Chapter 120: The Kiss

Liona’s POV

Pain woke me before anything else did.

A deep specific ache in my ribs that pulsed with every breath, reminding me with great patience and consistency that I had done something my body had not appreciated, and was going to keep bringing it up. I opened my eyes slowly.

Same ceiling. Same room. The fire in the hearth had burned lower than it had been when he left, which meant time had passed, though how much I could not tell from here.

Something warm and damp was moving across the bottom of my foot.

I sat up fast. The ribs protested immediately. I ignored them and looked down.

A woman was kneeling at the foot of the bed, a damp cloth in her hands, cleaning my feet with the focused careful attention of someone who had been doing this for a while, and had not expected to be caught at it. She looked up when I pulled my foot back. Her eyes were wide.

"What are you doing?" I said.

She stood immediately. Her head dropped into a bow that was practiced and automatic. "I apologize, my lady. I was only cleaning you up. You came in with dirt from the road and I did not want to wake you."

I looked at myself. Thin night clothes, the loose comfortable kind worn for sleeping. Someone had changed me while I slept, which was a thought I filed away to be uncomfortable about later. I looked at the window. Dark outside. The particular dark of deep night, past midnight, and heading somewhere further.

I pushed the blanket back and stood up.

My ribs had opinions about that. I moved anyway.

"My lady." The servant woman followed me as I crossed to the door. "Please. You need to rest. Your Highness will not be pleased if he finds you have left your room before you have healed."

"Do I look like I care what your Highness thinks?" I put my hand on the door. "Where is my friend?"

"My lady, please try to understand the situation..."

I opened the door and walked out.

The corridor was long, stone-walled, and lit by torches set at intervals that provided plenty of light for walking but very little warmth. My feet were bare on the floor and the cold of it came up through my soles immediately. I kept moving.

The servant followed. Still talking. Something about protocol and rest and His Highness. I was not listening to any of it. I was looking for something that told me where Azura was, or at the very least, which direction I should start moving in.

I turned a corner.

He was there.

Standing in the corridor ahead of me, talking to the broad-shouldered horned man from the cave, the one who had tried to carry Azura and had been stopped by me standing in his way. The Dragon King had his back partially to me, his white hair falling loose around the edges where his face would have been if I could see it from this angle.

He turned his head and saw me.

He stopped talking mid-sentence.

He looked at the horned man beside him and nodded once. The horned man’s eyes moved briefly in my direction, that same unreadable look, and then he inclined his head to the Dragon King and walked away down the corridor without another word until he turned a corner and was gone.

I kept walking. And stopped in front of him.

He turned to face me fully. Grey eyes. The tattoos visible on his neck above his collar. The horns curving back from his forehead into the white hair.

I looked at him directly. "Where is my friend?"

"I told you to stay in bed," he said. Low and unhurried, the way he said everything. "You need to heal before you start worrying about anyone else."

"Do not tell me what to do," I said. "You cannot kidnap two people, separate them, and then tell one of them to stop worrying about the other. That is not how this works."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Almost a smile but with more self-awareness in it than amusement.

"I never imagined I would meet someone more stubborn than myself," he said. Almost to himself.

I did not respond to that. I just looked at him and waited.

He glanced past my shoulder.

"You can go," he said.

Behind me, I heard the servant woman’s voice. "I apologize, Your Highness." Then her footsteps retreated down the corridor until they faded.

He looked at me for a moment. Then he started walking toward me.

Not fast. Not with any particular urgency. Just that same steady deliberate movement that he applied to everything, like he had decided on the destination and the pace was simply what the pace was going to be.

I held my ground.

He reached me. His hand moved to my waist, one hand, sliding to the small of my back and pulling me closer with a gentleness that somehow made it worse than if it had been rough. He bent his head toward my neck. I felt his breath before anything else, warm against my skin.

"What are you doing?" My voice came out tighter than I wanted it to.

I pushed at his chest. His chest did not particularly stand out.

Then the air shifted.

The corridor was gone.

I looked around. We were back in the room I just left. The fire was burning lower in the hearth. Between one breath and the next, we were back and I had not felt us move and that was somehow more unsettling than if there had been a sensation attached to it.

"I told you." My voice rose. I pushed at his arm properly this time. "Do not move me like I am something you can just pick up and put somewhere. I am a person. I decide where I want to be."

He lifted his head from my neck.

His hand moved. From my waist to my jaw. Two fingers and a thumb, gentle, tilting my face up until I was looking directly at him. His grey eyes were close and steady.

"Your friend is being cared for," he said. Quiet. No performance in it. Just the words, placed plainly. "Right now I need to take care of you."

I looked at his face from this distance.

The structure of it. The jaw and the grey eyes and the tattoos that ran along his neck and up toward his face, connecting to the base of his horns in lines that were too deliberate and too complete to have been put there by anyone’s hand.

"You are so gentle," I said. Mostly to myself. Not a compliment exactly. More like an observation I had not meant to say out loud, the kind that arrived before the filter caught it.

He looked at me.

The pull in my chest was warm and insistent, and had been sitting there since the moment I had first seen him in that clearing, growing with every second I spent in proximity to him, and right now with his hand on my jaw and his face close enough that I could see every detail of his eyes it was not sitting quietly anymore.

I was not thinking when my hand moved.

I was aware of it happening but the decision had already been made somewhere below the level where decisions were made consciously. My hand found the back of his neck. My fingers curled against the warmth of his skin there.

I pulled him down.

And connected my lips with his.

He did not stop.

He kissed me back and it was nothing like anything I had kissed before, and I had kissed people before, so I had a reference point for this comparison and the comparison was not close. His mouth was warm and certain and he kissed me the way he moved through everything, like he had decided on this and the pace was simply what it was going to be. His hand moved from my jaw to the back of my head, fingers threading into my hair, and his other arm wrapped around my waist and pulled me closer and the warmth of him pressed against me from the chest down.

I craved more of it before I had finished registering that I was getting any of it.

My hands moved. Across his chest. Up to his shoulders. Feeling the warmth of him through the fabric and then at the collar where the fabric ended and his skin began. He kissed me deeper and my fingers curled against his shoulder and I stopped thinking about ribs or corridors or any of the things that had been taking up space in my head before this started.

Then I pulled back.

Not gracefully. Just pulled back with my hand flying to my mouth and my breathing going faster than it should be and the heat in my face that I could feel without needing a mirror to confirm.

"I am sorry." The words came out fast. "I did not mean to. I was not. That was not something I decided to do I just..."

He had not moved. He was still standing exactly where he had been when I pulled back, looking at me with those grey eyes that were doing something I did not have a clear category for.

Then he walked to the bed.

He sat down on it. Slow and deliberate, settling onto the edge of it with the ease of someone sitting down in a place they were entirely comfortable. He looked at me from there.

His tongue moved across his lower lip.

"I like that," he said.

I looked at him. My hand was still over my mouth. I made myself lower it. I made myself look at him without looking away because looking away felt like losing something and I was not sure what.

That was when I noticed them properly for the first time.

The tattoos.

I had seen them before. On his neck in the corridor. On his hands. But from here, with the firelight moving across his skin and the collar of his shirt sitting lower than it had been before, I could see how far they went. Lines and marks that ran across his hands and up his forearms and continued past where I could see them, connecting at the neck to the lines that ran up toward his face and branched toward the base of his horns.

"Why do you have so many tattoos?" I asked.

He looked down at his own hands. At the marks there.

"They are just part of me," he said.

"Part of you how?" I crossed my arms. Not coldly. Just needing something to do with them. "Someone sat down and put all of that on your skin. That is not a small thing."

"No one put them there." He looked up at me. "I was born with them."

I stared at him. "Who is born with tattoos?"

"Apparently I am," he said.

I looked at his horns. Then back at his face. "Can people touch them? The horns."

He stood up.

One smooth motion, unfolding from the edge of the bed and rising to his full height. Then he started walking toward me.

I stepped back.

He kept coming.

"Not everyone touches my horns," he said.

"So only your girlfriends then," I said. My back was moving toward the wall without me fully deciding to let it.

That almost-smile again. "Only my mother has ever touched my horns."

My back found the wall.

He stopped in front of me. The space between us was small enough that I could feel the warmth of him in the air between us without either of us touching the other.

"But if someone else were to touch them." His voice had dropped. Still quiet. Still unhurried. But lower now in a way that moved through me before I had processed the words themselves. "Someone who is my mate."

He raised his hand slowly. His fingers hovered near my face. Not touching. Just close enough that I could feel the warmth of them.

"It arouses something in me," he said. "Something that does not respond well to being managed."

My breathing had changed. I was aware of it changing and could not do anything about it. The pull in my chest was not warm anymore. It was hot. Sitting right below my ribs and spreading in both directions and I was fighting it with everything I had and it was not a winning fight.

"Most times I can control it," he said.

His grey eyes held mine.

"But right now." A pause that had weight in it. "I am not certain I can hold myself back."

I should have said something. I should have pushed him back or stepped sideways or said any of the words that would have created distance between this moment and wherever it was going.

My body did not move.

My chest rose and fell. Fast and shallow. The wall was solid and cold against my back and he was warm and close in front of me and the space between us was nothing and getting smaller.

And I was not moving away from any of it.