Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 45

Chapter 45: Lead With The Part Where I Saved You

The portal spat her into open sky.

No ground. Just cold air rushing past her body at a speed that turned the world into a smear of grey cloud and distant earth.

She fell.

Fifteen hundred feet below her there was snow and mountains.

Kael came through the portal two seconds after she did.

His boots cleared the closing edge, and the fae realm snapped shut behind him with the wet sound of a wound sealing. He hit open air, registered the altitude, registered the woman falling three hundred feet below him, and shifted.

The black dragon tore out of his human. Iron eyes locked onto her with the precision of a predator who had calculated a dive ten thousand times and had never missed.

He folded his wings and dropped.

Terminal velocity for a black dragon was faster than anything with mass had a right to move. The wind screamed across his scales. The distance between them closed in seconds, three hundred feet to two hundred, two hundred to one hundred, one hundred to fifty.

His claws closed around her at four hundred feet above the treeline.

The contact was careful. One claw cradling her torso, the other supporting her legs, the grip of a creature whose talons could shear through stone but whose instinct said fragile and meant it.

He leveled out. Wings spreading wide, catching the mountain thermals, converting the dive into a glide that bought him time to think.

She was burning. The fever had climbed past the point where his human form had been absorbing it in the cave.

Kael scanned the mountain range below, looking for shelter, looking for anything that would get them out of the wind and give him room to work.

A ridge. East face. A dark mouth cut into the granite, wide enough for a dragon to land beside and narrow enough to defend. Cave or crevice, he could not tell from altitude, and did not care.

He banked.

The landing shook snow from the ledge in sheets. His claws set her down on the stone, and he shifted back to human form before the snow had settled.

He knelt beside her. Two fingers to her throat. The pulse was there, fast and thready, a heartbeat running a race it was losing. Her skin was so hot that his fingertips reddened on contact.

"Wolf girl. Can you hear me?"

Nothing. Her eyes were closed. He pulled his hand back. Looked at his reddened fingers, then back at her.

The cave was shallow, fifteen feet deep, angled enough to block the wind. Snow had drifted against the far wall, and the stone floor was dry where the overhang protected it. Adequate. Cold. Both of those worked in her favor.

He picked her up and carried her inside. Her body radiated heat in waves that he could feel through his clothing, each pulse synced to that erratic heartbeat, each one hotter than the last. The gold light under her skin had dimmed to a faint glow, concentrated around her sternum. The flame was consolidating. Pulling inward. Preparing to burn through whatever it found at the center.

He had seen this on the mountain. Tormund had explained it once, years ago, when Kael had been young enough to listen and old enough to understand: the flame calibrated with the body over days, and the bonded absorbs the excess heat. Merge fevers were as serious as the merge itself. But he hadn’t fully understood it until now.

The irony was so precise it felt engineered.

He set her on the dry stone. Her body curled inward on reflex, knees drawing up, arms pulling tight against her chest.

His jaw worked.

"For the record," he said to an unconscious woman on a cave floor, "I want you to know that I am aware this is a terrible idea. I am also aware that the alternatives are worse, which is the only reason this is happening. If you remember any of this, and I strongly suspect you will not, I would appreciate it if you led with the part where I saved your life and not the part where I removed your clothing."

He exhaled through his teeth. Then he moved.

Her fire suit came off in pieces. The flame merge had already destroyed most of it, charred patches and melted seams leaving gaps that made the removal more demolition than undressing. He worked fast, the hands of a field medic more than a man, pulling fabric away from burned skin where it had fused and cutting through what would not pull.

"Fuck... why would Maddox let you do this...." he breathed, staring in disbelief.

He stripped her to undergarments and stopped. The heat that hit him from her bare skin was staggering. It poured off her in visible waves, the air above her body shimmering the way air shimmered above desert sand.

His dragon pushed. Hard. The voice was louder now, insistent.

Skin. Now. She dies if you wait.

He knew.

She was choosing nothing. Her body said: this blood carries the right flame, this skin pulls the fever, lean in. Her hips settled into the curve of his. Her head tilted, and her cheek rested against his arm, and the gold light from her skin wrapped around them both in a cocoon of warmth that turned the frozen cave into something that felt, from the outside, like a hearth.

Take. Ours. Mate.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify