Page 39 of The Dragon 2
She didn’t doubt her father.
The King’s court had been known to cage even Nobles who showed wild or unapproved forms of magic.
But what would they do to a Lowly girl whose power wasn’t just strong, but seductive?
The kind of power that made even a dragon pause in midflight.
The kind of power that made her body cry out with craving.
The kind of power that tasted like joy on the tongue and left her soaked between the thighs.
She rose and looked up again—bolder now—and remembered the vision that she could not unsee. That moment. . .right before he flew away, he had shifted midair. She had thought it was just another pass over the city, but then she’d seenit.
All of him.
She hadn’t understood what she was seeing at first—a thick, scaled bulging length pressing against his underbelly, heavy and impossibly hard.
Did I imagine some of it? Was that his. . .love blade?
She’d never seen a human man’s love blade, but there’d been pictures in a book that her mother had kept hidden in the back of her sewing desk.
I think it was Korin’s love blade. What else could it have been?
The image of it burned in her mind—massive, dark-gold, veined with molten lines, glistening at the tip like it ached for her cold wetness.
A bolt of heat shot through her abdomen, down to the slick center of her body.
But the way Korin had turned, the way his wings had arched just enough to frame his form, as if sayingsee me—that surely had not been an accident.
It must have been a display.
No. Surely Korin wasn’t trying to show me his love blade.
Dragons could not feel desire.
Much less reveal it.
Still, she licked her lips, and her breath quickened.
Why did he do it? And why can’t I stop imagining it in my mind?
Soon she gathered her strength, calmed herself enough, and walked off.
Get home before anyone notices a Lowly is in the wrong part of the Kingdom.
Each step forward made her body ache with exhaustion, but she moved anyway. The aftershocks of power still simmered beneath her skin. Her limbs thrummed.
She rounded the charred remains of the tavern and stepped onto the main road that was now a ruin of ash and blood, carved into the bones of the city like a fresh wound.
The buildings, once proud with sculpted lintels and silver-tipped eaves, now sagged and leaned like old drunkards in mourning, their timbers cracked, their stones split and steaming.
The cobblestones beneath her bare feet were blackened and warped, some melted together by dragon fire into twisted veins of glass.
And yet. . .above the ruin, the night sky had begun to soften.
The dragon’s trail—a molten ribbon slashed across the stars—still burned above her like a mark she alone could read.
Korin.
