Powerful. More than human in a way I'd never experienced before. Energy crackled beneath my skin, strange and wild and utterly unfamiliar. The shadows in the chamber responded to my presence—reached for me the way they'd reached for him, curling around my ankles, brushing against my arms like curious creatures meeting someone new. Starlight flickered at the edges of my vision.
I looked down at my marked forearms. At the unconscious Dragon Lord beneath my hands. At the empty space where his dragon-nature had been, torn away and sacrificed for a chance to save the world.
Everything had changed.
I didn't know how. Didn't understand what the bond meant, what it would demand, what I'd become. But I felt it—that connection. That belonging. The thing I'd wanted my whole life without ever having a name for it.
Minutes passed. Hours. Time had stopped meaning anything.
And then Morgrith's eyes fluttered open.
They found me immediately. Not the other Dragon Lords, not the mates gathered at the chamber's edge, not the ancient altar or the pulsing walls or any of the impossible things that filled this impossible space.
Just me.
He looked different. Diminished. The vast presence that had coiled beneath his skin was gone, torn away, leaving something smaller behind. More human. More fragile. The starlight inhis eyes had dimmed to something gentler, something almost mortal.
But he was smiling.
It transformed his face. Made him young in a way I wouldn't have thought possible. Made him beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with his features and everything to do with the warmth behind his expression.
"It seems," he breathed, his voice wondering and warm and somehow exactly what I'd always needed to hear, "the shadows chose my mate at last."
I should have said something.
Should have questioned it, denied it, demanded explanations for what had just happened and what it meant for my future, for his future, for the world that still needed saving.
Instead, I did something I'd never done before in my entire life.
I let myself be held.
My forehead dropped to his chest. His hand—trembling, weak, barely able to move—found my hair. And for the first time in twenty-seven years, I wasn't alone.
I wasn't alone.
Chapter 3
Thesheetsfeltlikewoven shadow against my skin—impossibly soft, cool without being cold, as if darkness itself had learned to comfort. I didn't remember being carried here. The last thing I could recall was Morgrith's wondering smile, his voice saying something about the shadows choosing his mate, and then . . . nothing. Just the velvet embrace of unconsciousness, deeper than any sleep I'd ever known.
I should have felt hollowed out.
That was how it always worked. After a major healing—after absorbing the kind of trauma that would kill lesser wound-walkers—I'd wake up scraped clean, empty as a discarded shell. Sometimes it took days to feel solid again. Sometimes I wondered if part of me had leaked away with the pain I'd taken, if each healing cost me something I'd never get back.
But this . . . this was different.
I feltfull.
Power hummed beneath my skin like a second heartbeat, foreign and familiar all at once. When I breathed, the darknessin the room seemed to breathe with me—not threatening, not cold, but alive. Present. Welcoming in a way I couldn't explain.
I raised my hands.
The shadow-fractal marks on my forearms caught the faint starlight filtering through the walls, and I watched them pulse with inner light. Deep purple and black, spreading like frost on glass, beautiful and strange and utterly impossible on skin that had been unmarked twenty-seven years.
Bonded, something whispered in the back of my mind.You're bonded now.
To him. To the Shadow Master. To Morgrith, who had called me his mate in a voice that made my chest ache with recognition.
I sat up slowly, testing my body for the familiar post-healing weakness. It wasn't there. Instead, I felt the darkness in the corner of the room like a physical presence—could actuallyfeelit, the way I might feel sunlight on my face or water against my skin. Curious, I thought about it gathering closer.