Ryker: If you shift right now, I will never let you live it down.

Maddox: I am spotting her.

Ryker: You are hovering.

Maddox: I am her husband and I am spotting her. There is a difference.

Ryker: There is no difference. This is exactly why bondeds do not get involved with training.

Maddox: Noted. Shifting now.

Ryker: Maddox.

He shifted.

Gold light exploded across the training field.

It was immediate, involuntary, and catastrophically visible. A burst of white-gold radiance that lit the field like a second sun and turned every head on the ground and in the air toward the center of the course where the High King of Velkaris had just announced his presence with the magical equivalent of a flare gun.

Maddox’s dragon blinked.

What the hell was that?

Ryker: Beautiful. Truly. A lighthouse.

Maddox: Shut up.

Ryker: Your dragon needs an off switch, Commander.

His dragon agreed. That was the worst part. His dragon was fully aware that the flash was new, was a direct consequence of her mark on his neck, and was going to happen every single time he shifted until one of them figured out how to suppress it.

He made a note to ask Aldric. Or Sterling. Or anyone who wasn’t Ryker.

He launched into the air and positioned himself wide of the course, high enough to track Gwen’s trajectory without interfering with Ryker’s flight path. Spotting distance. His scales caught the late sun and threw gold reflections across the field below, which was the opposite of subtle and he was aware of it.

Ryker: Lap seven. Final. Do not talk to her, do not fly near her, and for the love of every god we have, do not glow again.

Maddox: I am going to pretend you did not just give me orders on my own field.

Ryker: Your field. My exercise.

Maddox stayed wide.

Below and ahead of him, Gwen was already moving. She launched off the brown dragon’s back in a blur of white, caught two orbs on the descent, shifted mid-fall, and hit the ground as her wolf at a dead run. Green lights trailed behind her in a clean line. She shifted back to human, caught Ryker’s leg, and was on his back before the next rotation started.

Lap seven finished clean.

Every orb green. Every arrow accounted for. The five dragons in the formation broke pattern and descended toward the field, and Ryker banked left in a wide arc to bring her down.

That was when she saw him.

Gwen’s head turned mid-flight. Her eyes tracked the gold scales, the wingspan, the size of him. He was larger than any dragon on the field. His scales shifted between white and gold depending on how the light hit them, and in the late afternoon sun, he looked like he had been forged from the same fire she had passed her hand through at their wedding.

She was still staring when his voice hit her mind for the first time.

Maddox: Jump to me.

Gwen went very still on Ryker’s back.

Gwen: That is a long jump.

Maddox: I will catch you.

Four words. The same four words could have come from Ryker during the simulation, and she would have calculated the arc, the speed, the probability of a clean landing.

Ryker was descending and Maddox was stationary, which meant she would be jumping upward across a gap that required more force than her legs could generate from a standing position on a moving dragon.

She jumped anyway.

The air caught her. For one full second, she was suspended between two dragons with nothing beneath her and the training field two hundred feet below, and the wind was in her hair and the sun was in her eyes and the gold dragon ahead of her was getting larger very fast.

Maddox surged forward to meet her.

He caught her against his chest in a motion so fluid it looked rehearsed, his massive foreleg closing around her with the same careful, devastating gentleness he used when he held her in human form. She landed against warm scales and climbed onto his back, second nature.

Then he moved, faster than Ryker. The difference was immediate and visceral and had nothing to do with training speed and everything to do with a dragon who had just gotten his mate on his back for the first time and had zero interest in sharing the sky with anyone else.

The field dropped away. Drakencrest became a sprawl of rooftops and then a smudge against the mountain and then a detail on a canvas too large to hold.

Ryker: And there he goes.

Ryker banked toward the field, shaking his massive head in a motion that was the dragon equivalent of an eye roll.

He had seen this coming from the moment Maddox set foot on the grass. The man had held out for exactly one lap before stealing his wife off the training course and disappearing into the clouds like a lovesick comet.

Maddox was already a speck against the mountain range.

✦✦✦

The mountainside was above the cloud line.

Maddox landed on a ledge wide enough for a dragon. Below them, clouds filled the valley like white water. Above them, nothing. Sky and sun and silence.

He shifted back the moment his talons touched stone.

The gold light flashed again when he did. Bright enough to paint the rock face behind them. He ignored it this time.

Gwen slid off his back during the shift, her boots hitting the stone ledge as his form compressed from dragon to man in a cascade of gold. She caught herself on a cropping of rock and turned to face him.

He was already moving towards her.

His hands found her waist and his mouth found her neck and he backed her against the rock face in one motion, lifting her off the ground so her legs wrapped around him on instinct.

"I missed you, baby."

She let out a breath that was half surprise and half laugh. "I was gone for an hour."

"Longest hour of my life." He pressed his mouth to the spot below her ear where her pulse was hammering. His hands moved to her thighs. "You were jumping between dragons, Guinevere. Five of them."

"I was also catching arrows."

"I know." His teeth grazed her neck. "I watched that too."

She felt his desperation through the matebond and his grip tightened on her.

His hips pressed into hers against the rock, and the sound she made was quiet and involuntary and it undid something in him that had been holding together by a thread.

He kissed her. Deep, immediate, graceless in a way that none of his other kisses had been. His hand came up behind her head to keep her skull from hitting the granite, and his other hand stayed locked under her thigh.

She kissed him back.

Her fingers laced through his hair and pulled. His groan vibrated against her mouth and down through her chest and into the stone behind her.

"Gwen."

"Mm."

"I need you. Right now."

He pulled back just enough to look at her. Gold eyes dark. Chest heaving. His thumb traced the line of her jaw the way he did when he was memorizing something he intended to keep.

She held his gaze. Her green eyes steady. Her white hair catching the late sun until it looked molten.

He kissed her again and his hands moved, efficient and deliberate, unzipping her training suit. Then he unhooked his pants, pulling them down enough to free himself.

He pressed into her slowly, watching her face.

She winced. The pain catching her again. Her body resisted him the same way it had the first time, a sharp protest from muscles that were still learning the shape of him.

She wrapped her arms around his neck.

"So fucking tight for me," he said, teeth gritted.

He pushed into her all the way. She gasped at the burn, breaths shallow.

"Hang on, Gwen," he said in her ear, already pulling out and thrusting in her again. And again.

He pulled one of her thighs up, and thrusted in deeper. Then his hips started to move rapidly in a punishing rhythm.

The burn sharpened into something brighter, something that sat right on the line between too much and exactly enough, and her spine arched off the rock behind her before she could control it.

Each thrust drove the air from her lungs in short, involuntary bursts she could hear bouncing off the granite.

A moan escaped her lips before she could stop it and a wave of heat hit her without warning. It was his pleasure bleeding through their matebond. The friction between them was building into a pressure low in her core that wound tighter with every stroke.

She could feel how close he was through the matebond, a coiling tension in his abdomen that mirrored the one building in hers, and the feedback between them was turning every nerve ending she had into a live wire.

"That’s it," Maddox said against her ear. "Say it. Say you’re mine."

"Yours."

The pressure in her core had gone past the point of return, and every muscle below her ribs was clenching in a slow, involuntary wave that she could feel building toward a break she was powerless to stop.

"Good girl. Now cum on my cock, Gwen."

His voice in her ear was the last thing she registered before the whole thing crested and her body started to convulse. Everything narrowed down to the friction between her legs and his scent.

As soon as he felt her body spasming, he lost control, and released himself into her.

✦✦✦

A dark mage knelt in the circle of black salt. The blood-stained gag cloth from Guinevere’s capture lay stretched across his palms.

Kael lounged on the obsidian throne, one booted foot propped on the armrest, fingers drumming slowly against the carved skull beneath his hand.

"Show her to me."

Black smoke carved into a perfect, merciless window.

He saw her.

Gwen, back slammed against sun-warmed granite high above the cloud line, legs locked tight around the Dragon King’s waist.

Maddox had her pinned, hips driving into her in a brutal, claiming rhythm. Her training suit was shoved down around one thigh, his pants barely past his hips. Every thrust forced a sharp, broken sound out of her throat that echoed off the rock.

His grip tightened until the arm of the throne cracked.

The dark mage’s voice was careful. "Didn’t you say she was the Second’s mate, Your Highness?"

Kael didn’t answer, too busy watching her back arch, and an unmistakable climax.

Then he smiled. Slow. Sharp. Cruel.

"An affair with his Second’s mate. Interesting."

He leaned forward until his face filled the scrying window.

"When I take back what’s mine, she will be screaming my name."