Page 36 of Davoren
The thought crystallized with perfect clarity, cutting through panic and fear like a blade through silk. Yes, I wanted Davoren here, wanted his protection and his fury and his ancient power turned against these fools who dared touch what was his. But wanting and needing were different things.
I stopped fighting against their grip and went still, letting them think the ice had won. The one reaching for my collar leaned closer, confident in my submission, his fingers working at the clasp with focused attention.
The power that lived beneath my skin wasn't just dragon fire borrowed from my mate—it was mine, written into every transformed cell, encoded in the golden lines that decorated my flesh like war paint. I'd been so focused on what Davoren had given me that I'd forgotten what I'd become.
I drew on that power now, not reaching for it but simply acknowledging it, letting it rise from my core like lava finding a vent. My skin began to heat—not gradually but with the sudden intensity of metal thrust into a forge. The golden linesblazed from dim embers to burning brands in the space between heartbeats.
The attacker holding the ice artifact screamed first. The shard was pressed directly against my throat, and when my skin temperature spiked past what human flesh could achieve, his hand bore the brunt of it. Even through whatever protective magic he wore, the heat was too much. The ice artifact fell, hitting the alley's stone floor with a sound like breaking crystal.
The moment it left my skin, the bond roared back to life with the force of a dam bursting.
Davoren's awareness slammed into me with enough power to make my knees buckle, but I used the motion, letting it drop me low enough to drive my elbow back into the stomach of the man behind me. He doubled over, gasping, and I spun in his loosened grip, bringing my knee up into his face with the kind of force my transformed body could generate. Bone crunched. Blood splattered across volcanic glass. He went down and didn't get back up.
The one who'd been reaching for my collar stumbled backward, his hands coming up in a defensive gesture that might have worked against a human opponent. But I wasn't human anymore. I caught his wrist as he tried to ward me off, and with the enhanced strength that let me walk through dragon paths and survive in the heart of a volcano, I twisted.
The snap was audible even over his scream.
His wrist bent at an angle that anatomy never intended, and he dropped to his knees, cradling the broken limb against his chest. Through the fully restored bond, I felt Davoren's location lock onto mine with laser precision, felt his fury transform from unfocused rage to targeted lethality. He was coming, moving through the festival crowd like death itself, but the fight wasn't over.
The third attacker, the leader who'd called me a pet, had recovered from his burns enough to draw a blade. Not steel—that would have been almost insulting. This was black ice shaped into killing intent, a weapon that trailed frost in the warm air, that promised the kind of cold that stopped hearts and froze blood in veins.
He lunged with the skill of someone who'd trained for decades, the blade aimed for the spot between my ribs where it would slide into my heart. A killing blow, delivered with professional precision.
I caught it in my bare hand.
The blade should have pierced straight through my palm. Should have frozen my blood on contact. Should have done exactly what it was designed to do. Instead, it met skin that burned with the heat of the mountain's heart, flesh that had been transformed in a caldera where lava breathed and stars watched. The ice exploded into steam with a sound like screaming, the rapid expansion sending shards of rapidly melting ice in every direction.
The attacker jerked back, but not fast enough. The steam scalded his face and hands, sending him stumbling into the alley wall with cries of pain that satisfied something primitive in my chest. He tried to run, but his eyes were swollen shut from the burns, and he managed only a few staggering steps before crashing into a pile of festival debris.
I stood in the center of the alley, breathing hard, my skin still glowing with heat that made the air shimmer around me. Three trained killers lay groaning or unconscious at my feet. The ice artifact lay in pieces where it had shattered against stone. My dress was torn but I was unharmed, my collar still secure at my throat, my golden marks blazing with light that turned the narrow alley into something from a fever dream.
This was what I could do.
Through the bond, I felt Davoren's approach like a storm front moving in—all barely contained violence and protective fury. But underneath that, pulsing with its own life, was something else: pride. Pure, undiluted pride at what I'd done, at what I'd become, at the mate who didn't need saving because she'd already saved herself.
He arrived like a natural disaster given purpose, the alley's entrance suddenly filled with ancient fury compressed into human shape. The temperature spiked so dramatically that the volcanic glass walls began to sing—a high, crystalline note that spoke of stone pushed to its limits. His eyes weren't ember anymore but molten gold, and for a moment I saw through the human glamour to the dragon beneath, scales and flame and death barely contained by will alone.
Then he saw me standing there, unharmed amid the carnage, and the transformation in his expression made my chest tight with emotion I couldn't name.
The fury didn't disappear—it was still there, radiating from him in waves that made the air itself seem to recoil. But it moved aside to make room for something else: a pride so profound it took my breath away. Through our bond, it crashed into me with the force of a revelation. Not pride that I'd survived, but pride that I'd triumphed. That I'd taken three trained killers and left them broken at my feet without needing rescue.
"I'm okay," I said, catching his hands in mine before he could continue his inspection. "Davoren, I'm not hurt. I handled it."
"You handled it," he repeated, and his voice carried so many harmonics I could barely parse them all—pride, fury, love, awe, and underneath everything a possessive satisfaction that made my marks pulse brighter. His thumb traced my cheekbone with devastating gentleness. "My fierce little one. My warrior mate."
His attention shifted to the scene around us, and I watched his expression sharpen from concern to assessment. He cataloguedeverything with the precision of someone who'd seen centuries of violence—the shattered ice artifact, the blood patterns on stone, the way the attackers had fallen. Through the bond, I felt him reconstructing the fight from the evidence, understanding exactly what I'd done and how I'd done it.
"You superheated your skin," he said, nudging the artifact's remains with his foot. "Burned through ice magic with pure thermal generation. That's not something I taught you."
"I didn't know I could do it until I did," I admitted. "I just knew I wasn't going to let them take me. Wasn't going to be anyone's pet."
The word 'pet' made his eyes flare brighter, and the attacker who'd been crawling toward the exit whimpered as Davoren's attention fell on him. The Dragon Lord moved with that inhuman grace, crouching beside the burned man with the kind of careful control that was more terrifying than explosive rage would have been.
"You called her pet," Davoren said conversationally, though his voice carried undertones that made my bones ache. "You tried to steal what is mine. Who sent you?"
The man's silence lasted exactly as long as it took for Davoren to rest one finger against his burned shoulder. Just a touch, but the man screamed as dragon heat met damaged flesh.
"The Ice Master," he gasped out, words tumbling over each other in his haste to answer. "Lord Sereis of the Northern Range. He said—he said you'd grown soft, taking a human mate. Said she'd be your weakness."
