“Darling?” Bash’s voice echoed through the room and drew my attention. When I looked toward the door, I found my men waiting for me.
Steele tilted his head slightly, a silent question in his eyes.Ready?
I nodded, rising to meet them. There was still so much to plan, so many choices waiting to be made, but for now, we’d earned this moment of quiet—the brief calm before the next storm.
15
KIERAN
The night skystretched above me like a dark canopy, twinkling stars strewn across it in quiet defiance of everything unraveling below. I leaned against the stone railing of my bedroom balcony, a thin blanket wrapped around my shoulders, more for comfort than warmth. The cool air brushed against my skin and tugged gently at my hair, but I barely felt it. My focus was far too tangled in the knot behind my ribs—the pressure that had been building steadily since the confrontation with the Dominion.
A heavy sigh fell from my lips as my eyes fixated on the stars that weren’t gleaming as brightly, reminding me of that imminent prophecy on top of the threat of the triad.
I’d barely started wrapping my head around what it meant to carry Star Keeper magic and what it might demand from me, and now I was supposed to lead through the threat of a full-scale war against the very heavens themselves.
I let the blanket fall to the ground and leaned over. My fingers tightened around the edge of the railing, trying to ground myself. I knew the blowback from the upper triads was a possibility, but I’d hoped that just for a fucking moment I could focus on one thing at a time.
The world felt too large tonight. Too full of unanswered questions and stakes I wasn’t sure I could shoulder. I knew I wasn’t alone. Creator, I knew I wasn’t—my men had made sure of that. Their belief in me never faltered, never wavered, but that almost made it worse, because the more I loved them, the more impossible it felt to let them down.
The more dangerous it became to dream about a future with them in it.
The fear wasn’t just about failure anymore—it was about loss.
My anxiety had started as a sharp edge and now it had expanded into something fuller, heavier. It lived in my chest like a second heartbeat, one that pulsed in time with the people I couldn’t afford to lose.
A familiar sound broke the silence of the night, soft and rhythmic, wings slicing through air in smooth, gliding arcs.
I looked up just in time to see a dark blur circling overhead. Niz.
He dipped low over the balcony once, his smaller wyvern form silhouetted against the stars. Black scales caught the faintest light from the bedroom behind me, revealing the soft shimmer of his green underbelly as he adjusted his flight. Then, with practiced ease, he coasted toward the balcony and landed on the wide stone railing with a soft scrape of claws.
He folded his wings with a quiet huff and settled into a crouch, his eyes watching me with quiet awareness.
I moved closer and reached out, my fingers brushing lightly under his jaw before scratching the spot just beneath his chin. He leaned into it with a low, pleased rumble, and a smile tugged at the corner of my mouth despite the tightness still coiled in my chest. I pressed a soft kiss to the curve of his snout, just like I used to back when I thought he was nothing more than Ronan’s wild companion—just a wyvern with an attitude and a penchant for napping in inconvenient places.
“I must admit,” I murmured, voice thick with amusement, “it’s nice to have a guy who can’t always talk back.”
The quiet stretched between us, not awkward or uncertain, but grounding. Niz’s body remained still as I stroked beneath his chin, the firm line of his scaled jaw warm beneath my hand. There was something soothing in the weight of him there, in the simple rhythm of his breathing and the steady gaze that held mine without judgment, without expectation.
For a few blessed seconds, it was just this: me, the stars, and the man who had somehow become both my comfort and my chaos.
I pulled back slightly, still trailing my fingers along the smooth ridge of his snout, and offered a half-smile, wanting to incite a little bit of that chaos to distract me.
“Really,” I said, tilting my head as I eyed him. “You’re very well-behaved like this. Quiet. Obedient. All things I can definitely get used to. I might even prefer you this way.”
His nostrils flared, and a low, pointedhuffescaped him—a sound I was fairly certain translated todon’t push your luck, My Fire.
“I mean it,” I continued, teasing. “It’s refreshing having someone around who can’t talk, smirk, and distract me with smoldering stares.”
The words had barely left my mouth before a pulse of energy rolled off him—magic stretching and folding with a sudden rush of heat. My eyes widened as Niz shifted without warning, form blurring and lengthening, his scales vanishing into skin, his body rising with a fluid snap of transformation that left no time to react.
And then he was there in his human form. Very human and very naked.
He was sitting lazily on the balcony’s railing, the curve of his shoulders loose and unbothered. His hands rested on his knees,and his expression was smug and wicked—pointed directly at me.
“Oh, excuseme, My Fire,” he drawled. “I must’ve forgotten I wasn’t allowed to smirk or talk back.”
My gaze dipped despite my best efforts to keep eye contact, but it was impossible when his cock was damn near eye-level with me.
