Chapter 7: Forbidden Bath
The cold from the scale had entered him. Not as a chill, but as an absence, a void where warmth should have been. It lodged behind his sternum, a tiny black hole sucking at his vitality. For two days, John moved through his duties like a ghost, the memory of that perfect circle of frost blooming behind his eyes every time he closed them. He served Xa’kir’s meals, mended a travel cloak, listened to the dragon’s low, intent voice explaining the theory of binding runes. But his mind was in the ravine, feeling that vast, curious loneliness pressing against the world.
The stiffness in his ribs had faded to a faint ache, the salve’s work complete. The grime of the forest and the sweat of fear, however, had seeped into his skin. Tonight, the need to scrub it away was a physical imperative.
His assigned bathing chamber was a closet of neglect. The tapestries were so faded the dragons were mere suggestions, outlines of fury bleached by time. The water from the brass pump was, as always, achingly cold. He lit the single stub of a candle, its light fighting a losing battle against the deep shadows in the corners.
He stripped slowly, his clothes pooling on the damp stone floor. The cracked mirror showed a fragmented young man, pale and too thin, the purple bloom on his ribs faded to yellow-green at the edges. He looked like what he was: used, and not yet broken.
He dipped a cloth in the basin, wincing as the cold bit into his hands. The chill was a shock, then a burn. He scrubbed at his neck, his arms, the impersonal efficiency crumbling with each pass. His skin, cold and wet, pebbled with gooseflesh. In the stark silence, his mind, unguarded, drifted to the only source of heat he knew.
Xa’kir. In the forest, a terrifying silhouette against the green. At the feast, the careless dab of a napkin. The clinical, painful press of salve into his wounds. The dragon’s heat was not a comfort; it was a force. It was the opposite of the scale’s void.
John’s breath hitched. The rough cloth slid over his chest, across a nipple that tightened painfully. A different heat, sluggish and unfamiliar, began to uncoil low in his belly, entirely his own. It was a stupid, dangerous indulgence. But the silence was absolute, and the fear of the past days was a live wire in his blood, seeking earth.
He leaned against the cold edge of the basin, head bowed. His other hand, moving of its own volition, trailed down the flat plane of his stomach. His fingers traced the trail of dark hair leading down. He was half-hard, just from the thought, from the shame of it, from the sheer, desperate need to feel something that wasn’t terror or cold.
He let the cloth fall into the water with a soft plop. His calloused palm, still cool from the water, wrapped around his cock. A shaky groan escaped his lips, swallowed by the room’s damp stone. He stroked himself to full hardness, his flesh hot and alien in his own grip. His mind furnished the details, vivid and unbidden: not the dragon’s fury, but the contained strength in his forearm as he sketched runes. The smooth, low timbre of his voice explaining their purpose. The way his pale eyes saw everything, including the pathetic, yearning spark in a disposable prince.
John’s fist moved faster, his breathing reduced to ragged pants. He pictured those hands on him, not healing, but claiming. Not cold like the scale’s touch, but incendiary. He imagined the weight of that impossible body pinning him to his narrow bed, the burn of it, the brutal, unequivocal possession. A filthy, hot word spilled from his lips. “Please…”
He was close, hips stuttering against the stone basin, lost in the crude, selfish fantasy. The candle flame guttered.
“Does the thought of me bring you comfort, or is it simply the only heat left to you?”
The voice came from the deepest shadow by the door, a shadow that hadn’t been there a moment before. It was Xa’kir’s voice, stripped of all lordly pretense, raw with an ancient, knowing weariness.
John froze, his whole body seizing in a shock of utter horror. His hand sprang away from his flesh as if burned. He whirled, crouching instinctively, his back slamming against the basin, the cold biting into his skin. He clutched for a towel, finding none, his nakedness suddenly a profound and terrifying vulnerability.
Xa’kir coalesced from the darkness, not as Lord Noir, but as himself. His human form seemed a mere suggestion, the edges blurred with tendrils of living shadow. His pale eyes gleamed in the candlelight, fixed unblinkingly on John. There was no mockery in them. Only a deep, predatory focus.
“You… you were watching.” John’s voice was a strangled thread.
“I am always watching,” Xa’kir said, taking a step forward. The small room shrank further. “The ward is singing a constant, panicked song. Your little… performance was a quieter, but no less telling, frequency.”
Shame curdled into something hotter, something like rage at the violation. “Get out.”
“No.” Another step. The ozone-and-granite scent of him filled the damp air, overpowering the soap. “You called. In your way. A prince offers a wish to a dragon. Did you think the transaction ended in the forest?”
John couldn’t breathe. The void behind his sternum pulsed. “I didn’t call for this.”
“You called for ‘more’. This is what ‘more’ feels like. It is not pretty. It is not noble.” Xa’kir was before him now, close enough for John to feel the radiant heat coming off him, a furnace to John’s chilled skin. His gaze dropped, deliberate, taking in John’s shivering body, his half-aroused state unable to be hidden. “It is desperate and hungry. Like the thing in the forest. The difference is, I am here. And I am not kind.”
A long finger, startlingly warm, touched the fading bruise on John’s ribs. The touch was not clinical now. It was possessive. It traced the yellowed edge, then slid upward, over a taut nipple, making John gasp. The finger hooked under his chin, forcing his head up.
“Do you want me to leave?” Xa’kir asked, his breath ghosting over John’s lips. It smelled of embers and old magic.
Every instinct screamed yes. Every bruised, lonely, yearning part of him cried no. John stared into those pale, ancient eyes and saw his own fractured reflection. He saw the ravine’s frost. He saw the end of waiting.
He said nothing. He didn’t move.
A sound, like a low growl from deep within a mountain, emanated from Xa’kir. The approval was feral.
The hand on his chin slid back, fingers tangling in his damp hair, pulling just enough to arch John’s neck. Xa’kir’s mouth crashed down on his.
It was not a kiss of seduction. It was a claiming. It was hard and hungry, all teeth and demand. John surrendered to it with a muffled cry, his hands flying up to clutch at Xa’kir’s shoulders. The fabric of his tunic was rough, but the muscle beneath was iron. John opened under the assault, letting the dragon’s tongue plunder his mouth, tasting him with a grim thoroughness. The heat was immense, consuming, burning away the last of the scale’s internal chill.
Xa’kir broke the kiss, his own breathing slightly altered. “You taste of fear and want,” he murmured against John’s swollen lips. “A potent vintage.”
In one brutal, effortless motion, he spun John around, bending him forward over the cold stone basin. John’s palms slapped against the wet surface, his reflection a wide-eyed smear in the cracked mirror. He heard, more than saw, the rustle of clothing. Then the blistering heat of Xa’kir’s bare body was pressed against his back, from shoulder blades to thighs.
A hard, thick length, unimaginably hot, pressed against the cleft of his ass. John tensed, a real bolt of fear shooting through him.
“Relax.” The word was a command in his ear. A hand, slick with something that smelled of oil and herbs—salove from the jar, John realized distantly—grasped his cock, stroking him once, twice, a rough, thrilling friction that made his knees buckle. The other hand, oiled fingers, found his entrance. “This will hurt. Then it won’t.”
The first finger pushed in. John cried out, the stretch sharp, unfamiliar. Xa’kir didn’t pause. He worked him open with a ruthless efficiency, one finger, then two, scissoring, stretching, the salve’s strange magic both cooling and enhancing the sensation. The pain was a bright wire, morphing swiftly into a deep, full burn. John was panting, drooling slightly onto the stone, his hard cock trapped between his belly and the cold basin.
“Please,” he whimpered, not knowing what he was asking for.
“I know,” Xa’kir growled.
The fingers withdrew. The blunt, searing head of Xa’kir’s cock took their place. He pushed.
John screamed. It was a rending, a splitting. It was too much, too big, too hot. He shook violently, tears springing to his eyes. Xa’kir held him, frozen, buried to the hilt, his body a cage of fire around John’s. He didn’t move, just let John sob and adjust, his mouth on the knobs of John’s spine.
“Breathe,” he ordered, his voice thick. “Breathe through it. As you did with the salve.”
John dragged in a ragged, wet breath. The pain was subsiding, replaced by a shocking, terrifying fullness. He felt impaled, owned, stretched to his limit around a core of living flame.
Xa’kir moved. A slow, deliberate withdrawal, then a harder, deeper thrust.
“Oh, fuck!” John choked out. The pain flared, then blurred instantly into something else. A friction so intense it bordered on agony, but an agony he never wanted to end. It scraped a spot inside him that lit up his entire nervous system.
Xa’kir set a brutal, pounding rhythm, each thrust slamming John into the stone basin, the candle flame dancing wildly. His grip on John’s hip was bruising. The sounds were obscene: wet, fleshy slaps, John’s choked cries, Xa’kir’s low, guttural grunts. He was not making love. He was fucking. He was branding John from the inside out, chasing his own release with single-minded intensity.
John’s mind shattered. There was no past, no frost, no queen. There was only this: the relentless, burning invasion, the heavy slap of Xa’kir’s balls against his skin, the rough hand that snaked around to jerk his cock in time with the thrusts. The coil in his gut wound tighter, a pressure building from that ravaged, lit-up spot inside him.
“Come for me, little prince,” Xa’kir snarled into his ear, his pace becoming frenzied, desperate. “Spill your seed on this stone while I fill you with mine.”
The words, filthy and precise, were the final key. John’s climax ripped through him, a white-hot detonation that seized his muscles and tore a raw scream from his throat. His cock pulsed in Xa’kir’s fist, stripes of hot come splattering against the basin and the faded dragon on the tapestry.
The sensation of him pulsing inside was all Xa’kir needed. With a roar that sounded too large for the small room, the dragon slammed home one final time, crushing John beneath him. John felt the scalding rush of his release, flood after flood of it, painting his insides with impossible heat. It felt like being claimed by a volcano.
They collapsed together, a single heaving, sweaty mass over the basin. Xa’kir’s weight was immense, crushing, anchoring. John’s body trembled with aftershocks, a used, empty vessel.
The dragon’s weight lifted, leaving John cold and hollow. He shuddered, liquid heat trickling down his thigh. He could not turn to face the silence behind him.
A warm palm smoothed over the flare of his hip, possessive and oddly soothing. Xa’kir’s breath stirred the sweat-damp hair at his nape. “Breathe,” the dragon said again, the command now edged with something softer, a rough approximation of care.
John drew a shaky breath. The raw, throbbing ache between his legs was a compass pointing only to the man behind him. His mind, slowly re-knitting, presented a horrifying, thrilling truth: he wanted it again. The emptiness was already a longing.
NOT FOR LONG. JOHN COULD FEEL THE FLESH IN HIM THICKENING AGAIN, XA’KIR’S HEAT STILL A BRAND AGAINST HIS BACK
A low, reverberant growl answered his body’s traitorous signal. “Greedy, little prince,” Xa’kir murmured, the words vibrating through John’s spine.
AND SOMETHING HOT AND SCALEY SLITHERED UP HIS LEG, CURLING AROUND HIS WAIST.
John’s breath hitched. He looked down. A length of obsidian-scaled flesh, thick as his wrist, coiled around his midsection, holding him firm against the furnace of Xa’kir’s body. The scales were smooth, not sharp, and radiated a deep, penetrating warmth. A draconic tail.
HIS BREATH STOPPED FOR A MOMENT, SEEING A DRAGONTAIL.
Before panic could fully root, Xa’kir’s hand curled around his throat, not choking, but cradling his pulse. “Look.”
John forced his eyes to the cracked mirror. The reflection showed a nightmare diorama. His own pale, ravaged body, bent over the stone. The sinuous black tail encircling him. And behind him, Xa’kir—mostly man, but his eyes burned with sulphurous light, and dark, metallic scales patches across his shoulders and the line of his jaw. A hybrid form of terrifying beauty.
“YOU THINK I WILL ONLY CLAIM YOU ONCE AND DISCARD YOU LIKE YOUR ‘FAMILY’?” XA’KIR’S PROMISE SOFTLY ECHOED IN THE DARK, resonant in John’s very bones. The tail tightened its coaxing grip. “Not you, Just John.”
The shadows in the room, already deep, began to move. They pooled from the corners, flowing like ink up the walls, swallowing the feeble candlelight. They blotted out the faded tapestries, the basin, the cold stone floor.
BEFORE SHADOWS SWALLOWED THEM.
The world tipped. There was no sound, only a pressureless fall through absolute dark. John’s cry was lost in the void. The tail and the arm around him were his only anchors, physical truth in a sensory vacuum.
TRANSPORTING THEM INTO DARK CAVES, WHERE NOTHING COULD DISTURB THEM.
Then, solidity. Cold, smooth solidity beneath his knees. The air changed, tasting of deep earth, of mineral deposits, and of a clean, dry heat emanating from somewhere ahead. The oppressive silence of the palace was gone, replaced by a vast, echoing quiet, punctuated by the distant, steady plink of water droplets.
They were in a cavern. A soft, lurid glow emanated from veins of phosphorescent fungus threading the high, arched ceiling. It illuminated the glassy smoothness of the floor—worn by centuries of water or something else—and the immense, dark shapes of stalagmites rising like teeth.
Xa’kir released him. John swayed on his knees, naked and disoriented on the cavern floor. The dragon-shifter stood, fully transformed back to his humanoid guise, though the pale eyes still held their otherworldly light. He looked utterly at home in this primeval place.
“Where…?” John’s voice was a dry croak.
“A mile below your palace. A place older than their stolen titles.” Xa’kir paced a slow circle around him, a predator examining its prize in a new lair. “No one can hear you scream here. No one can interrupt.”
The finality of it, the utter isolation, sent a fresh jolt through John. This wasn’t a stolen moment in a servant’s closet. This was a deliberate entombment. He was alone with a dragon in the deep dark, and the thought made his spent cock twitch against his thigh.
Xa’kir saw it. A sharp, approving smile cut his face. “There it is. The spark that isn’t afraid of the dark.” He stopped in front of John. “On your back.”
The command brooked no negotiation. John obeyed, lowering himself to the surprisingly smooth, cool stone. He looked up at the glowing ceiling, at the looming form of Xa’kir standing over him, blotting out the light. The scale of it all made him feel infinitesimal.
Xa’kir knelt, straddling his hips. His fingers, clever and cruel, traced the faint remnants of the bruises on John’s ribs. “The ice in your chest,” he stated, not asking. “Does it linger?”
John nodded, unable to speak. The void was still there, a tiny, frozen knot.
“I will burn it out.” The declaration was absolute.
He bent, capturing John’s mouth again. This kiss was different. It was slower, deeper, a devouring exploration. Xa’kir’s tongue mapped his teeth, his palate, as if memorizing his taste. One hand fisted in John’s hair, holding him still for the ravishment, while the other trailed down his quivering stomach.
When he took John’s cock in hand, it was with a slick, oily substance he produced from nowhere. The slide was effortless, sinful. “Your body learns,” Xa’kir whispered against his lips, pumping him with a rhythmic, twisting motion. “It remembers the shape of me.”
John arched off the stone, a broken sound escaping him. The sensations were amplified by the cavern’s echo, by the terrifying privacy. Every stroke, every graze of a calloused thumb over his dripping slit, was a note in a concert for an audience of one.
“Please,” John begged, not knowing for what.
“I know what you need.”
Xa’kir shifted. He lifted John’s legs, hooking them over the hard planes of his shoulders, bending him in half, exposing him utterly. The cool air of the cave kissed his stretched, sensitive hole. He was completely vulnerable, laid open on an altar of stone.
He watched, mesmerized and terrified, as Xa’kir spat into his palm, slicking his own rigid, daunting length. There was no finesse now, only intent.
The broad head pressed against him. John braced, but there was no brutal invasion this time. Xa’kir pushed in with a relentless, steady pressure, a slow, filling conquest that made John whimper with each fractional advance. It was more intimate than the frantic fucking against the basin. This was a statement of occupancy.
“You take me so well,” Xa’kir groaned, his composure cracking for the first time, a fissure of raw need. He seated himself fully, the rough hair at his base grinding against John’s tender skin.
He began to move. A deep, rolling rhythm that pistoned into the core of him. Each thrust was a calculated assault on that devastating spot inside, lighting John’s nerves like fuses. The slap of skin on skin echoed off the cavern walls, a chaotic drumbeat.
John clawed at the smooth rock, finding no purchase. He was adrift on a sea of sensation, anchored only by the dragon pounding into him. Xa’kir’s eyes were locked on his, reflecting the ghost-light, drinking in every shattered expression.
“This is where you belong,” Xa’kir grunted, his pace quickening, becoming punishing. “In the deep places. Unseen by them. Known only by me.” He drove deeper, harder. “Say it.”
John could barely think. Pleasure, sharp and catastrophic, was coiling at the base of his spine. “I… I can’t…”
Xa’kir leaned forward, changing the angle, hitting a place that made John see white. “Say it.”
“Yours!” John screamed, the word ripped from him. “I’m yours!”
The dragon roared, a sound of pure triumph that shook dust from the cavern ceiling. His control shattered. His thrusts became erratic, primal jackhammers of need. One large hand wrapped around John’s cock, stroking in a furious, matching rhythm.
It was too much. The coil snapped. John’s orgasm tore through him silently at first, a seismic wave of release that clenched hard around the dragon’s cock. Then sound followed: a raw, endless scream that echoed through the timeless dark, a declaration to the stone itself.
Xa’kir followed him over. He slammed home and held, shuddering, as his hot release flooded John’s depths, a scalding geyser that seemed to have no end. It was a claiming more profound than any bite or mark. John felt filled, not just with seed, but with that incendiary heat, melting the last icy fragment of the scale’s touch into nothing.
Collapse was inevitable. Xa’kir gathered him, pulling out with a soft, wet sound that made John flinch. He arranged them on the stone floor, John’s back against the steady furnace of his chest, the obsidian tail coiling around them both in a possessive loop.
In the humming silence, John listened to the distant water droplets. Plink. Plink. Like a heartbeat slower than time.
Xa’kir’s lips brushed his temple. “Sleep, Just John. The waking world is not done with us. But here, for now, you are safe.”
The dragon’s heat was a fortress. The cavern, a sacred womb of stone. John, for the first time in his life, felt neither cold nor lonely. He closed his eyes, the deep earth’s silence a lullaby, and slept.