Page 19 of Beast of Blood and Ash
Then a low growl rumbled deep in his chest, and his mouth answered mine.
One of his big hands slid from my back to cradle the base of my skull, claws brushing lightly through my hair. His thumb stroked my neck, sending sparks through every nerve ending. The threat and gentleness wrecked me in equal measure.
I pressed closer, desperate for more: his heat, his power, his mouth on mine. Every inch of contact stoked the fire. I was melting, unraveling, alive in a way I’d forgotten was even possible.
He shifted, tilting my head, and his mouth claimed mine more fiercely, tongue tracing a line that left me shaking—possessive, demanding, but never rough. I moaned against him, swallowing his heat, his need, my own. Thought left me. There was only sensation, surrender and wanting, the bared edge of possibility.
Something brushed my thigh. Smooth, strange, strong. It curled around my leg, up the back, wrapping, holding.
A tail.
A Drakarn tail.
The realization cut cold through the haze, shocking, undeniable.
I was kissing a Drakarn. One of the monsters. Letting him hold me. Letting him claim me as if I belonged.
What the hell was I doing?
I wrenched free, gasping, sucking in air that suddenly tasted like shame and panic. I stumbled back, looking up and up at Omvar, looming in the light, his face half-shadowed, half-fire. His eyes still burned gold, pupils huge with wanting, tail coiled around my leg possessively.
How could I kiss him? How could I want him to touch me?
The panic finally snapped the thread. My body moved before my mind could stop it. I ripped my leg free, spun, and darted away.
“Reika—”
His voice, ragged with confusion and something deeper, chased me down the stone hall, but I left him behind.
I ran, feet slapping, lungs burning, eyes blurring, away from him, away from myself, away from everything I had just admitted, even for a second, to wanting.
7
OMVAR
I was her monster.
The thought was a parasite, burrowing behind my eyes, gnawing through the quiet hours after the city’s fever heat bled out and left the stone cold against my scales. I did not see Reika again—not after she ripped herself away, not after the brand of that kiss. It was hers, fierce and wild and broken, a last act of defiance before the shame crashed down and she fled. I had stood there, my throat tight with her name, knowing I was the last thing she needed. Wanting anyway.
Now all I had left was the sour taste of her memory on my tongue, the scorch of her scent in my lungs.
I hated myself for wanting. Hated myself more for being the reason she ran. I was no fool. To taste her once was a blessing I had forfeited a thousand times over. To ask for more would be a gift I did not deserve.
So I did what I had always done when the shame came crawling: went in search of penance.
Scalvaris was forever hungry, demanding bodies to guard its borders against the desert’s teeth. The surface patrols were a brutal exchange, warriors trading safety for honor, their wings thrown to the wind as their eyes peeled for enemy blades. No onevolunteered without incentive. The twin suns did not forgive. The red waste would strip your scales and bake your flesh before an enemy blade ever touched you. And if that didn’t kill you, the boredom would bleed you dry.
I volunteered.
I stood at the flight shaft’s edge, talons digging into blasted stone, felt the pulse of life far below. My scales drank the suns’ fury, every old scar a ghost of remembered pain.
I welcomed it. I pulled the insignia of Scalvaris tight, a thin strip of battered leather laced with a shard of heat crystal. It was barely earned, barely respected. The stone hummed faintly, a pathetic glimmer against the fire in my gut. Who would see me as anything but Ignarath’s mangled hound?
I launched myself anyway. My wings spread open, caught the first hot updraft, and soared above the city that would never claim me.
Base camp was a ruin of sun-bleached boulders and gear half-swallowed by volcanic dust. Water skins hung from a leaning spike, their shadows short and sharp, leaking the very promise of relief. The suns were climbing, turning every rock into a forge. The air itself was a weapon, a wavering distortion that promised to blister tongues and split open scales.
Nyx was already waiting, parked with casual arrogance atop a rock as if he owned the wasteland. His stormy scales caught the sun in fractured, ruthless light. He wore his command like a second skin.
