Her brows lowered. “I’m not letting you go alone.”
I sensed her fear, but had no time for it. I fought for a precious few seconds of coherence.
“Anna.” My voice was nothing but a hoarse rasp. “You have to let me go.”
She searched my face with her beautiful bicolored eyes.
“Let me go,” I whispered. “Please.”
“Only if you promise me that you will come back, Talakai.”
My reluctance to give her that promise—until that moment, I hadn’t acknowledged just how fine a line I was treading.
She saw it in my eyes. “Promise—you will return to me,” she insisted.
“I cannot promise that.” I closed my eyes and opened them again. In her place, I wouldn’t let me go either.
Her eyes were liquid with tears. “Then promise that you will return from this flight, or I won’t let you go.”
Maybe such a promise would hold me together. “All right,” I said, my voice barely audible. “I promise.”
She held my gaze for a moment more, and I read her frantic worry in both her expression and energy. But then she nodded and stepped aside.
I had no memory of walking through the door or down the hall, but suddenly I was on the stairs, half flying up them, my wings carrying me five or six steps at a time. I burst out onto the roof and was airborne within ten feet.
I wasn’t fully transformed for another hundred, but I had no issues flying as I shifted—I’d spent a lifetime practicing it. I pointed my lengthening nose to the heavens, and I climbed.
And climbed. I’d meant what I’d said—I craved the cold, clear, thin air above the clouds. I raced through them, picking up moisture on my scales that froze solid as I flew higher, glittering like diamonds beneath the moonlight.
This was where Dragons came to mate. Thirty thousand feet, or more—Haki and I had screwed around, daring each other higher before we twisted our necks together and let ourselves fall as we joined. It had all been done in fun—unadulterated sex, and we broke apart long before we neared the ground.
But he wasn’t my soulmate, and then, he’d found his own. I was happy for him. We enjoyed the brief pleasure, and I had no regrets when we returned to a friendship without benefits.
Anna was different. She wasn’t about sex. Or rather, not completely about sex. More about me being whom I’d been. And that took me straight to the voices.
A door I needed to slam shut. Or—not.
I flew until I gasped for breath, but I couldn’t cleanse myself of the despair that permeated every fiber. And it was then that I finally acknowledged the truth.
Xumi had broken me.
The voices only revealed the darkness in my soul, and it was not something I could fix by soaring through the clouds. I would either have to learn to live with it, or—
I struggled to sift and consider the possibilities as I climbed through the icy cold air. The lack of it threatened to take the last breath from me.
Then I sensed him.
Distinctive energy. Tyrez. He kept his distance, respecting my need to be alone. But I was under no illusions—he was watching me. Making sure I didn’t do anything dumb.
To test my theory, I folded my wings, and dove.
He was with me in an instant, angling so that he remained a bit above. Where he could use his greater size and weight to grab me if he needed to.
And suddenly, as I dropped like a stone, I was enraged. That the choice would be taken from me, if I were so inclined to make it. I snapped a wing out, the membrane and muscles straining against the rushing wind as it turned me at almost a ninety-degree angle before I folded it and dropped again.
Tyrez’s size worked against him for such an abrupt maneuver. It should have ensured he overshot me, but instead, he rolled in mid dive, the wind crackling against his wings as he came out of the roll and shot toward me.
And it was game on.
