There was no time to linger on what I had missed. More pressing things were waiting.
I dissolved from the corridor and rematerialised in the centre of Arvid's room, in my own face, my own form.
He was asleep. Of course he was — it was well into the night, and Arvid had never had difficulty sleeping, a quality I had long found both admirable and occasionally irritating. He lay there with the complete, unbothered ease of a man whose conscience had apparently decided not to trouble him this particular evening.
The sight of it unsettled something in me.
I wanted to yell at him. To stand over him and demand an answer for how he had managed to arrange a trade route through my kingdom — my kingdom, the one he had promised to leave alone, the one that was the foundation of our agreement — without so much as consulting me. I wanted to make him feel the specific humiliation of learning about a decision that concerned you directly from a carriage conversation between a merchant and a dwarf.
I walked toward him, all of it churning through me — the rage and the sadness, the love that I couldn't locate a way to be free of, the guilt that came with both, the exhaustion of feeling so many contradictory things about the same person without any of them resolving into something manageable. I was a mess. I had been a mess for weeks.
I stopped beside the bed.
Without deciding to, I extended my arm toward him. The emotions had risen high enough that the control between my human form and my dragon nature had slipped slightly — black scales with their faint silver shimmer had spread across my hand, claws half-formed where my fingertips had been.
I looked at my own hand and wasn't entirely sure what I had been reaching for.
But my hand stopped at his cheek. Just rested there, gently, palm curving against the line of his jaw in a motion that had nothing to do with rage. The mate bond, doing what it always did — redirecting me, protecting him, refusing to let whatever darker impulse had formed in my chest find its way to my hands.
He opened his eyes.
"Oh." His voice was thick with sleep. "You're here."
"Yes," I said softly, sitting on the edge of the bed. "I'm here."
He blinked several times and shifted himself upright, taking a moment to fully surface from sleep. When his gaze settled on mine, it was clear and direct, the way it always was regardless of how recently he had been asleep.
"Where were you? I went to the rose palace — you weren't there." His voice was entirely neutral. No worry in it. No anger. No suspicion. Just the question, stated flatly, giving me nothing to read from it.
I could never quite get a reading on him. I suspected I never fully would.
"I was investigating something," I said. "Ensuring there is no threat to Selon from a particular source. Nothing more than that. You don't need to concern yourself."
"Concern myself?" Something dry entered his voice. "Worry is genuinely the last thing I would think to do when it comes to you."
I looked at him, uncertain of the tone.
"Think about it rationally," he said. "You are arguably the most powerful creature alive in the world right now. My worrying about you would be like an ant fearing that an elephant might be hurt by stepping on it. It makes no sense." A pause. "And as for trust — you told me yourself that dragons have one mate for their entire life. I believe you. So no, I don't worry about where you go, and I don't distrust you when you go there."
I held his gaze and said nothing for a moment.
He meant it practically, logically, as a statement of rational confidence. I understood that. And yet something in me flinched at it — a small, involuntary hurt, the particular sting of being told you are beyond harm in a way that sounds like being told you are beyond needing care.
Being powerful didn't mean I couldn't be hurt. It simply changed the geography of where the wounds came from.
I nodded, accepting his reasoning without contesting it, and then addressed what I had actually come to say.
"When were you going to tell me about the trade route through Draga?"
His eyes, which had begun to drift with the pull of returning sleep, came fully open.
A beat of silence.
"I planned to speak to you about it this morning," he said carefully. "You weren't in the rose palace. I had to make a decision within the time available, and I made it." He looked at me, and for once the question in his eyes was genuinely open rather than strategic. "Was it the wrong one?"
I sat with that for a moment.
The honest answer was complicated. My first response — the immediate, visceral one from the carriage — had been fury. The sense of betrayal, of something being decided about my kingdom without me, had been real and sharp. But I had walked through the logic of it since then, in the few quiet minutes I'd had, and the fury had cooled into something more measured.
The trade route was not, objectively, a bad thing for Draga. The northern kingdom had always been isolated to the point of vulnerability — insular, proud, and increasingly at odds with a world that was not going to wait for it. A paved road bringing merchants and movement and commerce through its territory would disrupt that insularity, yes. It would bring complications and cultural friction and a hundred new problems that didn't currently exist. But it would also bring income, and contact, and a broadened view of the world beyond the mountains. The isolation that had always been Draga's armour had also always been its cage.
Overall, it was a good thing. A great thing, perhaps, viewed from enough distance.
I let out a breath.
"You're right," I said. "It was the right decision. It's what I would have said, if you'd asked me."
He looked at me for a moment with an expression I couldn't entirely decipher.
It was strange — when I had first heard it in the carriage, it had felt like betrayal. Sitting here now, I couldn't hold onto that feeling with the same conviction. Whether that was rationality speaking or the mate bond smoothing over wounds that should have been left to scar, I genuinely didn't know.
What I did know was that I needed distance. Not from the conversation — from all of it. From him, from Selon, from the continuous effort of managing my own interior while navigating everything around me. Even an hour would help.
I stood.
"You're leaving?" He reached out and caught my hand with the unhurried confidence of someone who expects the gesture to work. Another yawn moved through him. "Just sleep here."
I looked at the hand holding mine. At the bed. At him — half-asleep, unguarded, asking me something that required no complexity whatsoever to say yes to.
"Maybe another time," I said.
I dissolved.
---
I reappeared in my own chamber at the rose palace and stood in the dark for a moment without moving.
I hadn't let myself feel it fully until now — the precise weight of what it meant to want something with your whole body and refuse it anyway, to say 'maybe another time' when what you meant was 'I cannot afford to say yes to you right now because I don't know yet what yes costs me.'
Three words. 'Maybe another time.'
And my hands were shaking slightly, which was new.
This was the mate bond. Not the warmth of it, not the belonging of it, not the particular peace that settled over me whenever I was close to him — the other side of it. The chain. The breathless, suffocating weight of a connection so absolute that even choosing distance from it required more effort than I had known anything would ever require of me.
'This is what they meant,' I thought. 'When the old texts said the mate was the dragon's greatest vulnerability. Not because someone could use the mate against you. Because you would do it to yourself. Every time.'
I stood in the dark of my chamber and breathed, and waited for the shaking to stop.