She cannot love anyone but us, for she is our mate.
Love.
The word was so unfamiliar to me, so foreign and heavy, spreading its disturbance outward until it touched everything.
I’d heard the poets in court recite their verses about it. Lisping, soft-handed men with ink-stained fingers and an entirely theoretical grasp of suffering. They wrote about love the way the blind described color: with great confidence and no evidence. Burning hearts, stolen breath, and the beloved’s face eclipsing the sun.
I’d listened to those verses and felt nothing except a mild contempt.
Love was a liability, a lever. The moment a man loved something, he handed his enemy the means to destroy him. I’d learned that lesson before I’d learned how to shave. I’d watched it unravel greater men than me, men with more natural gifts and better starts, men who possessed everything except the discipline to keep their hearts locked away behind something stronger than sentiment.
My father hadn’t loved my mother, as far as I knew. He’d wanted her badly enough to go to war over her, but that wasn’t the same thing. I understood want, desire. Want was clean. Want had an end. You satisfied it or you didn’t, and either way you moved on.
Love didn’t move. That was the problem with it: it installed itself and refused to be evicted.
I’d come close, once. Or I’d thought I had. But then I’d realized a king had no use for love. A king had use for alliances, for heirs, for loyalty purchased and maintained. Affection, perhaps, if it didn’t impair judgment. Desire, certainly, because desire was a function of the body and the body required management like any other part of the machinery.
But love. No.
The woman beside me shifted in her sleep and made a small sound. I continued to watch the ceiling.
The question wasn’t whether I could love. The question was whethershehad and whether she did still. Whether somewhere in that guarded, infuriating mind of hers, beneath the silences, the half-answers, and the eyes that measured everything before they gave back nothing, there was someone who had gotten in. Some man who’d seen the real shape of her and she’d let him, let him close enough to matter.
The thought turned in me like a blade finding the right angle to go deeper. And the dragon burned with the same fire. Both of us, angry at the thought that our prisoner could have loved the man who’d taken her innocence from her. And what of him? Had he loved her back? Did he love her still?
We will destroy whoever dares to love what belongs to us.
It wasn’t the act that bothered me, at least I’d told myself that several times now. Strangely, it might actually have been partially true. Men and women coupled, and they did so constantly: every second of every day. It was unremarkable. I’d had more women than I could name and attached nothing permanent to any of them. The act itself was the smallest part of what was eating at me.
What bothered me was the possibility of the other thing: that she’d looked at him the way she didn’t look at me. The way she would never look at me. Of course, I knew she desired me. That much was obvious. It was obvious in the way her pupils dilated whenever I was near, the way her breathing sped up, the way her cunt was always soaking wet. But that was desire; it wasn’t love.
Could she have been so unguarded with him, so undefended, that she’d let her mouth soften and her hands reach and her voice say things she’d never say to me? Hadshe given him something simply because she’d wanted to? Because he’d earned it somehow?
Only we deserve the love of our mate. We will destroy him as soon as he is named.
I pressed two fingers hard against my sternum and held the pressure there.
She is ours. She belongs to no other.
“She doesn’t belong to anyone,” I said, but my voice was barely a sound. The woman slept on.
She will.
That was the part I couldn’t argue with. Not because I believed it the way the dragon believed it, with that hot, simple, animal certainty. But because the alternative, the idea that she would remain in proximity to me and continue to belong to herself and to whatever ghost of a man still lived in her memory, was somehow worse than any threat I’d faced in a decade of ruling. And that didn’t make any fucking sense.
I wasn’t a man who wanted what he couldn’t have. I was a king. I took what I wanted. In fact, I wasn’t accustomed to wanting because I took whatever that thing was before I ever arrived at the stage of wanting it.
But this was different, and I was honest enough with myself, in the dark, in the small hours with a stranger asleep beside me, to admit I didn’t fully understand why.
I didn’t know what love felt like. I had no reliable measure for it. But whatever this was, this grinding, low-burning irritation that had no tactical justification, this need to know the name of a man whose only offense was being wanted by a woman I had no legitimate claim to… it didn’t feel like indifference. And indifference was the only thing I’d ever trusted myself to feel safely.
The candle guttered. The last of the light thinned to a thread.
I closed my eyes, but I didn’t sleep.
The dragon breathed low and steady in my chest.
Waiting. It was always waiting.