Page 49 of Flameborne: Fury (Emberquell Academy #2)

~ DONAVYN ~

I swam back to consciousness to a weight on my aching chest and lungs that didn’t want to work. I tried to inhale, to replenish air, and only succeeded in sucking in a cloud of smoke and steam that made me cough until my ears rattled.

But then I blinked and the darkness no longer blanketed me. There were points of light, and heat. The glowing eye of my dragon watching over me, and that soft weight on my chest…

Bren.

She knelt at my side, collapsed over my chest, her arms and hair spread over me as she sobbed my name.

“…Please, Donavyn. Please, wake up.”

It took two tries to lift a trembling hand to her head, but when I did she gasped and pushed upright, shining red eyes wide, tears coursing down her cheeks as she grabbed for me.

I was confused. She babbled, pleading for forgiveness, for my life, begging me to return to her. But I never left. I never—

The pain in my chest stabbed and the little, shallow breath I’d been able to gulp left me. The bond. My chest was hollow. Aching. Screaming. That golden cord that had tied her heart to mine suddenly withered and…

My head spun with confusion and a nameless fear. What had happened? How had it gone so terribly wrong?

‘Your mate lashed out, severed your bond, and wounded us all. She pleads for mercy, for forgiveness, and a chance to heal it. Do you desire it, Donavyn? If you wish to walk away, I will not help her reunite you.’

‘Of course I want the bond healed—she’s my mate!’

‘She spat and bled on the treasure she was given in you. A mate cannot sever a bond if the heart yearns for it. To reunite and lose her again would kill us all. Think clearly, Donavyn. Is she worth it?’

He blew another breath of choking smoke and steam over me so that I could only lay there, one hand on hers which was planted on my chest, eyes streaming from the smoke, my body wracked with hacking coughs.

But it was a power of Kgosi’s to create clarity.

His smoke overwhelmed the senses, then brought clarity in its wake.

I breathed easier when the coughing was done.

Bren’s eyes remained on mine, she gripped my chest, my hair, her lips trembling. She was clearly terrified and begging for forgiveness. Yet, she’d successfully cut our bond? Destroyed it?

The pain in my chest gave a sharp crackle and I lost my breath again.

“Please, Donavyn. I didn’t know what I was doing—”

“I know,” I croaked, swallowing hard, still struggling to breathe. “I believe you.” And I did. But the cold, hard chill of fear had also wrapped its talons around my heart as Kgosi warned me again that if she didn’t hold true, one more blow like this would kill all of us.

She could kill me and our dragons.

‘How could we heal this? ’ I asked Kgosi.

‘Trust,’ he replied simply, tightly. ‘She must make herself known to you in even the darkest ways. She must surrender her heart, her fear, her truth into your hands—reforge the bond in the fire of risk. I have warned her. She claims she’ll honor it. But the final choice is yours.’

Bren continued babbling, one hand pressed on my chest, the other clawed into my hair, leaning over me, her eyes shining with tears.

I lifted one weak hand to cup her face, wiping the tears from her cheek with my thumb, remembering the way she’d staggered into my apartment—eyes wide but glazed, body twitching like a frightened horse. And she’d used the safeword to make me let her go.

“Tell me, Bren,” I croaked. “You have to tell me now. What frightened you? Why did you shrink from me?”

“I l-love you, D-Donavyn,” she whispered. “Please, remember that.”

My heart flipped in my chest, but the pain sang right along with it. I nodded and let my hand drop back to my chest because my arm felt heavy as steel.

“Tell me,” I rasped. “Kgosi said you need to tell me.”

She closed her eyes and dropped her chin, her hair dangling down over my bare chest, but she nodded. “Just… promise me you’ll remember that I love you.”

I nodded and coughed again, opened my mouth to reassure her, but then Kgosi roared and covered us both in smoke and steam, and then, as the coughing and tears passed, Bren spoke the words that left me coated in horror.

I reeled, tumbling back through time with her as she haltingly, shakily told me her past.

And my heart died a little bit more every moment.

SOUNDTRACK: #1 Crush by Audiomachine

~ brEN ~

I lay nestled in the sweet hay of the barn loft.

Dust motes drifted lazily through the beams of afternoon sunlight slanting in the wide-open doorway through which my father used to pitch the hay for the animals.

Usually, Ruin and I had only stolen moments here.

But my parents had taken the last of our summer goods to market and wouldn’t return until tomorrow, leaving me alone, in charge of the farm for the first time.

I’d rushed through the chores before he arrived, and now lay in his thick steel, sun-darkened arms. I couldn’t stop smiling. I hoped he’d stay the night with me.

“There’s that smile,” he said, his voice a low, ragged thing in the perfect late-summer warmth.

“I always smile,” I giggled, flushed with love, yet feeling shy at the same time.

It was the strange effect he had on me. Every time he touched me, every time we joined, I felt powerful because of the need for me that blazed in him.

Yet somehow, afterwards, so overwhelmed. So shy—yet desperate for more of him.

“It’s one of the things I love about you,” he agreed, his stubbled cheeks pulling up to show his dimples.

My breath stopped at the same moment my heart leaped into my throat. Love?

His eyes crinkled and he touched my face, dragging one calloused finger down from my temple to tuck hair behind my ear. “Don’t pretend you didn’t know it,” he said gruffly.

Then he changed my world.

“I love you, Brenny. You’re my girl. The best girl a guy could have. How did I get so lucky?”

The smile that burst from me at those words… I almost wept. He was so strong. So perfect. So powerful. And he loved me?

“I love you, too,” I breathed, awed.

He nodded and winked. “I know. I tell my brothers about you all the time—how your eyes light up when I visit. And when we touch.” He continued to stroke my hair, then the side of my jaw, then down my body as he spoke, tracing a line around my bared nipple that had been in his mouth a few minutes earlier.

I loved that touch. It made my breath shallow and sent tingling pleasure through my body to pool heat between my legs.

His eyes darkened when I arched into his touch, seeking more from those fingers, catching his eyes to silently ask for more.

“Look at you,” he rasped, his gaze raking down my body to where he touched me, watching my skin pebble under his hand. “So ready for me. All the time.”

“I love you,” I said quickly, ecstatic that I could use the word now. “I’ll always want you.”

My chest warmed when his smile grew. “Yes, you will,” he said in a low, guttural voice.

Then his eyes danced as he rolled me to my back and touched me more firmly.

“My brothers, they’re jealous of what we have, Brenny.

It’s not normal, you know. Most girls are harder to convince.

You’re a needy little filly—like my father’s young mare, always swishing her tail and looking at the stallion. Tempting him.”

“Stop,” I giggled, thrilled by the approval in his voice, but also nervous and unsure again.

When he continued to smile, I laid a hand on his bare chest and appreciated the way his body had strengthened even further since he’d become a Furyknight.

His new role with the dragons kept him away a lot—sometimes for weeks at a time.

And it was so hard. I missed him desperately.

But he always came back stronger. Surer. Better.

He awed me.

“She jumps out of the pasture sometimes to look for others.” Ruin’s voice graveled. He locked me in that piercing gaze and kept me there as he leaned down to take my nipple in his mouth and suck hard, sending a jolt of pleasure that bordered on pain to the lowest part of my belly.

My breath grew shallow. As he continued to suck, I arched into it until he pulled off sending a zing of pain to that sensitive spot behind my navel. Then he braced on his elbows over me, staring down at me with hooded eyes. The animal in him was coming alive again. It scared and thrilled me.

“Do you do that, Brenny?” he asked, his voice raw, and suddenly tinged with something hard?

“Do what?” I whispered, scrambling to understand what had shifted in him.

“Do you jump out of the pasture to look for another male?”

I shook my head vehemently, but he caught my chin and made me meet his eyes. “I think you do,” he said in a low growl that confused me. His tone heavy with dark approval of my need, but his expression a warning, as if the heat in him tangled desire with anger.

“I’d never betray you. I love you!” I insisted, then pulled him down to kiss him. To press myself to him. To convince him he could trust me.

Why didn’t he trust me?

I bit my lip and reached for him, watched myself touch his chest, flattening my palm against the broad plane of his pec, then tracing the lines on his ribs because he was ticklish and it always made him twitch.

“Little flirt!” he chuckled as I bit my lip and turned my hand so I could drag my nails up the center of his stomach, then slid my hand back down towards his member, which had been slack and resting against my thigh, but now awoke again, thickening.

I smiled, enjoying the evidence of his desire for me.

He let that rumble sustain in his chest, his fingers on my nipple becoming a grasp of my breast, needy. Clawing. His eyes flashed when he caught me looking, and he rasped my name in a way that made my chest tingle.

His hands grew firmer, grasping, kneading, and his breath heavier. I let my head fall back and my eyes close to focus on his touch, on his body, the way he made me feel, the sheer ecstasy of knowing he loved me. He really loved me!