Page 7 of The Dragon Warlord
And I get to.
Unless he rejects me once he finds out what he’s done.
PART ONE: BECOMING
1
Tristan
He smells like a damn dragonfly honeycake.Gods.That scent is going to kill me.
It’s a good thing that my three men are Elves, polyamorous by nature, and understand what ancient magic can do to a person. If I had to worry about touching River on top of everything else, I wouldn’t survive this.
River. The dragon I bit and made my omega.
A bunch of shite happened. I played with magic I didn’t understand. I opened the door for what turned out to be my dragon and failed to keep that part of myself from manifesting. One of the three loves of my life traveled to Mortouge—my home—to warn us all that his idiot brother and power-hungry father, tore open the veil, which is, like, the barrier between the world of the dead and the world of the living. He’d also come with the intention of “rescuing me”. Unfortunately for him, his family and my husband and fiancé’s family have been at war for pretty much forever. They thanked him for the warning by tossing him into the dungeon. Screechings—demonic skeletons from the pits of hell—wracked terror and destruction on the palace and then I was poisoned with dark wyvern venom by an emperor’s minion, which nearly killed me. Finally, I threw a tantrum, which triggered the shift. I told my men off, became a dragon, and ran away from home.
Arguably, not my finest moment.
Now I’m here. It’s one drama and into the next with me and I’m forced to admit that my life is turning out to be one long soap opera theatre, just like the ones Papa and I used to attend in Markaytia.
After being a dragon for a little while, I was bitten by a more dragon-y dragon. That is to say, he is a dragon with a lot more experience being a dragon than I have. Thousands of years. Tristan Kanes—yeah, like me, I’m his namesake—first Warlord of Markaytia, the one who supposedly turned into a dragon and flew away never to return is the dragon who bit me and bonded me to him for life.
Yep, that guy. Only that story was greatly contrived and exaggerated.
Still, if someone were to write three books about my life that would be the major fucking plot twist, hands down so I’ve got to applaud him for that, at least a little. I idolized the man. Read every book in all of Markaytia’s many libraries about him. Studied the craft of Warlording so that I could be just like him.
Now, he’s the terrible dragon lord and I would rather sleep in a bed of scorpions, or ride on a saddle of nails, or impale myself on my own sword—you get the idea—than be anything like him.
The first thing I’m doing when I get home is ride straight to Markaytia and burn every book about him. I’ll write new and more accurate ones.
I’m being kept in this place, Dragon Land I call it, under duress. That’s not the slightest bit exaggerated. The dragon lord’s bite bonded me to him and left a nasty raised scar on the right side of my neck. He’s proven its uses, which are mostly for control as far as I understand. If that weren’t enough, a metallic red collar has been permanently secured around my neck. It doesn’t have a lock. There’s no latch. It’s a seamless piece of metal that never come off. It’s also for control.
But I don’t have the luxury of worrying about any of that because I took my own person, River Kanes, the dragon lord’s youngest son and my animal brain thinks of little else. River and I have a blood bond as the dragon lord, and I do.
Everything was fine for a week. By fine, I mean that I could co-exist with River in what I consider to be a normal fashion. To think that the most shocking week of my life is now a week that I consider “the normal days” is baffling. My life is so far from anything anyone would construe as normal that it’s not funny.
But I digress.
Now, as if a coin has been flipped, the beast has returned and all it wants is River. My bones ache. My skin burns. I’m attuned to him in a way that borders on obsessive. No, itisobsessive. I deny myself for as long as I can, until the pain and the craving become intolerable. That’s when I allow myself to inhale his scent. Or graze his knuckles with mine. Or let my knee rest against his. Touch and proximity seem to be the only relief the bond will allow.
When I really can’t stand it, when I’ve suffered beyond endurance, I scoop him up so that he can bury his face in my neck, underneath the curtain of my hair. It’s not a perverse thing, it’s animalistic. The same way a cat rubs against your leg to declare you as their own.
He’s not a small man, but thankfully I’m larger and have new strength that allows me to pick him up when I need to.
Until today, it hadn’t presented as a sexual thing; at least during the time that I remember. Apparently, I’ve been storming around this place for two weeks, but I have no recollection of those weeks. Fuck, what did I do during those two weeks? I don’t even know that I’m not related to this man. I’m a direct descendant of Tristan Kanes and River is his son, but it’s been many thousands of years and dragon medicine says that there is no more familial relation between us at this point. Just a nominal one. For now, it’s a great way for me to force myself to keep as much distance as I can, which isn’t much, all thanks to the ancient bonding magic.
Each of my men has their own way of showing possession, and under particular circumstances can become possessive brutes themselves, but at the end of the day, they are okay with sharing me and they would understand this. It’s not much different from the way I cuddle with my brother-in-law, Diekin. Alrik (my soon-to-be second husband) ended the thing between the dungeon Master Strobavik and me—even though he was the one to order my lessons with Strobavik in the first place—when he didn’t have any claim on me. They were essentially sex slave lessons because Elves are kinky fuckers. Oh yeah, an important side note, my fiancé Alrik is also my Master, a style of relationship I was crazy enough to enter consensually. But anyway, no claim equals intense Elven jealousy. Once he felt confident that I was his, he gave me his blessing to be with another love of my life. No, not my first husband, whom I’m still married to and will be until one of us dies, but someone I hope will become my third husband.
Ugh, but that’s a whole other thing.
Anyway, I’m not worried about betraying them because they wouldn’t see this as a betrayal. I’m more concerned that my feelings are false. That it’s the ancient bonding magic making me feel this way—making us feel this way—and that if not for the bond, we wouldn’t want each other.
Because fuck do I want him. I woke up this morning and everything had changed overnight. I want to sink my cock so deep into his arse that it becomes part of him. Claim him. Own him in every way there is to be owned. Suck markings all over his body just because he’s mine.
But I won’t. I will not cross that line. I’m going to have to find a way through this suffering and ween myself from this unhealthy co-dependence I’m developing.
My first lesson as a dragon was learning that remaining in full animal form for too long is a bad idea. It’s why many dragons never shift back. In that state, it’s hard to convince a dragon that shifting to a form that’s so much smaller and weaker is desirable. Dragons favor strength. I was told that I was forced to shift back to my other form, which for me is Elf with a little human thrown in. The human part is the Markaytian part. I will always be Markaytian. Dragons are descendants of Markaytians and Markaytians are descendants of dragons.
