They locked me in a room carved from molten stone — beautiful and terrible, like him. Walls of black rock shimmered with veins of lava. The bed was too large for one person. Everything smelled faintly of fire and something… male.
I didn't sleep.
The bite on my neck still throbbed.
It wasn't bleeding, but it burned. Not like a wound — more like something pulsing just beneath the skin, alive with heat.
I'd been beaten before. Branded. I knew pain.
But this… this wasn't pain.
It was a bond forming.
---
VaerionPov
He stood alone on the balcony, wings half-spread in the dark, fire simmering in his veins.
Fool, he thought.
He hadn't meant to touch her. Not like that. But the moment he'd scented her — innocence, ash, and something older — it had ripped through his control.
She was nothing. A slave. A tribute.
But his dragon didn't care.
It had chosen her.
It wasn't just hunger now. It was something worse.
Possession.
---
🕯️ Back in the Room...
The door creaked open. I stood. I didn't want to, but my body obeyed.
He entered like a storm.
His cloak was gone. His armor, too. Bare chest, runed and scarred, gleamed in the flickering firelight. He didn't look at me at first — only stared at the mark he'd left on my throat.
"You should be afraid of me," he said.
I was.
But not in the way I should've been.
I wasn't afraid of being killed. I was afraid of the way he made me feel — like I was meant to belong to someone. Like I wanted to be kept.
"I don't understand," I whispered.
His gaze snapped to mine. "You don't have to. Just obey."
He walked closer.
My knees hit the edge of the bed.
He didn't touch me. Not yet. But I felt the heat of his body, the way his power pressed against me like a wall.
"I don't take mates," he said. "But the fire in you… it sings to mine."
My voice trembled. "I'm just a slave."
"No," he growled. "You're mine."
He leaned in again, his breath brushing my ear.
"I won't touch you tonight." He paused. "Unless you beg."
Then he vanished in a blur of black flame, leaving me burning and breathless.