Chapter 45: Lead With The Part Where I Saved You

The portal spat her into open sky.

No ground. Just cold air rushing past her body at a speed that turned the world into a smear of grey cloud and distant earth.

She fell.

Fifteen hundred feet below her there was snow and mountains.

Kael came through the portal two seconds after she did.

His boots cleared the closing edge, and the fae realm snapped shut behind him with the wet sound of a wound sealing. He hit open air, registered the altitude, registered the woman falling three hundred feet below him, and shifted.

The black dragon tore out of his human. Iron eyes locked onto her with the precision of a predator who had calculated a dive ten thousand times and had never missed.

He folded his wings and dropped.

Terminal velocity for a black dragon was faster than anything with mass had a right to move. The wind screamed across his scales. The distance between them closed in seconds, three hundred feet to two hundred, two hundred to one hundred, one hundred to fifty.

His claws closed around her at four hundred feet above the treeline.

The contact was careful. One claw cradling her torso, the other supporting her legs, the grip of a creature whose talons could shear through stone but whose instinct said fragile and meant it.

He leveled out. Wings spreading wide, catching the mountain thermals, converting the dive into a glide that bought him time to think.

She was burning. The fever had climbed past the point where his human form had been absorbing it in the cave.

Kael scanned the mountain range below, looking for shelter, looking for anything that would get them out of the wind and give him room to work.

A ridge. East face. A dark mouth cut into the granite, wide enough for a dragon to land beside and narrow enough to defend. Cave or crevice, he could not tell from altitude, and did not care.

He banked.

The landing shook snow from the ledge in sheets. His claws set her down on the stone, and he shifted back to human form before the snow had settled.

He knelt beside her. Two fingers to her throat. The pulse was there, fast and thready, a heartbeat running a race it was losing. Her skin was so hot that his fingertips reddened on contact.

"Wolf girl. Can you hear me?"

Nothing. Her eyes were closed. He pulled his hand back. Looked at his reddened fingers, then back at her.

The cave was shallow, fifteen feet deep, angled enough to block the wind. Snow had drifted against the far wall, and the stone floor was dry where the overhang protected it. Adequate. Cold. Both of those worked in her favor.

He picked her up and carried her inside. Her body radiated heat in waves that he could feel through his clothing, each pulse synced to that erratic heartbeat, each one hotter than the last. The gold light under her skin had dimmed to a faint glow, concentrated around her sternum. The flame was consolidating. Pulling inward. Preparing to burn through whatever it found at the center.

He had seen this on the mountain. Tormund had explained it once, years ago, when Kael had been young enough to listen and old enough to understand: the flame calibrated with the body over days, and the bonded absorbs the excess heat. Merge fevers were as serious as the merge itself. But he hadn’t fully understood it until now.

The irony was so precise it felt engineered.

He set her on the dry stone. Her body curled inward on reflex, knees drawing up, arms pulling tight against her chest.

His jaw worked.

"For the record," he said to an unconscious woman on a cave floor, "I want you to know that I am aware this is a terrible idea. I am also aware that the alternatives are worse, which is the only reason this is happening. If you remember any of this, and I strongly suspect you will not, I would appreciate it if you led with the part where I saved your life and not the part where I removed your clothing."

He exhaled through his teeth. Then he moved.

Her fire suit came off in pieces. The flame merge had already destroyed most of it, charred patches and melted seams leaving gaps that made the removal more demolition than undressing. He worked fast, the hands of a field medic more than a man, pulling fabric away from burned skin where it had fused and cutting through what would not pull.

"Fuck... why would Maddox let you do this...." he breathed, staring in disbelief.

He stripped her to undergarments and stopped. The heat that hit him from her bare skin was staggering. It poured off her in visible waves, the air above her body shimmering the way air shimmered above desert sand.

His dragon pushed. Hard. The voice was louder now, insistent.

Skin. Now. She dies if you wait.

He knew.

He pulled his own clothing off and lowered himself beside her. The stone was cold against his bare back. He pulled her against his chest, her spine to his sternum, her body curving into the space his body made, and the heat hit him in a wave that whited out his vision for one full second.

The Drakencrest flame inside her recognized him.

It moved the way it had moved on the mountain. Willingly. Eagerly. Pouring out of her and into him through every point of contact, the gold fire finding his blood and rushing toward it with the desperate recognition of a flame that had been trapped inside a body too small to hold it.

Her temperature dropped by two degrees in the first thirty seconds. Three more in the next minute. Her breathing, and erratic pulse steadied. All of her muscles unclenched by fractions, the rigid curl of her body loosening against his chest.

His arm tightened around her waist. The contact was necessary, every inch of skin against skin pulling more heat, bringing her temperature closer to survivable.

The gold light brightened. The flame, no longer consolidating, no longer preparing to consume, spread back outward through her body in slow rivers of warmth that followed her veins and settled into her limbs.

She made a sound. Quiet. Involuntary. The same sound she had made on the mountain when the burning stopped.

His dragon rumbled

She was choosing nothing. Her body said: this blood carries the right flame, this skin pulls the fever, lean in. Her hips settled into the curve of his. Her head tilted, and her cheek rested against his arm, and the gold light from her skin wrapped around them both in a cocoon of warmth that turned the frozen cave into something that felt, from the outside, like a hearth.

Kael stared at the cave ceiling. His jaw was locked so tight the muscles in his neck stood out in cords.

His body was responding. He could feel it happening with the same detachment with which he had observed it on the dragon during the battle, the same progression, the same loss of control, the same gravitational pull toward a woman who was doing nothing except existing against his skin.

His cock was hard. Had been since the first wave of heat transferred. A physiological reality he could not override.

She shifted against him. A small movement. Her hips pressing backward in a motion that was pure reflex, pure heat-seeking, the body’s attempt to maximize contact with the source of relief.

His breath left him in a sound he did not recognize as his own.

His dragon. Louder than it had been on the battlefield. Louder than it had been in years. The voice of an animal that had been silent for a decade and was making up for it with a vocabulary escalating in volume.

Take. Ours. Mate.

His fangs extended. He felt them drop, felt the points press against the inside of his lip, felt his jaw distend a fraction of an inch toward the marking threshold.

His mouth was at her neck. Her pulse was right there, visible, the vein running close to the surface in the exact spot where a mark would take. His fangs were dripping with mating venom. He dragged them down the side of her neck, scraping over the frantic beat of her pulse.

He could taste her. Salt. Gold. Heat. Something underneath all of it that his dragon identified as home and his brain identified as catastrophically dangerous.

His hand slid down her stomach the same way it had on the back of the dragon: possessive, uninvited, unstoppable. His fingers dipped between her thighs, and he groaned at how perfect she felt.

"Fuck..."

His fangs grazed her skin again. The lightest touch. The kind that left no mark and would leave no evidence. The kind that, if he let it continue for one more second, would become the kind that left a permanent biological claim on a woman who belonged to his brother.

His hand moved away from her. Slowly. Trembling in a way his hands had never trembled in his life, through negotiations and assassinations.

He brought his hand to his own mouth.

He bit down.

The pain was immediate and clarifying. His fangs pierced the meat of his palm, punching through skin and muscle, and the venom that should have entered her bloodstream entered his own. It burned.

He held the bite for three full seconds. Long enough for the pain to override the drive. Long enough for his fangs to retract on their own because the signal from his nervous system said wrong target with enough force to override the signal from his dragon that said right woman.

He pulled his hand away from his mouth. Blood ran down his wrist and dripped onto the stone. The bite marks were deep. Four punctures, two from upper fangs, two from lower, arranged in the precise pattern that would have been on her neck.

His breathing was ragged. His cock was still hard. He ignored it.

He adjusted his grip on her. Arm around her waist. Skin against skin. The fever still transferring, slower now, the worst of it past. Her temperature was dropping toward something survivable, and her breathing had settled into the rhythm of deep, unconscious sleep.

He pressed his forehead against the back of her skull. His blood smeared into her white hair, a small stain of red against gold-tinted white.

"You’re asleep. I’m bleeding. My dragon is purring. This is the worst first date I’ve ever been on and I’ve been on some terrible ones."

His voice was hoarse. Wrecked. A man who had just fought a war with himself.

He closed his eyes, held a woman who would probably kill him when she woke up, and slept better than he had in ten years.