BOUND TO THE AVERNUS FAMILY

Chapter 19: Davion at Midnight

I am walking down the dark, shadowed corridor of the ground floor, my bare feet completely soundless against the cold marble. I am not looking for anyone. My biological obligations for the day were entirely fulfilled hours ago. The midday and evening mist requirements were met.

But as I pass the heavy archway leading to the glass-walled conservatory, I see a faint, flickering light spilling across the floor.

The heavy glass doors are standing wide open.

I stop. I do not turn around and go back to my bedroom. I adjust the thin silk of my sleepwear and step through the threshold.

The blistering, oppressive heat hits me before I even fully enter the room.

It is not the suffocating, metallic density of unpurified mist. It is pure, structural, radiating temperature. The air inside the sprawling glass room is visibly shimmering, distorting the shadows of the exotic plants like a mirage on hot asphalt.

Davion is sitting on a carved stone bench in the center of the room.

He is completely bare-chested. His dragon heat has spiked to its absolute, unpredictable maximum. The blistering warmth radiating from his skin is so intense that the broad-leafed ferns nearest to him are visibly wilting, their green edges curling and turning brown from the sheer ambient temperature.

He has been sitting here alone for at least an hour, riding out the violent biological spike in the only room in the estate with enough humidity and temperature regulation to contain him.

His eyes, usually a bright, playful amber, are glowing in the dark like molten gold.

He looks up as I walk in. He expects me to turn around. He expects the suffocating wall of heat to drive me back into the cool hallway.

I walk across the humid floor. I sit down on the stone bench directly across from him.

I do not move away.

This is not a decision born of biological necessity or emergency mist management. I am staying because I walked in, because the blistering heat is fascinating data, and because, on some level my analytical mind refuses to fully examine, I am deeply curious about him at his absolute maximum.

Davion stares at me. The shimmering air between us is thick and heavy.

He reaches out. When his hand wraps around my bare waist, the heat is blistering, searing directly through the thin silk of my sleepwear. It borders dangerously on painful, but hovers perfectly on the absolute warmest side of comfortable.

He pulls me directly onto his lap.

The session operates entirely differently from the controlled, exhibitionist warmth of our previous encounters. His massive, rigid c*ck is burning hot against my wet entrance. As he sinks his thick girth deep into my tight p*ssy, the heat changes the texture of the friction completely. It feels as though I am melting around him, my internal muscles desperately yielding to accommodate the searing, heavy stretch.

I arch my back, a breathless, broken sound tearing from my throat as he sets a relentless, driving pace.

His running commentary is gone. The playful, observant exhibitionist is completely submerged under the violent spike of his dragon physiology.

"I can't always predict when it happens," Davion grinds out, his voice rough and incredibly low as his hot hips snap forward.

He thrusts deeper, burying himself to the hilt, the blistering heat of his chest pressing flush against my breasts.

"I've been trying to keep it from—" He stops, his jaw tight, his amber eyes completely dark as he fights for breath.

I grip his burning shoulders, my nails digging into his skin. "From what?"

"From being someone else's problem," he whispers heavily, resting his hot forehead against the curve of my neck.

The sudden, brutal vulnerability in his statement completely short-circuits my analytical cataloguing. This isn't charm. This isn't calculation. He came down here alone in the middle of the night to suffer through a physical spike so his volatile biology wouldn't inconvenience anyone else in the estate.

The profound, heavy weight of that realization collides violently with the blistering physical friction of his thick shaft stretching me open.

My body reacts instantly. The ambient, residual mist in my bloodstream flares, responding to his overwhelming temperature.

"Davion," I gasp, my sl*ck internal walls clamping down frantically around his burning length.

I shatter completely. A violent, screaming *rgasm rips through my core. He groans—a deep, ragged sound of total surrender—and unloads a heavy, scorching flood of c*m deep inside my womb.

The stark, silver-blue light projects instantly from my wide eyes.

The dark, humid conservatory is suddenly illuminated by two distinct, massive sources of light. The freezing, luminescent, silver-blue glow of my processed mist collides directly with the shimmering, golden, ambient heat radiating from his skin. The visual is staggering, painting the glass walls and the wilting plants in fractured, impossible colors.

I collapse against his burning chest, my lungs fighting for air as the heavy, twisting pleasure slowly ebbs.

We sit tangled together on the stone bench for a long time.

Gradually, the violent spike begins to break. The blistering temperature of his skin slowly cools back down to its comfortable, baseline warmth. The air in the conservatory stops shimmering and becomes breathable again, though the dead, brown ferns beside the bench will not recover.

Davion gently withdraws from my soaking entrance.

He helps me pull the thin silk of my sleepwear back into place. He doesn't look at the dead plants. He looks directly at my face.

"You're the first person who hasn't moved away when it happens," Davion says quietly in the dark.

I sit perfectly still on the stone bench. I look at the curling brown edges of the ferns. I look at his steady, amber eyes. My analytical mind weighs the data, evaluating the exact truth of my own internal processes when I crossed the threshold of this room.

"I thought about it," I admit cleanly, my voice completely devoid of false comfort.

Davion goes completely still for a fraction of a second.

Then, the tension bleeds out of his broad shoulders. A slow, genuine smile touches the corners of his mouth.

"I know," he replies, his voice warm and steady in the cooling room. "That's exactly why it means something that you didn't."

I process the logic of his statement. It is perfectly, internally consistent. He does not want blind, ignorant martyrdom; he wants someone who recognizes the danger of his heat, evaluates it, and actively chooses to stay anyway.

I look at him in the shadowed conservatory, filing this specific, profound revelation directly into the second column of my expanding mental ledger.