“And you just… wandered into our territory?” Raze asks, his voice dangerously even.
“No,” I say, because this part matters. “I came looking. I just didn’t expect to survive it.” The truth settles like falling rain. “I didn’t plan to stay,” I add, and this is the part that hurts the most to say. “I was supposed to observe and report back what I learned. Maybe help undo some of the damage if I could.” My eyes burn. “And then leave before I crossed lines I couldn’t uncross.”
Scar lets out a low, thoughtful hum. “That explains the scent,” he murmurs. “Magic-adjacent, bloodline inheritance without the bite.”
I barely hear him.
“Everything after t-that…” I say, my voice breaking despite my best effort, “… everything was real. The accident. The fear.Fallingforyou.” I look at Raze fully, openly. “I didn’t lie about that. I didn’t pretend my way into your bed or your trust. I didn’t even remember who I was by the end.”
Raze stares at me like he’s trying to reconcile two incompatible truths.
“So, you knew,” he says finally. “And you still came?”
“Yes.”
“And you stayed.”
“Yes.” The word lands like a challenge.
“And you let her take your memories…” he asks, ice and fire grinding together in his voice, “… instead of letting her take my fire again?”
My throat closes. “Yes.”
No one speaks.
Because now they understand.
I’m not a human trespasser.
I’m not a spy.
And I’m definitely not an innocent.
I’m just a woman who walked knowingly into a monster’s den because she believed the monsters deserved better than the laws written over their bones.
Raze exhales slowly, controlled, deadly. “Which means…” he says, “… everything that followed started with a choice.” Something in his tone sharpens, not an accusation, but on the edge of it.
“No!” The denial explodes from me with enough force to make both of them focus entirely on me, predatory attention I’ve learned to navigate through weeks of captivity, claiming and learning to survive in a world where humans are prey, and I’m somehow both. “The hunter was real. The crash was real. I was trying to calm him when we hit that tree. I didn’t plan to end up at your doorstep bleeding and terrified.”
“But you planned to find me eventually.” It’s not a question.
I meet his gaze without flinching, letting him see the truth written in my eyes even as my heart threatens to beat itself to death against my ribs. “Yes, I planned to find you! Planned to see if I could help break the curse, maybe prove to my mother that her laws are… limited. That supernatural and human don’t have to be completely separate if there’s choice involved instead of just an accident.”
“And then?” Scar interjects, moving into my peripheral vision with that unsettling vampire grace. “What was supposed to happen after you helped the big bad dragon regain his fire?”
The answer sticks in my throat, weighted with the memory of my mother’s face when she arrived at the clubhouse, with the knowledge that her laws existed for reasons rooted in centuriesof humans destroying what they feared and supernatural beings losing control when exposed.
“I was supposed to leave,” I finally admit, each word feeling like a small death. “Report back. Let my mother know if the curse could be broken or if it needed to remain in place.” My hands tremble as I wrap my arms around myself. “I wasn’t supposed tofall in love with you!”
The words hang in the air between us, confession and accusation intertwined, peeling back every lie until only the brutal truth remains. The same truth that drove me to spend years covering these walls in research, even when I couldn’t explain why it mattered so much.
Raze closes the distance between us in two strides, his intense eyes focused on mine. “But you did.” His hands come up to frame my face with the careful precision of someone handling something breakable that they desperately want to crush and protect in equal measure. Ice spreads from his touch, not burning but claiming, reminding every cell in my body that I already belong to him, even if my conscious mind spent three weeks in amnesia. “You fell in love with a monster. And when the witch came to enforce her laws, you chose to forget everything rather than watch me lose my fire again.”
Tears spill over my eyes despite my best efforts to contain them. “I couldn’t let her cage you again. Not whenIwas the reason you found yourcontentment. Not when the flamefinallyburned the way it was supposed to after three centuries of d-dying.” My voice cracks. “I’d rather lose myself than be the reason you went back into that crystal prison.”
For a long moment, Raze stares at me, his blue eyes with a redish gold tinge now circling the blue, searching my face for any hint of deception or manipulation, finding only honesty, grief, and a love that survived memory loss and should have died with the rest of my recall.
A low growl escapes him, then suddenly he slams his lips to mine in a brutal and claiming kiss. A possession so complete it rewrites everything I thought I understood about gentle or careful or any of the soft words people use when they talk about romance and connection. This is fire and ice colliding, dragon and witch-blood human, three weeks of separation, rage and loss compressed into a single moment of absolute claiming.