Page 98 of House of Ashes

Rhylan let out a rumbling growl, cast a glance at the saddle we’d hurriedly affixed to him, and snorted. I had no idea what that meant, until he scooped me up in his claws, cupping me in a carefully-formed cage, and took flight.

And I appreciated it. I curled up in his grasp, my limbs aching from hauling bodies, my chest aching from hacking up smoke and soot. The last thing I wanted to do now was sit in a saddle and fake any sort of confidence.

I didn’t open my eyes again until he touched down through Jhazra’s dragon door. He deposited me gently on a woven rug, and shifted back into his soot-streaked male form.

“Come with me,” he said, eyes still glittering in a way that said he was on edge. He walked on two legs now, but the scales still covered most of his skin, an incessant, dizzying shift between flesh and dragonhide.

He’d just lost his people to an attack; of course he was walking a fine line. No dragon could hold back from the urge to destroy whatever had harmed their territory or their people.

I needed to be here, needed to be a pillar of stone he could lean on. Unbending, unbreaking, unyielding.

He led me down into the eyrie, and as I pushed my door open, he came in on my heels. Close enough that I felt the heat of his skin against my back.

I couldn’t think like that. Not right now. “Whatever you need, I’m h—” I started to say, wanting to give him whatever small comfort I could, but Rhylan pushed my door shut firmly and took my face in his hands.

He kissed me hard, the taste of blood and smoke between us, the harsh press of his lips full of hunger.

Without thinking, wanting to forget everything I’d just seen, wanting just a small sliver of time in which I wasn’t terrified or grieving, I wrapped my arms around his neck. Met his lips with force of my own, nipping his lower lip and drawing a groan out of him.

His hands tangled in my hair, pulling my head back, exposing my neck to him. He didn’t give a damn about the soot, the blood, the sweat; teeth grazed my throat, and he kissed a trail from the hollow to my jaw.

“I don’t want to do this alone, Sera,” he breathed against the pulse racing in my throat. “I don’t want to be alone.”

Fire and blood…I still tasted ash and dragon flame when I reclaimed his mouth, silencing him.

“You’re not alone,” I whispered against his lips, kissing, biting. “I’m right here.”

He pushed me backward and I let him, feeling the slither of scales under my hands, the warmth of skin. I wanted more, to silence the screaming in my head, to take happiness with both hands for once in my life…

My knees hit the bed and I fell back, taking Rhylan’s full weight over me. He kissed like he was dying, like this was the last time he would ever touch someone, like I was just as much an escape for him as he was for me.

He arched over me and I felt his thick, hard shaft against my thigh. The sound he made when I moved against him sent heat flaring through me, a demand to strip away every layer between us.

Rhylan laced his fingers in mine, pinning my hand above my head. He stopped kissing me for a moment, staring down at my face like he was reading something there.

“What if it wasn’t fake?” he asked hoarsely. “What if everything was real?”

I gazed up at him, the heat still licking at my veins, driving me towards something…something I had sworn not to do. I couldn’t touch him like this. It was forbidden.

“I…” My voice died out as he kissed me again, desperate and driving.

“You could be mine, and I could be yours.” He nuzzled my ear, gently bit my lobe, traced burning kisses across the silver scales on my cheekbone. “What if we belonged to each other, if all of this was yours, too?”

I pushed back against the primal instinct shrieking at me to say yes, to take him, to make good on what he offered now. To make the bond and lighten his burdens, to carry some of the load that weighed him down.

To be his undying, eternal bond, to support him through ashes and embers and flames.

“You’re grieving,” I whispered. “You only think this because…because of grief.”

Rhylan had just seen his own people annihilated. He wasn’t just hurt, he had been flayed open, and now would have to live with knowing the horror of their last moments, knowing that he couldn’t save them.

He wasn’t in his right mind.

“No.” He breathed the word in my word, his cheek pressed against mine. “Not just grief. I don’t want to be alone…not in my head. I want you with me, I want to feel what you feel, I want to know…that I’m yours. That when I need you, it’s all real.”

The desire in me didn’t die, but the coolness in my mind had detached from everything else. From the primal instinct, from my own wants.

This must stop now, or I would lose myself to the pull of the dragon atop me.

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