Chapter 173 173

Chapter 173 173
Lucian's POV:

"Every time you asked me about dragon fire," I said, "I was describing my own body. Every correction I made about lore. Every answer that was too specific, too detailed. You kept asking how I knew and I kept lying and you kept believing me and I felt sick every time. Every single time."

She looked at the ground. At the burned leaves. At my hands, which were on my knees, the veins still visible under the skin, fading now but not gone. And she moved.

One step. Then another. Slow, not cautious exactly, more like she was making a decision with each step and the decisions kept coming out the same. She came closer. The burned leaves crunched under her shoes. Five feet. Three feet. She was right in front of me, standing, looking down at me on the ground, and the height difference was reversed for once, she was above and I was below, and the look on her face was not what I expected.

She crouched. Then she knelt, both knees in the dirt and the leaves, right in front of me. Close enough that I could smell her shampoo and the dirt on her jacket and the cold air on her skin.

She reached for my hands. Her fingers wrapped around my wrists and she lifted them, gently, off my knees, and I flinched because my hands were still hot, too hot, hotter than any human skin should be, and she was going to feel it and pull back and—

She didn't pull back. She held my hands in both of hers and turned them over, palms up, and looked at them. At the lines on my palms, at the place where the glass had cut me, where the scar should have been and wasn't, at the veins that were still carrying traces of gold under the skin. She studied them the way you'd study something precious, something you were seeing for the first time and wanted to remember.

"These healed my sister," she said. Not a question.

"Yeah."

She ran her thumb across my palm. Across the place where the cut had been. Her touch was light and careful and it went through me like an electric shock.

"And these wrote me a poem about hiding."

I couldn't speak. My throat was closed and my chest was tight and her hands were on mine and nobody had ever held my hands like that, not like they were something worth holding, not after knowing what they could do.

She let go of my right hand. Lifted hers to my face. Her fingers on my jaw, her palm against my cheek, and the touch was warm, her warm, human warm, not dragon warm, and she turned my face toward her because I'd been looking at the ground, looking anywhere but at her.

"Look at me," she said.

I looked at her. Brown eyes, three inches from mine. The scar on her chin. The dirt on her jacket collar.

And the gold came up.

I felt it, that surge I'd been fighting, the gold pushing against my skull, and I tried, I tried the redirect, I tried to send it to my hands, to my chest, to anywhere that wasn't my eyes, but she was right there, so close, touching my face, and her eyes were looking into mine and the redirect couldn't hold because you can't redirect something when the source is right in front of you, when the person who makes your whole body go wrong is kneeling in burned leaves and holding your face like you matter.

The gold came through. I felt the shift, the color change, the heat behind my irises, and I tried to close my eyes, to turn away, but her hand was on my cheek and she was holding me there and she saw it. She saw it happen. From three inches away, she watched my eyes go from blue-green to full gold, solid gold, no iris no pupil, and her breath caught and she didn't move.

"Don't," she said, when I tried to close my eyes. "Don't hide them."

I kept them open. Gold. Full gold. Looking at her face, and my hands were shaking and my jaw was shaking and I was the most exposed I'd ever been in my life, more naked than any transformation, because this wasn't my body changing shape, this was Emma seeing the real me and the real me was a thing with gold eyes that set trees on fire.

"They're beautiful," she said.

I shook my head. Small movement against her palm.

"You think I'm a monster," I said.

She didn't answer right away. She looked at my eyes, at the gold, and her thumb moved on my cheekbone, this small, slow stroke that I felt all the way in my chest.

"A little bit, yeah," she said. And smiled. This small, real smile that had nothing afraid in it. "But you're the most beautiful monster there is. In books and outside of them too."

The writer. The girl who'd spent two years building a dragon out of words and imagination and research and forty YouTube videos about fire dynamics, telling the actual dragon that the real thing was more beautiful than anything she could invent.

I didn't deserve it. I didn't deserve any of it, the hands on my face, the words, the way she was looking at me, the way she wasn't running.

"I'm scared I'm going to hurt you," I said. "That's why I pull away, that's why I stop, it's not because I don't want you, Emma, it's because my body does things I can't control and—"

She kissed me.

Not slow, not careful, not the way you kiss someone you're afraid of. She leaned forward and put her mouth on mine and her hands were on my face and my hands were at my sides because I was afraid to touch her, afraid the heat would burn, and her lips were warm and soft and tasted like nothing, like herself, and I stayed still for about two seconds before something inside me gave up, just surrendered, and my hands came up and found her waist and pulled her closer.

The gold was everywhere. In my eyes, in my hands, in my chest. I could feel it pulsing through me, responding to her, to the kiss, and the air around us got warm, then hot, and a leaf near my knee started to smoke and I didn't care. I didn't care. She was kissing me and she knew what I was and she was still here and the leaf could burn, the forest could burn, everything could burn.

She pulled back. An inch. Her forehead against mine, her breath on my mouth, her hands still on my face.

"I don't care what you are," she said. "It's too late, Lucian. I'm already in love with you. You can't change that. Nobody can. Not even you."

I closed my eyes. The gold stayed. I felt it behind my eyelids, warm, steady, and for the first time in my life I didn't try to push it down. I didn’t have to. And I just hoped it wasn’t all just a dream, because in that case I didn’t want to wake up.