Chapter 313: My Aim Is Impeccable (It Was)
Dex turned her, lifted her, and sat on the stone ledge beneath the window with her on his lap.
Her legs folded across his thighs, her face pressing into his neck, and his arms locked around her the way they always did, with the specific pressure that said: I have you and I am keeping you and the rest of the world can wait.
His thumb found the tears on her cheek. He wiped them with a gentleness that made more come, because the tenderness of the gesture was so at odds with the man who commanded armies and rode dragons that the contrast cracked something in her chest every single time.
The grief came through the matebond. Not just grief. Guilt. Layers of it, dense and complicated, pouring into him like a tide that carried debris from multiple storms. He felt the necklace in it. He felt the trial. He felt Guinevere’s apology and the ugly truth about Agnes and the weight of a friendship she was forbidden from honoring.
He felt Gavriel in it. He knew it was there. He knew it was tangled into the guilt the way roots tangle through soil, inseparable from the ground they grew in.
He said nothing about it.
"I’m sorry for what she did to you," Serena whispered against his neck. "I’m sorry for all of it, Dex. I should have said it before now and I should have said it louder."
He pressed his forehead to hers. His gold eyes were close enough to fill her vision, and the expression in them was the expression she loved most, the one that sat halfway between irreverence and devastation, the one that meant he was about to say something that would either break her heart or make her laugh.
"Baby, she purred at me. She literally purred. Like a cat. I have been chased through two castles by a woman making animal noises. You do realize the bar for apologies has never been lower."
A hiccup-laugh escaped her, wet and broken and exactly what he was aiming for.
He kissed her. Mid-hiccup. His mouth caught hers with the timing of a man who had been waiting for the exact second her grief cracked open enough to let him in, and the kiss was slow and warm and tasted like tears and the word mine.
Her hands found his jaw. His arms tightened. For three seconds, the room contained only them and the sound of her breathing and the warmth of his mouth and the matebond humming between them in a frequency that meant safe.
Then Dex’s entire body changed.
The shift was instantaneous. His arms locked rigid around her, his chest expanding with a sharp inhale, and every muscle in his body coiled with a tension that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the thing his eyes had just found over her shoulder.
She felt it through the matebond before she understood it. A spike of something primal and absolute. Fear that had been transmuted into fury before it finished forming.
"Boo."
The voice came from behind her. Low. Amused. Conversational. The voice of a man who had walked into a room uninvited and wanted credit for the entrance.
Serena’s entire body went rigid on Dex’s lap.
Her spine locked. Her breathing stopped. The matebond from Dex detonated with a protective rage so total it whited out everything else.
The Emperor stood six feet behind them. Not physically. The same way he had appeared in the recovery room, layered over reality like a second image pressed against glass. His dark magic coiled around his boots, and his smile held the specific pleasure of a predator who had found his prey in a moment of vulnerability and intended to savor it.
He moved toward Serena.
One step. His hand reaching forward with the casual intention of a man reaching for something that belonged to him.
Dex’s body ignited.
Gold erupted from his skin with a violence that had nothing to do with thought and everything to do with the place where instinct met bloodline and produced something older than both. The light was blinding, consuming, pouring from every point of contact between his body and Serena’s until they were both wrapped in a shell of power that the Emperor’s projection hit and recoiled from like a hand pulled back from a flame.
The gold was his. Dex’s. From his own core. The same power that had woken in the lake, the power that had been sitting dormant inside him after getting marked by Serena, waiting for a threat catastrophic enough to justify its existence.
The Emperor faltered. His smile thinned. His projected form shimmered at the edges, the dark magic struggling against a frequency it recognized and respected and feared.
Aegon surged.
The wolf’s instinct took Dex’s body before his mind could consent, the same way it had taken him in the forest when Aurelia shifted for the first time. His wolf knew what to do. His wolf had always known.
Dex’s fangs punched through before he registered the motion. His mouth found Serena’s mark, and his teeth sank in with a precision that was ancient and absolute, venom flooding her system in a single devastating pulse.
He was marking her before he knew he was marking her. His body was already doing it by the time his brain caught up, and by then her eyes had rolled and her body had gone limp against his chest, the venom hitting her bloodstream with the force of an Alpha’s claim at full power.
She was unconscious in two seconds.
The Emperor watched it happen. His smile returned, slower this time, carrying something that looked like recognition. He tilted his head, studying Dex the way a chess player studies a board after an unexpected move.
Then he vanished. The projection dissolved like smoke in a wind that existed on another continent, and the room was one room again, and the cold that had accompanied him receded, and Dex was sitting on a stone ledge with his unconscious mate in his arms and his heart trying to break through his sternum.
His breathing was ragged. Hard. The kind of breathing that belonged to a man whose body had just done four things simultaneously, ignited power he barely understood, shielded his mate, marked her with venom, and stared down a projection of the most dangerous man alive, and was now processing the adrenaline debt of all four at once.
He looked down at Serena. Her face was slack, peaceful in the specific way that venom-induced unconsciousness produced. His mark on her neck was fresh, angry red, still pulsing with the faint gold residue of what he had just done.
He had marked her so fast he hadn’t realized he was doing it until his teeth were already in her skin. Aegon’s instinct, channeled through Dex’s body, operating on a protocol that predated every throne in Skardos: protect the mate, claim the mate, remove the mate from the threat by any means available, including rendering her unconscious so the tether the Emperor was using to find her went dark.
The venom would hold her under for hours. The mark would reinforce the cloak Maelor had placed. And the Emperor, wherever he was, had just learned that the Dragon King Incarnate’s power was no longer theoretical.
Dex pressed his lips to her forehead. His arms didn’t loosen.
Aegon: Well done.
Dex: I didn’t plan that. What if the venom was too much? She’s already depleted.
Aegon: It was precisely enough. My aim is impeccable.
Dex stared at the empty space where the Emperor had stood. The room was warm again. The dragons below were still training. The sun was still setting.
He heard about the recovery room with Fin and Gav catching a fire poker before it hit his chest. But he had been unconscious for it. This was the first time he had faced it while aware, while holding Serena, while the Emperor’s hand had been reaching for her with the casual ownership of a man who considered her a possession he was collecting.
The image of that hand was going to live in his skull for a very long time.
He stood, lifting her weight without effort, and carried her toward the door. His gold was still flickering at the edges of his skin, the power reluctant to recede, Aegon reluctant to release the state of heightened readiness.
His jaw was set. His breathing was evening out. His eyes were still gold.
He was the Dragon King Incarnate, and the Emperor of Orosia had just made the mistake of showing up in the same room as his mate.
The next time would end differently.
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