“More what?”
“Time. I want you to kiss me, hold my hand, take me out for coffee, and stay up all night talking while you’re actually lying beside me. I’ve never felt this way about anyone before. It was instant for me. I should’ve been scared of you, right? Well, I wasn’t. You always make me feel safe, even locked in here. I want to see Mr. Diddles and see your mountains. I want to be part of your crew. I want you to stick around because, to me, it doesn’t matter if you have the dragon or not. To me, it only matters if you’re here. With me. The princess and the dragon. A fairytale…except that’s not us, is it? Not really. We were built in similar ways that made our edges too rough for anyone else to handle or they would get cut. But we don’t cut each other. We fit. Now you go. What do you want?”
Vyr ran his hand over his cropped hair and then leaned forward, grabbed her chair, and scooched her closer until her knees were between his thighs.
“No touching!” Emmitt said over the intercom.
Riyah flipped off his observation room, her gaze never leaving the exhausted lines of Vyr’s face. “What do you want, Vyr?” she asked again.
“I want my dragon back. I want to be whole because I want to keep you.”
God, what those words did to her insides. As she filled with warmth, she raised her hands, palms facing Vyr. He searched her eyes and then slid his much bigger hands against hers and then intertwined their fingers.
“I have a surprise for you,” she whispered.
His ruddy eyebrows drew down. “What is it?”
“Come lay on the floor with me.”
“Wait, are you wanting to fool around in here? We can.”
“Dear lord, do all of your thoughts revolve around sex?”
“No. Yes. Look at your shirt! Your tits are all squished together, and I can see the edge of your bra. I wish I could push you against the wall and fuck you from behind until you’re screaming my name.”
Well, she needed to add that to her list of wants. Riyah offered a slow, drunken blink. “Hooooly wow.” She cleared her throat once, twice. Opened her mouth but nothing intelligent came out. Just a soft gasp. Smooth. She cleared her throat once more and tried again. “Back to the surprise. Come on. I put a lot of work into this. Mostly because Emmitt is a stubborn anus and fought everything.”
“What did you do?”
She laid down on the cold concrete right in the middle of the room and patted the space beside her. He limped over to her and laid down too, crossing his hands over his stomach.
Riyah smiled over at him and asked, “Are you ready?”
Vyr looked confused, but so handsome, staring unabashedly back at her, allowing her to look right into his frozen dragon eyes. He had a week of red facial scruff, and the freckles across his nose were stark. She’d never wanted to kiss a man so badly.
“I’m ready,” he murmured in that deep voice of his.
Riyah closed her eyes and cut the lights. But she could still see him in the glow of the hundreds of plastic stars she’d taped to the ceiling. It had taken her hours to get it just right.
“Riyaaah,” Vyr drawled out softly.
“Remember when you told me what you missed the most?”
“The sky. The stars.”
“Yeah, and you said you liked to imagine them smiling down on you, even if you couldn’t see them. And that they were smiling because they could see better things coming for you.”
Vyr lay there unblinking up at the ceiling. “Yeah, I remember.”
“Vyr. I’ll be your star. I believe in you. I’ll wait with you while better things are coming.”
He stared up at the words she’d written with some of the stars. “I’m yours,” he read aloud.
She smiled. “You just said you wanted the dragon back so you could keep me. Well…dragon or no, you have me.”
Vyr slid his hand from his stomach and pulled her fingertips to his chest, right over his drumming heartbeat. He pressed her palm there and kept his hand on her like he didn’t want her to pull away.
On a breath, she whispered, “You have me, so trust me.”
Any second, the guards would storm the room and ruin this, but this is what they had. Stolen moments. Stolen touches. And she didn’t care what anyone thought. Only what Vyr thought. She didn’t care about consequences or judgement. She cared about one thing—the man beside her, who was smiling…smiling despite everything that had been done to him.
He lifted two fingers up at the ceiling and whispered, “Look, Riyah.”
The stars came off the ceiling and floated there above them, like real stars in the night sky. They rotated slowly, moving this way and that in different patterns until words formed. It was an I, a heart with a jagged crack down the middle, and a U. And as she watched in awe, the crack in the heart disappeared.
A tear slid from the corner of her eye down her cheek and made a tiny splat on the concrete.
Vyr rolled his head to the side and gave her a crooked smile. God, he was stunning, his dragon eyes glowing under the lights of the floating plastic stars, his smile for her certain, even though he must’ve been falling apart on the inside. “I feel steady around you.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. “And where the hell are the guards?” She propped up on her elbows and stared at the observation room mirrors across the room. They should’ve been in here tearing her and Vyr apart about now, but no one had even knocked on the window and told them to cut it out.
“Oh, I put them all to sleep,” Vyr said.
“W-what?”
“Oh, I can put people out. All the guards are on the floor right now. I made sure Emmitt hit his head on the way down because I can’t fuckin’ stand the way he talks to you.” Vyr’s smile turned wicked.
“Wait…you can put people out?”
“Yep. I can do a helluva lot people don’t realize.”
“Then what are you still doing in here?”
“I’m voluntary, Riyah.”