Page 81 of Dragon 7

I’ve whispered my name in his dreams too.

Don’t whisper in my Roar’s dreams.

Our Roar.

You’re worse than my brother.

Our brother.

Frowning, I leaned over the table. From above, it looked manageable. Pieces on a board, arranged in patterns, moving through a logic that could be read and redirected.

From below, in the dirt, the dark, and the smoke, it was six hundred armed men and fifteen aircraft and the sound of my island tearing itself apart.

“We’re not doing bad at all.” I straightened.

Once, I would have looked at that table and felt something close to worship.

The pieces.

The positions.

The architecture of power rendered small enough to hold in both hands.

There was a time when this—all of this—was the only thing I understood as a life worth living.

The empire.

The name.

The throne that cost more to keep than I could calculate in a single accounting.

I had been given the throne out of tragedy and. . .I had learned to want it. Completely. With the kind of wanting that didn't leave room for anything else—not rest, not softness, not the warmth of a woman who looked at me not as the Dragon but as the man standing just behind the beast, ordinary, exhausted, and still trying.

But something had shifted in me on that forest floor, and it had not been gradual the way they said change was supposed to be.

It had been a single point of rupture.

Her blood in a bowl.

Her mouth on my palm.

Her body in my arms after.

Her soul now. . .inside of me.

I had felt her rage burning through my chest all the way to this table, and what I felt alongside it—beneath the pride, beneath the war-hunger—was a grief so quiet it had no language yet. Only the shape of it. The outline of something I had already lost and not yet been permitted to mourn.

I thought about children I had not yet held.

I thought about mornings that had no war in them.

I thought about Nyomi's laugh—the one that arrived when she was not performing anything for anyone, when she forgot I was watching—and I thought that I would give all of this away just to spend the rest of my days with her in my arms.

I’d give my entire empire away.

The pieces on the board.

The throne.