd heard how Drakarn could use their tails. And right then, curiosity was killing me.

Bolder, I stroked him, finding a rhythm that felt obscene and perfect, wonder and power sparking through my arm. There was a heady pleasure in watching him shake, the baddest thing in the pit undone by the smallest of touches.

His hand closed around my wrist, gentle, but ironclad. “ Veshari .” Voice cracking—edge of prayer and warning. “Stop now, or—” The rest was carved in fire between us.

I could have pushed, could have made him unravel, but his need was thick as honey in the air.

Then he moved, muscles rolling with the promise of violence, down my body, his heat blistering where thighs pressed on either side of my waist. I expected fingers.

Instead, it was the tip of his tail, scaled, prehensile, impossibly sensitive, that ghosted over my thigh, drawing spiral patterns, promise and threat entwined.

He slid the fabric down. My body jolted when his hands bracketed my hips, forcing my thighs apart. His nostrils flared, a wisp of breath against my overheated skin. “Your scent, veshari , it is wildfire.”

I should have felt exposed, split open in the hard light of alien attention. Instead, want overrode fear. His tail’s tip found the seam of my body, circling, teasing, mapping. Sensitive skin screamed under the onslaught, nerves lighting up like a lightning storm.

When he first touched my center—a careful, swirling pressure—the sound I made was raw, uncontrolled, somewhere between prayer and profanity. My hips jerked, answered by his tail teasing near my thigh.

He watched me, obsessively cataloguing every gasp and tremor. His tail slipped higher, sliding slickness where need bloomed bright. He ringed me, teasing, coaxing, until I was shaking under the effort not to shatter.

“More,” I demanded. Who was I kidding? I was begging.

He obliged, finding a rhythm that matched my racing pulse, methodical, devastating. One calloused thumb flicked a nipple, doubling the neural overload. There was no room for shame.

The pressure coiled, a storm gathering at the root of my body, wound tighter and tighter with each lap of his tail. I was a live wire waiting for the strike.

“Zarvash—” I collapsed his name into a shudder, because language was leaving me. “I'm?—”

He pressed close, voice a thunderhead against my skin. A command and a promise. “Let me see you burn.”

That was all it took. The world fractured.

Nerve endings detonated, a white-hot solar flare, pleasure unspooling in a silent scream that left me arched and shaking and utterly unmoored.

His tail didn’t stop; he was wringing me through crest and aftershock, savoring every pulse and tremor as if it were the only thing that mattered.

At last, I collapsed back, a slick mess of sweat and don’t-care-anymore, the world spinning down to the size of his eyes, satisfied, intense, unbearably smug.

“Smug beast,” I rasped, not quite coherent.

He flexed his hands, golden gaze burning. “Your pleasure is tribute enough.”

I reached down, finding him still impossibly hard, hot and slick, impossibly needy. “Let me,” I whispered, hoarse with want.

His hand caught my wrist. “ Veshari .” There was caution in the gravel of his voice. “Are you certain? This is not demanded of you.”

I cupped his jaw, letting him read it in my eyes, in the way my body moved against his. “Let me stroke your cock.”

He stilled just for a second. As if he’d never heard the word uttered with reverence, command, and laughter all tangled into one. Something wild and terrified crossed his face before the scale-armor settled, and he nodded once, regal, shattering.

I wrapped my hand around his length, mapping heat and pulse and the alien flex of living flesh beneath my palm. His head lolled back, exposing the corded strength of his neck, throat working over a choked sound. “Stars above.”

The ridged lip at his glans suckled greedily at my thumb, as if learning me in return, hungry, alive.

I stroked him from root to quivering tip.

The lubricant he produced was thick, sweetly metallic, slicking my palm.

Every pass made him twitch, body threatening to shatter the sleeping platform beneath us.

He made no move to control me. He just …

gave himself, every pant and shudder and convulsive tremor a submission I’d never dared win from anyone.

He caught my wrist, not to stop my hand, but to ground himself, his enormous thumb circling my pulse, claiming it as his own. “ Veshari —” Raw, guttural. Like he was reciting a prayer with every syllable.

I watched the way he trembled, how he flayed himself open under touch. Power and surrender, the intoxicating knowledge that the most lethal creature I’d ever met was vibrating with pleasure because of me.

Need coiled in my gut, sharp as fear and just as sweet.

His tail slid between my thighs again, still slick from my own climax, curling possessively around my leg as if to anchor us both. He slid his hand over mine, pumping furiously until he came with a groan, cum spilling out over my hand and dripping down onto my thigh.

We froze, him arched above me, head thrown back, jaw clenched so hard the cords of his throat stood out like cables.

I watched his face as he let go, the gold of his eyes eclipsed by black, stunned, unguarded, more animal than man.

Hot, viscous seed painted my knuckles and my thigh in thick, shimmering ribbons.

His release was heavy, wild, tinged with that sharp, metallic-spice scent that had threaded through every fight, every moment of tension between us, now concentrated, intoxicating.

He sagged, breath ragged on my cheek as he braced himself over me, his sweat-slicked chest shuddering with each inhale.

His tail coiled tight around my calf, flexing, still claiming, still anchoring.

I traced the delicate cracks in his scales, feeling the heat radiating off him, heat I’d fed, stoked, dared into eruption.

For a beat, nothing existed but the aftermath: the sticky wet between my thighs; the way his chest rose and fell, brushing my breast with every exhale.

Zarvash shifted, careful, easing his weight off mine but keeping an arm across my waist, his tail a loose, possessive loop.

I stared at the ceiling, counting long cracks, marking time by every hitch in his breath.

The air was thick with us, with what we’d done, with the promise of more and the certainty that nothing in this broken city would ever be the same.

Neither of us spoke. There was nothing to say.

For now, his body was a shield, his breath anchored to my skin, and the world beyond the bolted door could burn.