Page 7

VEGA

Okay. Deep breaths.

The door clattered shut behind him, the finality vibrating out into the heavy silence. Zarvash. Gone.

For now.

Relief punched through my chest, harsh enough to make my knees threaten to buckle. I took a shaky inhale, filling my lungs with the dirty, dusty air of Ignarath.

Nobody looming, nobody watching, nobody looking at me like they wanted to peel me open and eat my insides.

No Zarvash.

The reprieve was brief. Gone before I’d even finished my first shaky exhale.

Anger hit next. Not a warm, fiery burst, but cold, sharp, the kind that cracks stone. That performance out there, his hands on me, the snarled words for the crowd, “defiant pet” in front of a ring of slaver-eyed bastards, it scraped a layer raw I didn’t even know I had.

Touch what’s mine again, and you’ll pay for it in blood.

The memory of his growl throbbed in my skull. Possessive. Threatening. Directed at everyone, except maybe not. Because he’d looked at me when he said it, like I was prey.

No.

He looked at me like I was his .

And God help me, the worst part, the part that made me wish for brain bleach, for a way to peel my own skin off and scrub it raw, a small, mutinous coil of heat had burned low in my belly.

Not fear, not hatred. Something sideways, embarrassing, something an awful lot like want. Betrayal, from the inside out.

Get a grip, Cross.

I started to pace in the dilapidated little room. Three steps. Turn. Three back. The planks shivered, some catching and snagging at the soles of my boots. Splinter, pinch, ignore. Think.

I needed my mind on the same page as my body. Zarvash was Drakarn. Scalvaris’s favorite strategist, legendary for his utter lack of trust in anything soft, squishy, or human.

Not my friend, not my ally except by some spectacularly terrible accident of necessity.

He'd nearly gotten Orla killed with his machinations with the Forge Temple. Zarvash’s loyalty was only going to last as long as the tactical advantage did. I was an asset. A chess piece. Expendable. His equation had to be: How much is she worth dead? How much alive?

I couldn't trust him. Not deeply, not with my plans. With my life? It was a fool's bargain, but he was the only person I knew there, and anyone else would sell me … or worse.

That act out there? Pure theater, the sort of thing baked into the bedrock of survival in that suns-poisoned garbage heap of a planet.

Nothing personal. It wasn’t supposed to feel personal.

Except it did. The way his claws had wrapped around my shoulder, possessive, tight, just this side of pain, or the heat that had rolled off him, vibrating with banked violence.

I’d known exactly where I stood: one inch from the teeth, a heartbeat away from being used as a weapon or a shield.

The moment where it felt like he was defending me? It wasn't real. Couldn’t be. Just tactics wrapped up in violence. I hated that a part of me—the dumb, hormonal, lizard-lusting part—had registered something else.

I glared down at my wrists. Red, swollen, angry where the strap was biting in. I fumbled at the knot, fingers half-numb and clumsy. The thing was stubborn. I yanked, swore, and yanked even harder. Of course the bastard hadn't thought to untie me before he ran the fuck away.

The knot finally gave, the restraint falling to the ground. I kicked it across the room with a tight jerk of my leg. The relief stung. I flexed my hands, shook them out, rubbing at the sensitive places that were almost bleeding. A reminder of how bad this could all go.

Dust motes, slow-motion, spun in a lone blade of filthy sun slicing through crooked shutters.

Everything smelled like sweat and old metal and the ghosts of blood and old fucking.

The centerpiece of the décor: one bed. More a slab, barely wide enough for Zarvash’s wingspan, half-covered in a blanket that looked something close to clean.

I didn't want to get close enough to give it a sniff.

My stomach cramped, that distinct edge of hunger making itself known.

Where was Zarvash? Part of me wanted him to vanish forever and let me figure this mess out solo.

It simplified the math. But the practical, unkillable survival part knew better.

Getting whatever humans we could find out of Ignarath would require Zarvash.

Just setting foot in the city had been like jamming my tongue in acid.

The tension there was different, meaner, broader than Scalvaris’s honest echoing danger.

Scalvaris was shadowed, claustrophobic, but it didn't hide anything in those shadows.

Ignarath was a wound left open under twin suns, all blood and teeth and who could bite deeper.

You walked in, and you were evaluated, weighed, flayed alive by a dozen watching eyes: predator or prey, asset or waste.

I’d hated the caves. But now? Scalvaris was starting to look like home.

Here? The way that guard had stared at me, cold calculus. The slaver’s look—what can I get for her, and how much pain can she take before it’s too much work? Even pretending, it soaked in. The powerlessness. Didn’t matter if I’d signed up. I wanted to burn that humiliation out of my bones.

Were the others looking for me? Hawk, Terra, Selene? Had they already marked me as dead, written my name on a gravestone and moved on? And then there was Kira. I hoped she wasn’t blaming herself. My mistake. My overreach, my need for answers, my faith in my abilities at the worst possible moment.

Damn it.

The ache in my stomach was starting to bother me when the door rattled. My hand shot to the knife strapped at my calf, muscles tensed tight. But it was Zarvash. Even seeing his familiar form, it took me several seconds to calm down.

He stepped in, filling the doorway: shadow and scale, tired eyes. Just a man, or dragon monster, and not at his best. I saw it, the bronze of his scales streaked with city dust, the slump in his left wing, injury hidden but not gone. He was running on fumes. Just like me.

He had a bundle in one clawed hand, steam rising, food smell laced with a tang of oil, and a battered waterskin hanging at his side. He didn't say anything, just gave a nod at the miserable excuse for a bed, then dropped the food onto its threadbare blanket.

I didn’t argue. My dignity had already moved out. I sat, tested the edge of the slab, half-worrying it might collapse under me. But Drakarn preferred stone sleeping platforms, and this was as hard as I'd come to expect.

Zarvash dropped down at the end. Proximity: suddenly way too much. The room shrank by half.

He unwrapped the bundle. Steam—hot, spicy, meaty—rose into the stagnant air. Dumplings. Delicious. He offered one, a lean across the too-short gulf. My fingers brushed his as I took it. His scales were cool. I pretended not to notice the shiver knifing up my arm.

We ate, silent, watching each other across the DMZ of our sleeping platform. Tense, calculating silence. Like sharing a foxhole with someone who might, or might not, shoot you when this was over. I stared at the food, chewed slowly.

Don’t think about the alien sitting three feet away. Don’t think about arm muscles under his torn tunic. Focus on survival.

He finished first, wiped his mouth with the back of his scaled hand. Efficient, but not pretty. His gaze dropped in a way that set every alarm in me screaming, straight to my wrists, the ugly red welts left from the staging. I pulled them away, too slow. He saw.

A growl started low in his chest. Before I could brace, he’d reached out, one huge hand swallowing my left wrist. My entire body went electric, every nerve sparking, adrenaline surging. Reflex screamed: yank away, grab the knife.

I didn't move.

His claws, curved and lethal, ghosted over my pulse point. I could feel the throb of my blood, erratic and panicked. And something else I really didn't want to name.

“Hold still,” he ordered.

I wanted to jerk back on principle. To tell myself I was still the one in control here. But my body had other plans.

He uncorked the waterskin, fingers deft and surprisingly graceful for hands so lethal. A slip of wet cloth pressed gently and slowly against my wrist. Careful, precise, as if I were some rare, breakable specimen. Not a prisoner. Not prey.

I shuddered. Heat prickled under my skin. It burned up my arm, haze and static, nerves twanging in time with my pulse. Every touch was a new spark. I resented it. Relished it. Didn’t know where to put the wanting.

He paused, gaze boring into the space where my flesh rose, small shivers, betraying me with every shallow breath.

His thumb brushed deliberately over the goosebumps.

Almost wonder, something like hunger flickered in his eyes, raw and unguarded, so unlike the calculating strategist I’d catalogued and hated and, God help me, noticed.

“Your skin. It rises. Why?” The words vibrated out of him, low and heavy, close enough to melt into my bones. Not scornful. Curious. Hungry. Like the puzzle of me had him absolutely riveted.

A claw danced its way up my arm, feather-light and agonizing, tracing a map of heat and blood. Each graze left a pulse behind, tight, electric, intimate. My body arched to it for half a second before I caught myself, but he saw.

Of course he saw.

My breath caught, turned ragged. Not fear, I recognized that old, animal instinct. This was something more slippery, more dangerous. Dread and desire, tangled and indistinguishable in the moment. I tried for science, for analytic distance. I failed spectacularly.

I wasn't just being handled; I was being studied. Admired and consumed by his focus. Under that stare, I wasn’t less. I was too much. Nerve endings overloaded, skin tuned to his frequency, every instinct in me screaming: Yes. Yes. Don’t you dare stop.

He leaned in, an invasion, heat radiating off him like a furnace. The air thickened, crackled. His scent wrapped around me: dust, stone, and something wild, base, beautiful. I could taste it, could almost taste him.

His head dropped, lips parted, hovering just above my skin, close enough I could feel the heat of his breath, the promise strung taut between us.

Not prey. Not an experiment. No, not for a second.

I should have pulled away. Should have said something sharp, driven a wall up between his want and mine. But my body was honest, traitorously honest, urging closer, arching into his orbit, breath coming quick and wanting.

The danger wasn't that he'd break me.

The danger was that I'd say yes.

He sat there, studying me like something half-wild, half-sacred. Like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to conquer me or worship me. I held his gaze, chin up, defiant but shaking, inside, anyway. Refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing how badly I wanted to close the distance.

The silence vibrated. Breathless. Heavy.

He went lower, gaze fixed on the chaos at the pulse under my jaw. Then, God and rot and every broken thing, his tongue flicked out. Long, dark, deadly. One slow, deliberate swipe across my wrist, burning and startling and weirdly, breathlessly intimate.

I froze. Blank. Sound dropped away. The world, for one long, vertigo-laced heartbeat, constricted to nothing but the damp heat on my skin, the thought of his alien taste, the wild, unspooling panic and thrill tangled at the root of my spine.

Then he was gone, pulling back like a shutter slamming down, intensity vanishing behind emotional armor.

“You should rest.” Flat. Command. Dismissal.

He rose, every movement efficient, practiced, distant. He parked himself at the fractured window, staring out at the slice of sky hacked between the filthy buildings.

My body was still locked up, perched on the edge of the bed, hands trembling, skin tingling with the echo of that tongue. Mind racing. Trying and failing to box away what just happened, index and file it like a fever dream.

But control had left the building. Something vital and dangerous had cracked open between us, transgression leaking into every breath, every nerve. We’d crossed a line I hadn’t even seen, the ground underfoot suddenly all trapdoors and razor wire.

And the ugliest truth, the one I didn’t want to touch? I didn’t know if I wanted to find my footing again.

This was bad. So freaking bad.

I stared at the scarred shutters, jaw set, heart trying to burrow straight through my ribs. Rest, he’d said. Like I could. Like that was possible in this world, this body, with this new, unnamable ache singing under my skin.

God damn it.