Page 26 of The Dragon 1

Lightning seared my balls.

Sharp, burning pain lit up my entire groin like fireworks going off behind my eyes.

The last time I’d been kneed, I was in grade school. I punched the boy so hard he’d lost a tooth. There were no consequences. The staff didn’t suspend me. Not a note home.

Everyone knew my family.

They knew what would come. Knew my father’s name meant silence and my uncles carried longer memories than most men survived to regret.

But all that legacy didn’t save me from the ache now pulsing at the center of my body.

She said she would knee me. And she did.

I’d have to remember that—her threats were real and merciless in execution.

I clutched myself like a bruised pervert and laughed under my breath.

How. . .strange.

How fucking beautiful, that one woman—this dark brown skinned American stranger—could do something no one else ever had.

She made mefeelsomething completely new that I couldn’t even name.

What is this? Excitement? Anticipation? Hot desire, perhaps.

In the numb landscape that had become my life, emotions were prizes. Rare. Tarnished. Better locked away than wasted.

Most women?

Predictable.

Soft shapes I memorized without touching.

I read them before they moved.

Knew their games before they smiled.

But not this one.

I wasn’t lying when I said she came into my office like an eclipse—a celestial event no man could summon and every man feared. She swallowed the light, bent gravity, and dragged my gaze toward her like a tide rising for the moon.

And I let her pull me in.

I was eager to let her drown me.

One moment, my world was order—every object in its place, every threat cataloged, every desire silenced beneath brutal control.

Thenshewalked in.

With those wild curls like smoke made flesh. With a mouth that looked sculpted to speak rebellion and kiss sin. With a scent I hadn’t breathed since childhood, when I stood in the shadows of my father’s study and first discovered that power couldmoan.

She didn’t just enter my space.

Sherewroteit.

Bent the air around her.

Tilted the axis of my composure.