"Now," he said, "it's just us."
I didn't resist when he pinched the hem of my tunic and peeled it from my body in a single, slow movement. My hair snagged on a broken horn, and before I could flinch, Ash freed it with his tongue. The taste of blood and black iron was everywhere. I tasted him in the marrow of my teeth.
Ash was too big impossibly so and the logistics of our bodies were instantly comical. His hands slid under my hips and he lifted me, so when my ankles locked around his waist we matched. He could have staked me against the wall but he chose the furs by the fire, settling us amid the blood-splattered warmth like a dragon nesting its first, rare egg.
Ash's mouth grazed my collarbone, following each line of tendon, and only when my body started to shake did I realize it was laughter. My laughter, high and cracked, and so unlike anything I had ever allowed myself.
"I'm not like them," Ash murmured, so softly even my fox ears barely caught it.
"I know," I said, and wrapped myself around his hunger, softer than a promise, sharper than a kill.
He didn't devour. He didn't ravage, didn't take, though the outline of his restraint pressed against my ribs and made a cage worth living inside. He kissed under my jaw, then behind my ear, then the inside of my wrist where the pulse ran fastest.
No one had ever explained to me the advantages of being claimed by a dragon. No one had described the drag of tongue over skin as anything more than forfeiture. The reality: his tongue laved over my bite, licking into the memory of it, and every place his mouth left was more tender than the last.
When he entered me, he did it with a shudder. The heat of him rolled through me in a pulse, impossibly deep and slow no tearing, just the endless, molten insistence that I could hold it, that I could take it, because he asked nothing I hadn't offered already.
My hands hooked around the ridges of his horns, rooting myself. His hips rolled and the world squeezed down to the wet sound of our bodies, the sticky heat of blood and sweat and something older, sacred, that lived in the marrow of his kind. His name tumbled out of me in gasps, each time a little rawer. "Ash. Ash." Like a warning. Like a surrender.
He carried me, never withdrawing, slinging my weight with careless, effortless possession. My back hit the stone table so lightly I barely registered its chill.
Ash kissed down my chest to the hollow above my heart, his teeth bracketing the shape of it as if measuring what he could take and what he would leave. "You know what I was before you," he rumbled, voice reverberating into my bones.
"A legend."
"A mistake." His hands bracketed my ribs, reverent, as if to say no, as if to say I was not a mistake. "You are not what I expected."
Something wild and animal in me seized that phrase and gnawed at it. I wanted to ask what he saw, what he wanted from me now that he'd tasted every inch of my soft underbelly. But his next thrust cut off every question. The table slid several feet on the flagstones; he caught it with a palm, then caught me when I tried to fall apart.
I locked my limbs around him, desperate to consume as much of him as he did me. "You'll break me," I managed, but there was pleasure in the threat.
"You would not be here if you broke," he answered, low and absolute.
Each time he finished, the tempo changed: a shift to the high backed chair, where he bent me over, hands tangled in my hair until I moaned, until I screamed. To the bearskin where he knelt and fucked me slow enough to make me sob. To the ledge above the fire, where he pinned my wrists and licked the tears from my cheeks, murmuring, "Dragon's mate," over and over until it sounded like a prayer.
Hours passed inside a hunger I didn't understand, let alone recognize as my own. He worshipped every part of me: the curve of my hip, the hollow of my ankle, the backs of my knees where I was most ticklish and weak. And when I fell asleep briefly, always briefly his breath woke me with the words:
"More than a future." Kiss, bite, claim. "More than a womb." Lick, thrust, singe. "I want you, only you."
When I could do nothing but gasp, when my body shook under his, he gathered me in his lap like a thing too precious for the earth, and cradled me until the world reassembled itself in the shadow of his arms.
Afterward, I drifted in and out, found myself wrapped in wolf pelts and the sticky, spent scent of us. Ash traced the line of my jaw with a claw that could have gutted me, but never did.
"You never told me what you want," he said, voice a raw scrape. "Not from the world. From me."
Her words tumbled out raw and unvarnished. "Mmm, to be wanted truly wanted." She swallowed hard, voice cracking. "Not as a vessel for what I create, but for the woman beneath it all."
He stared at me, pupils blown wide, expression untranslatable. "I have always wanted you. Even before I knew your name."
He held me, for once, like he never intended to let me go.
And in the raw, feral dark I believed him.
… Maybe
The system might have brought me here to be the dragon's queen, but my destiny stretched far beyond one territory. I would journey across the beast world, sampling its most powerful males, leaving behind children who would strengthen the realm. I'd be remembered in their bloodlines, but never confined to a single den.