Page 36 of Beast of Blood and Ash
Shame, hot and thick, rose in my throat. My claws bit into my palms. “I did what I could to protect you.”
I made myself meet her gaze, laying out the truth stone by stone, each admission worse than the last. “Extra food, when I could get it. Cleaner water. I made sure the worst of the guards, the ones who hurt for sport, never worked your corridor again. I took two of them out. Made it look like a drunken brawl.” My voice had gone flat, defensive. Empty. She’d been locked in a cage, and all I could offer was cleaner water and a sliver of chance. “I created an opening in the patrols. I was coming to get you out.”
I had to move, to pace, or I might explode with the emotion simmering underneath.
“I should have torn down the walls of that pit to reach you. And I didn’t. For that, I have no excuse.”
She sucked a breath through her teeth. I watched understanding flicker in her eyes.
The unlocked door, the food, the moments of calm she knew she couldn’t trust in that place. Every tiny mercy, revealed. The ghost in the dark, the one she’d never seen, now stood before her as flesh and scale and shame.
She took a shaky step closer. Her courage was a living thing in the curl of her hands, the rigid set of her jaw.
“But why?” The question was a whisper, wrecked and fierce, yet it echoed around the bare chamber as if the stone itself demanded an answer. “Why risk everything?”
The question ripped me open.
Because you are my mate. Because you are the only hope I have left.
But the words were a chain. Sacred to my kind, but for her, just another cage.
I couldn’t stop myself from taking a half step forward, closing the distance. I kept my hands open, palms out. Surrender was written in every line of my monstrous form. There was nothing left but the truth.
“Because you are my mate,” I said.
The word rang in the air like a struck bell. Sacred. Damning. Everything I’d tried not to say.
She flinched, a tremor that ran through her as if the word itself were a brand searing her skin.
I struggled to explain, my voice raw. “It’s not just biology. It’s a pull. A certainty in my blood. I knew you the moment I saw you, the first time I caught your scent in that pit. It’s why I defected. Why I tracked you here. It’s the reason I would burn this city to nothing to keep you safe.”
I let her see it all: the desperation, the hunger, the shame.
“I would have died in Ignarath, but I couldn’t let Skorai have you. So I watched. I waited. I did what little I could. It was never enough.”
I looked at her then, really looked, the bond a line of acid under my scales. “I gave you the tools. The unlocked door. I gave you everything I could. If you want my life, you can have it.”
I braced for the blow.
She choked on a sound, her eyes glossing over, tears brimming but not yet falling. Her body trembled, caught between reaching for me and recoiling. I saw it all in her face. Shock, disbelief, old wounds cracking open, and something helpless and incandescent fought its way out.
“So this is all just … biological imperative?”
Something snapped inside me. “No. Never. Not just that.”
My denial came out as a ragged snarl. I let every defense I had fall at her feet. “You are not a compulsion. You are not just fate. I would choose you. In any world, any body, any life. It’s you. It has always been you.”
She took a step, then another, until she stood directly before me. The space between us was charged, the heat a living thing. My chest ached with a pain so sharp I thought it might split wide open.
Her hands lifted, trembling, and hung in the air between us. Not a caress, not a refusal. Her face was a ruin of pain and hope, the ghost of her old life warring with the burning edge of something new.
I remained perfectly still. Open. Waiting. I would not touch her until she chose. I would not be her monster. Not now.
She was the one who moved.
Her hands lifted, hovering in the air between us. Not to push me away. Not to pull me closer. Just … there. A question.
One I couldn’t answer alone.
