Chapter 11

Nora didn't know what to make of her new life. The changes were nearly innumerable. She slept on a pile of gold, with a dragon wrapped around her—sometimes in his human skin, sometimes in his scales. She had a little beast that followed at her heels throughout the day. She had food she didn't need to fetch herself. Her clothing was as grand as the queen's, if not even finer. She bathed daily in a hot underground pool, and nearly every day she made love in that very pool with the same dragon that had taken her.

But the most stunning one was this: she was happy.

It was especially startling, because Nora had never considered herself someone to be unhappy. Yet now, with her current mood in stark relief to the past one, she realized that she had merely survived from one desperate day to the next.

With Alistair, she wasn't simply making it from one day to the other. She was enjoying them. He liked to make her laugh; he seemed to set it as a goal. And he succeeded. The dragon could be quite funny when he set his mind to it, and she found she enjoyed teasing him back, enjoyed coaxing the rough sound of his laugh until it no longer sounded so rusty from disuse.

More than simply making her laugh, he was eager to please her. And not just her body. He indulged her mind as well. He told her stories of far-off kingdoms, of lands unlike anything she had ever seen, and of creatures as wondrous as—or slightly less than, as he'd emphasized—dragons. There were more dragons in the world than just him, and he taught her about them, their culture, their values. He even mentioned a brother, another obsidian dragon who had left the too-small kingdom in search of a new land. It was not simply greed that drove them, though he was not ashamed of his base nature. Their wealth, their hoard, was directly tied to their power. The most powerful dragons had one thing incapable of being stolen in their hoards—love. A twin flame, he described, was a soul carved from the same embers as the dragon's.

He had looked at her meaningfully when he told the story. Perhaps letting her know there would always be something else, a way to inform her he had his mind on other treasure. But it hardly mattered, Lenora decided. If he had not found his twin flame by now, he would likely not find it while she was still alive, and she could keep her dragon for herself in the meantime.

When the stories weren't enough, he availed her to the rest of his collection. Where books had been a rare commodity in Mossley, and she'd only been taught letters so she could manage her stepmother's legal documents, Alistair seemed to have an unending supply.

Jealous as he was, he didn't mind when her attention was on books or anything else she explored in the cavern. Sometimes, he bid her to read to him, as he explained he never quite had the patience to go through them himself. Yet he was quite literate, and when she stumbled over words, he helped her along, ever patient.

Alistair especially enjoyed the romantic ones. And sometimes he acted out scenes with her. First in jest, and then in a way that left them both breathless and collapsed on the cave floor.

So yes, Nora was happy. Happier than she had any right to be, she suspected. And the happiness continued until she made a grave mistake.

It was some months after she had come to live with the obsidian dragon. They had just gone for a third round that day and settled into one of the massive beds in the main cavern, Morthil dozing some distance away.

"Isn't this more comfortable than a mountain of metal?" she teased.

"It's not just metal. It's gold." He drew out the word as if it was a very important distinction to understand.

It was. But where once she'd been alarmed by the wealth Alistair surrounded himself with, she now had simply accepted it as part of him.

"It's cold and hard," she insisted, just because it was sometimes fun to rile the dragon. Even if she'd come to realize he was not her enemy, not in truth anymore.

"It's actually rather malleable," he groused. "Are you so used to a bed you cannot adapt?"

He indulged her on every front, but he truly did prefer to sleep on that mountain of gold. Of course, more than that, he refused to sleep separately, and Lenora found she liked the warmth of his body surrounding her enough that the gold wasn't so bad, certainly not with the pile of textiles.

She snorted. "I'm not used to beds at all. Can't recall having slept in one before coming here, actually. It's why I'm so keen to try it out."

Alistair frowned slightly. He was propped on his side, one hand carelessly toying with her hair while he spoke with her, their legs in a tangle. "Have human tastes changed so much? I thought beds were common for your kind."

"They are. I just never had one."

"Why?"

Nora wasn't sure what it was. Maybe it was the fact she was truly happy for the first time in her life and no longer felt the need to constantly remind herself that she should be grateful for everything her stepmother had done for her. Maybe it was the way Alistair never seemed to judge her harshly or insult her—at least not outside of odd comments about her lack of appreciation for sleeping on piles of gold. Maybe they had simply spent enough time together.

"We only had one bed in the cottage, my stepmother's." There had been two, but hers had been moved to make way for her stepmother's belongings. "Hers was large enough to share, especially since my father died shortly after they married, but she said I took up too much space, and that the hearth was a more comfortable spot. So I didn't have a bed."

"Did you not have money for one?"

"No, we weren't destitute. My stepmother, Helga, didn't see the point in getting a second bed. She felt the ground was more than enough, and especially since my chores included tending to the livestock, there was no sense in letting me get animal filth onto clean sheets that would then need to be laundered. Even though she had me launder her sheets every few days." She snorted. "Though with all the cinders around the fireplace, I daresay I was usually dirtier than the animals. She insisted good care be taken of them, and if she ever found my care lacking, if I was a half hour late getting the feed in the morning, or too slow to finish milking the cattle… she let me know of her displeasure. And how lucky I was that she cared for me, even though my father was no longer alive."

"Did she do this to you?" He fingered her back. The scars no longer pained her, not after Alistair had taken to applying some poultice he'd gotten after her first week and kept in regular supply since.

"Yes. It was her. It wasn't often, maybe every other season or so. It was just… after my father died, I was unruly. She said it helped her ‘guide me.'"

The change over Alistair was subtle, but instant. His reptilian eyes narrowed, the pupils thinning to slits. He blinked as if to cast it away, but Lenora had not missed it.

And even though Alistair did not immediately bolt from the bed, did not so much as frown, let alone curse the woman the way Nora sometimes did, she knew she had made a very bad mistake.