Page 22 of Davoren (Dragon Master Daddies #1)
T he great obsidian doors slammed shut with the finality of a coffin lid, sealing us in sudden, profound silence that pressed against my eardrums like deep water.
The echo bounced off volcanic glass walls, fragmenting into smaller sounds that died like whispers in the vast space.
Without Solmar's bluster and his guards' nervous shifting, the Great Hall revealed its true nature—not a throne room but a dragon's lair, dressed up in architectural pretense.
The magma veins pulsed slower now, their angry flare settling back to that steady heartbeat rhythm that matched my own accelerated pulse.
Through our bond, I felt Davoren's fury banking from inferno to controlled burn, though embers of rage still sparked when his thoughts touched on Solmar's final words.
Scarlet melted backward into shadow with the fluid grace of someone who'd perfected the art of strategic disappearance. One moment she stood witness to diplomatic theater, the next she was gone, taking the lingering guards with her through exits I hadn't even noticed.
We were alone.
My body remembered exactly where we'd left off—him barely inside me, my desperate need cresting toward release, the chains holding me open and willing and ready. The memory sent fresh heat pooling between my thighs, and the collar at my throat seemed to pulse with its own awareness.
Davoren turned to me with the slow deliberation of a predator who no longer needed to hurry.
The cold fury of the Dragon Lord dissolved like morning frost under sun, replaced by something hotter, hungrier.
His ember eyes tracked over me with an intensity that made my skin prickle, cataloging every response—the way my breath caught, how my nipples hardened visibly through the thin silk, the slight shift of my weight as my thighs pressed together seeking relief that wouldn't come.
"He was plotting." The words rumbled from somewhere deep in his chest, more growl than speech. "He'll try something."
His hand cut through the air, a gesture of dismissal that carried finality.
"But not tonight. Tonight exists outside his reach, beyond his small human schemes.
" His attention returned to me with laser focus, and the golden lines on my skin flared brighter in response.
"Tonight, he will not steal another moment from us. "
The distance between us evaporated without either of us seeming to move.
Suddenly he was there, close enough that his heat washed over me in waves, close enough that his scent—smoke and spice and barely leashed wildness—filled every breath.
His hand rose with deliberate slowness, giving me time to see it coming, to anticipate.
When his finger finally traced the edge of my collar, the contact sent lightning straight to my core.
"I made you a promise, little one." His voice had dropped to that register that bypassed thought entirely, vibrating through the bond directly into my bones.
His finger followed the collar's curve from one dragon clasp to the other, never quite touching skin but close enough that I felt the heat of him.
"Three edges left unfinished. Your body singing with need. The lesson incomplete."
His thumb brushed the hollow of my throat where the collar sat, and I couldn't suppress the whimper that escaped.
Every nerve ending he'd awakened earlier came roaring back to life, demanding attention, demanding completion.
Through the bond, I felt his matching need—not just physical but something deeper.
The need to claim fully what had been interrupted, to mark me so thoroughly that Solmar's threats would seem like dust against mountains.
"But that chamber . . ." He paused, and something shifted in his expression.
The calculated dominance of our earlier scene gave way to something rawer, more primal.
"It feels insufficient now. After his words, his presumption, his dare to name you with terms that should see him flayed—" The temperature spiked for a moment before he controlled it.
"No. Your claiming deserves more than a lesson in a room of pleasures and restraints. "
His hand moved from my collar to cup my face, thumb tracing my cheekbone with devastating gentleness. "It deserves ceremony. Ritual. A place of power where the mountain itself will witness what you become when you shatter for me."
The words sent fresh arousal flooding through me, my core clenching around emptiness that felt like grief. Ceremony. Ritual. The words carried weight that promised something beyond physical pleasure, something that would seal me to him in ways our interrupted scene couldn't achieve.
He took my hand with the certainty of ownership, his grip firm enough to feel like a shackle but gentle enough to be a caress.
The dichotomy of him—destroyer and protector, ancient power and tender lover—made my head spin with want.
He didn't lead me toward the lifts that would return us to his chambers.
Instead, he drew me deeper into the hall, past the obsidian throne that still radiated authority from his presence.
Behind the throne, shadows gathered thicker than they should, as if light itself knew better than to venture there without permission.
The wall looked identical to every other surface—volcanic glass polished to mirror perfection, reflecting our approach in fractured images.
But as we drew closer, I felt it through our bond—power humming beneath the surface, old magic that predated the keep itself.
Davoren pressed his palm against the wall with the same casual authority he'd brought to destroying Solmar's contract.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the solid rock began to shimmer, edges blurring like heat mirages over summer stone.
The shimmer spread from his palm outward in ripples, and I realized the wall wasn't melting—it was remembering that it had never been solid at all.
The opening that revealed itself wasn't a door or an archway.
It was an absence, a place where the wall simply wasn't anymore, revealing darkness beyond that seemed to breathe with its own life.
The air that exhaled from it was warm and thick, carrying scents that made my transformed body sing with recognition—deep earth and sulfur, yes, but underneath that something wild and ancient that I knew without learning was pure dragon.
"This is a dragon's path," Davoren said, his voice carrying reverence I hadn't heard before. "No human has ever walked it. No human could survive it unchanged." His ember eyes found mine, and in them I saw promise and warning combined. "But you're not human anymore, are you, little one?"
The moment we crossed the threshold, the world changed.
Not gradually, not gently, but with the absolute certainty of stepping from one existence into another.
The mountain swallowed us whole, and I felt it happen—felt the volcanic glass flow back together behind us like water finding its level, sealing us into darkness that was somehow more complete than the mere absence of light.
My human self would have panicked at the totality of it, the way the black pressed against my eyes like physical weight.
But my transformed body interpreted the darkness differently, found comfort in it, recognized it as something that belonged to us—to dragons, to creatures that lived in the mountain's heart and called molten rock home.
The golden lines on my skin responded immediately, brightening from their gentle glow to something more substantial, casting light that didn't pierce the darkness so much as negotiate with it.
Davoren's marks blazed brighter than mine, the patterns on his chest and arms creating a lightshow that painted the tunnel walls in amber and gold. We became our own light source, marked creatures moving through unmarked space.
The tunnel itself defied every underground space I'd ever experienced.
This wasn't carved or constructed—this was a natural lava tube, created when the mountain was young and violent, when rivers of molten rock had flowed through this exact space before cooling and leaving behind this perfect, smooth-walled passage.
"No human could walk this path," Davoren murmured, his voice taking on new dimensions in the enclosed space.
It didn't echo—the tunnel seemed to absorb sound rather than reflect it—but it surrounded me, came from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.
"The air here is wrong for human lungs. Too much sulfur, too little oxygen.
The pressure is wrong. The temperature would cook human flesh in minutes. "
As if to prove his point, I became aware of how easily I was breathing, how my transformed lungs processed this alien atmosphere like it was made for me. Because it was. Because I was made for this now, rebuilt at the cellular level to exist in spaces that would kill what I used to be.
His hand never left the small of my back as we descended, that constant pressure that was guidance and claim combined.
The touch seemed amplified by the darkness, by the way the tunnel forced us close together.
Every few steps, the passage would narrow enough that his chest brushed my shoulder, or widen enough that he had to adjust his grip to keep me centered.
Each change sent fresh awareness through me—of his size, his strength, the controlled power in even these small movements.
We were descending into the mountain's heart, and every step felt like shedding another layer of the human world, another tie to what I'd been before the bond claimed me.
That's when I noticed the gemstones.