bright sun of Denhar’s home.
Solar pulled in all the power she could, but while it kept her awake, it could not heal the wound slowly seeping blood.
Denhar shifted and held her in his arms, rushing up the stairs to the room. He unbuckled her breastplate and removed her collar. She lay bare from the waist up in his arms and he wasn’t even looking at her naked skin. His gaze was on the jagged wound in her back. “I have heard that this hurts.”
It was all the warning that she got as he applied his mouth to her wound and fire cascaded into her blood. Instead of pain, there was a sharp intensity to the contact that caused an involuntary moan to break from her lips. His breath was hot, and his tongue licked at her skin until the pain disappeared. To her shock, he flipped her to her back and repeated the same treatment.
Her skin was sensitive, the marks on her body pounded with a pulse of power, and her hips shifted restlessly. When he lifted his mouth from her, she sighed and slumped into the bedding. She had been so close to something, and she didn’t even know what it was. All she knew was that she was so frustrated, she wanted to cry.
“Does it feel better?”
She wanted to scream no, but instead, she nodded her head. “Thank you.”
“Good. You are now under house arrest. There is a rift restrictor on the walls, so you are not going anywhere again until I am sure that your shields will be up at all times. You could have been killed.”
She nodded. “There was something about that bolt. They were ready for me, and that is more distressing than what I learned while they introduced me to their organizer.”
“What was that?” He may have been oblivious before, but his reaction to her naked torso was starting to make itself obvious.
“The humans are no longer content to explore or to return for the safety of their species. There is a new type of human out here, and they are living for themselves alone. They buy their place on a new world and live content in the knowledge that the dimensional collapse will not happen on that world in their lifetime.”
Denhar sat back and rubbed his forehead.
“Bastards.”
To make sure he understood, she summed it up. “They are aware of us, they are heavily armed and they don’t ever want to go home.”
Chapter Nine
T wo days. She was left thinking about what she had learned for two days. Solar was beyond frustrated when her arm was able to move without any pain, and Denhar still kept her locked in her room with only Haringk bringing in one meal at a time and removing traces of the previous one.
Denhar came to her at night so that she wouldn’t have to sleep alone, but it was beyond frustrating that he disappeared before she woke every morning. The heat of his body was still in the sheets, but he was gone.
Frankly, she was lonely.
Haringk brought her books and a history of dragons, but the words on the page reluctantly yielded their secrets as she struggled to teach herself a language she had never been exposed to before.
She saw her mother’s name and stared at the page until the words made sense.
And the lovely Eiwyn came to court and hid from the Dragon King in plain sight. Eventually, her power called to his, and he summoned the great seer to his chamber for a private reading of his future. He laughed for two weeks straight after that consultation, but even when he took other ladies to his bed, his thoughts always returned to the sombre seer.
Eventually, he cursed a vivid streak and demanded Eiwyn’s body as mate.
To everyone’s surprise, she agreed on one condition, that he forgive her once and completely if she should ask it of him. The condition was bound by blood and sealed with power.
The Dragon King had his bride, and she had her promise.
After their union, a courtier asked what had made the Dragon King laugh for so long. He smiled and said,
“The seer promised me a clutch of daughters. Twenty of them born on the same day. How could any