Chapter 5 CHAPTER 5

VALDRIS'S POV

I could not stop looking at her.

That was the problem. That had been the problem since the moment she walked through the door and my entire nervous system decided three hundred years of discipline was no longer relevant.

She stood in the centre of my throne room with her hands at her sides and those yellow eyes fixed on me like she was already deciding where to aim. The fury coming off her wasn't something she was performing. It wasn't the strategic anger of someone frightened and reaching for something to stand behind. It was old. Settled. The kind of rage that had been living in a person long enough to become part of their bone structure.

I gripped the arm of the throne.

Every instinct I possessed was pulling toward her with a force that had no interest in reason. The dragon in me had found what it had been waiting for and it did not care even slightly about the timing. It did not care about the collar at her throat or the war at my doorstep or the forty-seven reasons why what it wanted was catastrophically ill-advised.

It wanted to move.

I closed my eyes.

Breathed in slowly. Held it. Let it out.

The pull didn't disappear. It never disappeared — I was beginning to understand that it never would. But it receded enough that I could think around the edges of it, and thinking was what the situation required.

I opened my eyes.

She hadn't moved. Still watching me with that burning gaze, still radiating enough heat to make the air between us feel different from the air in the rest of the room.

Her burgundy hair had come loose around her face. There was a bruise darkening along her cheekbone that made something in me go very still and very dangerous every time I looked at it directly, so I was trying not to look at it directly.

A witch.

Of all the things — a witch. My fated mate, the person the bond had chosen for me out of every living soul in the known world, was a witch. Not a dragon shifter. Not someone whose blood would recognise the bond and know instinctively what it meant. A witch. Specifically the witch queen. Specifically the weapon I had spent six years engineering the capture of. Specifically the daughter of the woman I had taken six years before that.

In eons of recorded dragon history there was not one documented case — not one — of a mate bond forming between a dragon shifter and another species. Not one text. Not one elder's account. Not one whispered exception to the rule that it was always dragon to dragon, had always been dragon to dragon, would always be dragon to dragon because that was simply the nature of the thing.

Apparently the gods had decided three hundred years of war wasn't sufficient entertainment and had chosen to make things interesting.

I looked at her standing there in the centre of my throne room, collared and stripped and shaking with a fury she was holding by the thinnest thread, and tried to think about what this meant in practical terms.

I came up with nothing useful because the dragon kept interrupting with opinions that were not helpful.

I needed to speak to her.

I needed to think straight first.

I breathed again, slower this time. Then I broke the silence.

"Your name," I said.

She looked at me like I had said something deeply offensive. "You sent an army to take me and you don't know my name."

"I know your title. I'm asking for your name."

A long beat. Those yellow eyes didn't move from mine, measuring something, deciding something.

"Aurora," she said finally.

"Aurora." I let it settle for a moment. "I want you to understand that what happened to your coven—"

"Don't." The word came out quiet, edged with steel "Don't tell me what it was. I was there. I watched it burn. I watched my people run. Don't explain my own night to me."

"There are things about this situation that you don't have the full picture of—"

"Where is my mother?"

The question came out of her like something she had been holding in her chest for six years and had finally decided she was done holding.

"Where is she." Quieter this time. Dangerously quiet. "Six years. Six years and not a word, not a sign, nothing. My father burned himself out looking for her. I stood at his grave when I was twenty one years old, alone, and I want you to look me in the eye and tell me where she is."

"That is something we will discuss. At length. But not—"

"Now." She took one step forward. The collar was suppressing her power but it was doing nothing to whatever was happening in those eyes. "We discuss it now. You took her from a parley. A parley she walked into believing your people had honour. She went in good faith and you took her and I want to know what you did with her."

"Aurora—"

"Don't say my name like that." Something cracked in her voice. "Don't say it like you have any right to it. You're a monster. You are exactly what every story ever told about you said you were and I stood in front of my council for a year defending the idea that there might be more to this war than — " She stopped. Jaw tight. "You got to my brother. I don't know what you said to him or what you dangled in front of him but you found the crack in him and you used it and you turned him against me and I need you to understand that I will never—"

"I did not turn your brother against you."

The silence that followed was a different texture than the one before it.

"You're lying," she said.

"I'm not."

"Cael would not—"

"Cael did." I held her gaze. "He made contact through an intermediary eight months ago. His proposal. His terms. His idea. I did not approach him, did not seek him, did not whisper a single word in his ear that he had not first asked to hear." I paused. "What your brother did, Aurora, he did entirely on his own."

"You still took the deal," she gritted her teeth, her fists clenched as tight as a vice.

"Yes."

"You still sent them. You still let them take me. You still—"

"Yes." I didn't round the edges of it. "Every choice I made I made because the alternative is a world that Malachar, The Demon Monarch finishes. Your coven. This empire. Every living thing between the south and the northern sea. What is coming does not negotiate. It does not stop at borders or blood or anything else. It consumes and it moves on and it has been doing so for three centuries while the rest of the world argued about whether it was real."

"Don't use your war to justify what you did to my family."

"It is your war too—"

"You don't get to tell me what my war is." Her voice cracked on the last word. "You took my mother. You took her and my father died looking for her and I buried him alone and held a coven together alone and fought a war I didn't start alone and then when I had finally—" She stopped. Pressed her teeth together. "You put this thing around my neck." Her hand came up and touched the collar, just briefly, and the look on her face when she felt it was the worst thing I had seen in a very long time. "In my own home. In front of my own people."

I said nothing.

Because there was nothing to say to that. It was true. All of it was true and smoothing it over with strategy would be an insult to both of us.

"Take it off," she said.

"No."

"Take it off." One more step forward. She was close enough now that I could see the exact shade of those yellow eyes — the way they burned brighter at the centre, like the hottest part of a flame. "Take it off and let's see what happens. Let's see if I don't pour every piece of power I have left into burning you where you sit. Let's see if I don't spend my life right here, right now, gladly, to put you in the ground." Her hands were shaking at her sides with the sheer force of everything she was containing. "You want to know what I'm capable of? Take it off. Find out."

I looked at her.

Really looked.

At the bruise on her cheekbone and the ash still caught in her hair and the collar at her throat that I had put there and the yellow eyes that had not wavered once — not when Aldric brought her in, not when she found herself alone with me, not in this entire conversation that had been designed, whether she knew it or not, to take the fight out of her. It hadn't. Nothing had.

She was standing in the throne room of the man she hated most in the world, stripped of her power, having lost everything in the span of a single night, and she was shaking with rage and grief and exhaustion and she was still — still — looking me dead in the eye and meaning every single word.

Something moved through my chest.

I locked it down before it reached my face.

"I know you would," I said quietly

She blinked.

"I know exactly what you would do," I said. "I have no doubt about it at all."

I held her gaze across the space between us.

"And that is precisely why the collar stays on."