Here is a list of things Dexmon intended to do: Serena.

He locked the door to their chambers, the sound of the bolt sliding home. Then he looked at her, and every intelligent thing he had planned to say evaporated like spit on a forge.

He crossed the room in three strides.

His mouth found hers before she could speak, and the kiss was different from every kiss that had come before it.

His hand fisted in her hair at the base of her skull, angling her mouth under his. She tasted like adrenaline and the word mine.

He had lost her tonight, searched for her in a dark forest with his wolf howling her name, found her, watched her dismantle a conspiracy, and was now putting his hands on her because the alternative didn’t exist.

He pulled the tie from her hair and it fell, white and heavy, down her back.

He unzipped her training suit then pulled it down, off her body. Her hands found the zipper in his training suit too, and she pulled it down.

His thumbs brushed her nipples. Serena gasped, arching into him. Dexmon groaned, low and rough, cupping her breasts fully, squeezing, thumbs circling the sensitive peaks until her knees weakened.

"These are mine," he growled against her throat. "Every fucking inch of you is mine."

Then his mouth was on her neck, on her mark, and the sound she made was quiet and wrecked and exactly what he needed to hear.

He lifted her. Her legs wrapped around him, and he carried her to the bed with the urgency of a man who had been patient long enough and was finished with it.

As he carried her, the hard length of his cock pressed against her core through the last thin layer of fabric.

Every step ground him against her, teasing, promising. Serena rocked her hips instinctively, chasing friction, and Dexmon hissed a curse, fingers digging into her ass hard enough to bruise.

Her thighs tightened around his waist, pulling him closer, and the friction drew a groan from his chest that vibrated against her collarbone.

"Keep doing that and I won’t make it to the bed."

He laid her down. Covered her body with his, weight settling over her, chest to chest, and her hands found his jaw and held his face above hers and looked at him with an expression that warmed his chest.

"You terrify me. And I’m starting to think you like it." He kissed her harder.

She smiled against his mouth. The real smile. The one she saved for rooms with locked doors and firelight and the man whose body she knew the way she knew language: fluently, instinctively, without needing to think.

"I meant it when I said I’ll protect you, Dex."

Dexmon laughed on her lips. "I’m an Alpha with a dragon, a wolf, and an army. You realize that, right?"

"And?"

"Serena Drakenfell. Protector of Alphas. Slayer of kingdoms. Can’t open a jar."

She started laughing. He pressed his forehead to hers. Neither of them moved. Three seconds of absolute stillness where nothing existed except her breath on his mouth and the terrifying certainty that he would do anything she asked. Anything. Without hesitation. Without condition.

Then he entered her slowly. Every instinct in his body screamed to move, but he held still, watching her face, waiting for her to breathe.

The stretch of him burned and felt good at the same time. Her walls tightened as he sank deeper, filling her completely.

His forehead dropped to hers, breath ragged. Her back arched off the mattress, her lips parting on a breath that carried his name in a register that made his vision blur.

"Fuck, baby..."

He moved with deep, rolling strokes, grinding against that spot inside her that made stars burst behind her eyes.

Every thrust dragged a needy sound from her throat. Through the matebond he felt her pleasure echoing back. The intensity was already threatening to end this before it started, and he wanted this to last, needed it to last.

Her hips answered his. Her hands found his shoulders, his back, his hair. She pulled him closer, deeper, and the sound that tore from his chest was low and desperate and belonged to a man who had stopped pretending he was in control of anything the moment she wrapped her legs around him.

"Harder."

The word detonated through his restraint. His pace broke, rebuilt, accelerated. Each thrust drove deeper, claiming her. The bed creaked violently beneath them.

Sweat traced the line of his spine. He pinned her to the mattress, holding her exactly where he wanted her. She couldn’t move, but she didn’t want to.

The matebond fed her every sensation to him. "Come on my cock, baby. Let me feel you break."

Her climax began building through the matebond before her body showed it. He felt the pressure mounting in her, a wave gathering height.

Dexmon groaned, hips stuttering as her pulsing heat dragged him over the edge with her, pumping her full of heat.

Her legs locked around him, pulling him deeper, refusing to let him withdraw. Her entire body clenched, trembling, wrung out, still pulsing around him in waves that made his vision white at the edges.

Then her eyes flared gold, and Dexmon’s mirrored in answer. Both of their wolves surged.

They struck at the same time. Neither of them understood what was happening until their fangs were already in each other.

Venom flooded both of them, intensifying the pleasure. Then gold light erupted from both of their bodies.

The room went white as the climax extended, intensifying for both simultaneously. His body locked. Hers arched into his.

Gold light emanated from their skin, from the marks on their necks, from the places where their bodies touched. It moved like something alive, like a heartbeat made visible, pulsing in a rhythm that matched perfectly because the rhythm was theirs, shared, singular, one pulse in two bodies.

Neither of them understood it.

Serena’s eyes fluttered closed. Dexmon’s followed. They fell together, consciousness leaving them at the exact same moment, tangled in each other, glowing gold in a dark room.

The fire in the hearth relit itself.

The gold faded slowly, over minutes, dimming to a warmth that lingered on their skin like sunlight after the sun has set.

They didn’t move.

Somewhere in Dexmon’s mind, Aegon rumbled once, satisfied, and went quiet.

✦✦✦

The High Emperor sat on his throne, listening to his general.

"The cloak they placed on her is Fae-mage hybrid work. Sophisticated. It disrupted the feed before we could get a full rendering."

"But you got something."

"Fragments, my Emperor. Emotional impressions. A moment of heightened distress, clear enough to confirm her location in Drakenfell."

The Emperor’s fingers drummed once against the arm of his throne.

"What else."

Thalor swallowed. The swallow of a general who had served the Emperor for eleven years and had learned that ’what else’ was the question that preceded consequences.

"She retrieved an artifact, my Emperor. One of the ones we were tracking."

The drumming stopped.

"Which artifact."

"We could not confirm. The cloak collapsed the feed before the image resolved. But the energy signature was consistent with the First Accord relics."

The Emperor’s posture changed. The shift was microscopic. A degree of forward lean that would have been invisible to anyone who hadn’t spent a decade learning to read the man’s body the way cartographers read coastlines. But Thalor had spent that decade, and what he saw made the back of his neck go cold.

"She knows about the artifacts."

"It appears so, my Emperor."

The silence that followed was the kind that reorganized priorities. The Emperor’s eyes, green and ancient and carrying the specific luminescence of Fae blood that had been refined over centuries of selective inheritance, fixed on a point past Thalor’s shoulder. He was calculating.

"How does a girl from a dead kingdom, a girl who spent six years in chains, know about artifacts that predate every throne on that continent?" His voice was quiet. Conversational. The tone he used when he was genuinely curious, which was infinitely more frightening than the tone he used when he was angry. "The scrolls that reference them are held in exactly three archives, two of which are on this continent, and the third was destroyed in the Frostborne purge."

Thalor had no answer. The absence of one was written across his face with the clarity of an admission.

"She has the Scrolls of the First Accord." The Emperor said it the way a man says a thing he already knew and was waiting for the world to confirm.

He stood. The movement was fluid, unhurried, carrying the particular grace of a half-Fae body that had been trained since childhood to treat every motion as a statement. His robes settled around him like smoke finding its shape.

"My Emperor, the cloak they are using is advanced. Our tether reads are diminishing with each layer they add."

The Emperor turned.

"Then we stop reading through the tether." His voice dropped into the register that meant someone, somewhere, was going to die soon and the only variable was the method. "We go to her."

"The portal requires proximity, my Emperor. The tether is weakened by the cloak. We would need her unguarded, emotionally compromised, and within range."

The Emperor’s smile widened.

"General. She is a girl from dead kingdom and has a collection of men who specialize in making her cry. Emotionally compromised is her resting state."

He turned back toward the throne, dismissing Thalor with a gesture that communicated the conversation was over and the orders were already in motion.

"Find me the gap in their cloak. I will handle the rest."

Thalor bowed. Deep. The bow of a man who had just watched a predator decide to hunt, and understood that the only safe position was behind it.

The throne room doors closed. The incense continued to burn. And the Emperor sat in his silence, thinking about a girl with white hair and gold blood who had just accessed relics that he had spent six years trying to find, and who apparently knew things about the old world that no living person on her continent should have been able to teach her.

The cloak would fail. It always did. And when it did, he would be waiting on the other side of it, because patience was not a virtue the Emperor practiced. It was a weapon he had perfected.