Page 36

M elissa

Bass makes the foundations shake, and I am arm in arm with Tempest. It is so good to see her again. I had almost forgotten the feeling of being with a friend. This used to be the entirety of my life, and in all the excitement and oddness of it all, I let it go.

I feel so guilty. None of it has been my fault, but I feel like I should have held on more, tried harder to see her. I’m going to do that from now on. I’m going to try to make more time for her.

“Those wings almost look real,” she says, plucking a feather. The sharp pinch reminds me why I will never be able to return to this world again. If anything they seem thicker and stronger and more lustrous than ever before. “You look like a real angel, Melissa. Where did you get them from?”

“Ornix had them specially made,” I say.

“Wow, he’s really spending on you,” she says. “Good. You deserve some sugar from a daddy.”

I laugh. I wish my life was what she imagines it to be. I wish I was just caught up in a hot older guy’s house, being fucked and pampered. Instead I’m in the middle of a war I know I didn’t start, but I still somehow feel responsible for.

“Ouch!” I wince as she yanks another feather out. “Quit it, you’re going to make me bald.”

She giggles and slaps my arm. “You’re so fucking weird, Mel. I missed you! I’m glad you’re back from Mr. O’s fuck shack.”

Only Tempest would call a multimillion-dollar home a fuck shack. We’ve invited our friends, and their friends, and a whole lot of other people to this party that I hope contains someone who knows how the fuck Nox is opening portals to the dragon realm.

This is what we call a long shot. But I think it’s worth taking, if only for the fact that it gets me back to the human world.

Ornix is here too, but he’s in disguise.

As a dragon. He’s crouched over the pool, intermittently raising his head and bursting gluts of fire into the sky.

I didn’t know how he was going to come out of that disguise without anybody seeing, but then they pulled out a very big tent that he can be covered in.

Sort of like a magician’s trick, but nobody knows it’s a trick at all.

People are absolutely fascinated by him. They keep going up and rubbing his leg and trying to climb him even though there’s a velvet rope blocking him off.

Tempest and I party like we used to, but there’s a difference—I am being watched by a massive dragon whose eye is following me across the party as I talk to various guys.

I am trying not to flirt too hard, but I have to smile and laugh and engage the men in the hope that they tell me something about their work.

“I’m so into tech,” I say. “It’s truly the most important thing in the world. You know? It’s like, okay, growing food is fine, but food is everywhere. We’re made of food. But tech? You have to make tech.”

“That’s so true,” a man who probably thinks I’m incredibly stupid says.

“What kind of tech do you do?”

“I work for a medical company, we make devices that monitor brain…”

I’ve already started walking away. I don’t have time for people who save people with brain problems. I’ve got to find the asshole who is talking about ripping holes in time and space.

“Cute wings, angel.”

A guy slaps my ass. I don’t see it happening until it’s already happening and then there’s a moment in which I know some shit is absolutely going to go down.

Fwomp!

Ornix disappears.

There’s a squeal from the crowd, most of whom missed the moment he turns into a man in a suit. Those who did probably can’t believe their eyes. It might be on some phones, but at this point I don’t think he cares.

He strides through the crowd, takes me firmly by the arm, and steers me away from the handsy guy.

“I would kill him, but I don’t want to ruin the party,” he growls in my ear. “He will pay for that disrespect after. I have marked him and will ensure he is destroyed.”

“Destroying might be a little harsh,” I say as he leads me inside.

“It is not harsh enough. For what he just did, he should be deprived of…” Ornix catches himself before he utters a string of unhinged punishments that will only serve to scare me. “I do not like them so much as looking at you. You’re mine, and you’ll stay that way.”

“Of course I’m yours,” I giggle. His intensity makes me nervous, almost as if I did something wrong, though he has given me no indication he blames me.

“You are too desirable for these worms to resist,” he continues. “But resist they will or I will destroy their bloodlines. How dare they. You, the vessel of my seed, the love of my eternal life. For them to so much as approach you is unacceptable.”

I have never seen him jealous before, but I suppose I’ve never publicly paraded around in a bodysuit and high heels in the middle of a party filled with tech men before.

He draws me into a private bedroom and shuts the door, pressing me up against it.

It is so strange to see him in this very human form, not a trace of dragon about him.

I am used to his other side, the one that is taller, bigger, scaled.

The one with the slitted eyes and the regal bearing.

But even trapped in his human form, he’s so devastatingly handsome.

It is just as it was when I first met him.

He is angular and beautiful and brutal. His eyes gleam with possession, and I feel his passion for me with every breath he takes.

The chemistry between us is not just powerful.

It is fundamental. It bends reality. It demands consummation.

He slides a hand between our bodies and runs his palm down my belly until his fingers curl around my mound.

“I want you to remember,” he says. “These young human men are nothing. They are scraps on the wind, ephemeral creatures who will never muster the meaning of you.”

I don’t know entirely what he is trying to say with that, but it doesn’t matter because I know what he is really trying to do—reclaim me from humanity. His fingers slide along the length of my slit, rubbing me through my smooth, satiny bodysuit back and forth until they are soaked with my desire.

It feels so incredibly good to be touched by him, to have my arousal sparked by his rough need to possess me.

He slides my bodysuit to the side as his mouth covers mine, and I feel the heat of his smooth digits running over my lower lips.

It is so strange to feel touched by a human again.

It feels lesser than his true form, but that’s the point.

It doesn’t matter if Ornix is a fifty-foot dragon, or a six-foot-four man, he owns me. Every part of me.

“You know it, don’t you. You feel it. You belong to me, don’t you.”

I moan against his mouth as my hips arch toward his fingers. The feeling of being fingered slowly, my folds explored, my body returned to a state of desire that makes me feel chemically transformed is more intoxicating than any cocktail.

“They surrounded you like unworthy insects,” he growls.

“They looked at you with lustful eyes. They thought they could have you. But they could never handle you. You would break them with a look. They would crumble at your words. They are not worthy even to gather the crumbs from under your table. They are less than dogs.”

He finds the heat at my core, circles the entrance to me and runs the tip of his finger around the outside of my clit, teasing me and making my hips dance closer to him.

“My beautiful soft sweet human,” he growls, wrapping his arm around my back. “You are everything to me.”

He slides two fingers inside me, stretching my pussy open around his digits. I am so used to the feeling of his scaled fingers or his thick cock that this feels like little more than a tease. He knows it too, and is using it to his advantage.

I was never anything or anyone else’s other than his. I belong to him in a way I have never belonged to anyone. My connection to the human world feels more tenuous than my connection to him.

“I’m going to fuck you with this unworthy human cock,” he says. “For old time’s sake. Remember the first time I took you, remember how you whimpered for me, how sore your ass was? I remember. I will remember our first mating until the end of time itself.”

I have said very little, lost in the incoherence of being desired so powerfully my own words don’t matter.

My body is speaking the language of need, my chest and face flushing, the hair on the back of my neck and arms standing erect, pupils dilating.

My hips grind against his hand, my pussy sucking at his fingers, trying to draw them deeper, begging for seed they cannot possibly supply.

He frees his human cock, hitches my leg up over his arm, and slides deep inside me in one long possessive stroke.

I am wet enough to take him, but not so wet that I don’t feel the stretching of being taken deeply and completely by a dominant dragon who whose fury at seeing me touched by a man has made him intent on staking his claim over every part of me.

Picked up and pinned against the wall, I am ravaged as powerfully as I can be by my mate when he is in this human form.

His shirt manifested far too tightly, and it snaps at the buttons, baring his chest to mine as he slams inside me, his mouth on my mouth and then on my neck, his teeth grazing along sensitive skin as he does his best to consume me whole.

My clit is ground against his pubic bone, the fabric of his suit bunching in a way that makes the pressure spread out and stay almost constant between rough thrusts.

I am trembling, chemically overwhelmed by a cascade of desire that starts somewhere in my brain and overflows every time he growls or thrusts or moves his hands to a new position to keep me in place.

There’s no escaping my fucking, not even when my pussy starts to ache from the pounding that only intensifies as the session continues. I am being punished for the actions of those who coveted me.