“Don’t,” I croaked. “Too hot.”
“I don’t care,” he said, which was a lie because his eyes were watering from the heat, but he lunged, wrapping his body around mine. The dragon exhaled. The world tilted again, but this time it wasn’t ripping apart; it was…reorienting. Like everything inside me had been spinning off its axis and suddenly clicked into place around a new center.
Him.
The alarms still screamed. Hartshorne babbled something about unstable constructs and catastrophic failure. My father tried to push off the wall, face twisted with fury and something uglier—fear of losing his investment, his control.
Ignatius stepped between him and the bed, shoulders squared, eyes still lit with that inhuman glow.
But all of that was background.
Phoenix held on, hard enough for me to feel it through the numbing, searing rush of magic. “You’re okay,” he promised. “I’ve got you. We’re getting you out of here.” I wanted to tell him he shouldn’t be here. That my father would hurt him. That the dragon might hurt him.
Instead, what came out was a raw, broken whisper. “He said he’d make you disappear.”
Phoenix’s jaw flexed. He flicked a glance at Wells that could have stripped paint. “He’s welcome to try,” he said softly. “But he’s going to have to get through a lot of very angry dragons first.”
Ignatius’s mouth twitched, humorless. “Starting with me.”
The dragon inside me curled around those words like a promise. Mine. Safe. Not alone. The heat finally stopped climbing. It didn’t go away—the room was still shimmering, monitors still warping at the edges—but it stopped trying to burn through everything around me. It flowed instead toward Phoenix’s hand, toward the sight of him, the sound of his voice.
I let out a long, shuddering breath.
The bindings on my soul lay in cracked pieces. The old lattice was broken. The new cage Hartshorne had tried to build lay scorched and ruined.
I didn’t know what that meant, not really. For my control. For my future. But as Phoenix’s fingers tightened around mine and Ignatius squared off against my father and Hartshorne, and the dragon finally, finally lay down quietly with its head in my chest.
For the first time since I’d opened my eyes on that too-white ceiling, I didn’t feel alone.
And that, more than anything else, terrified my father. I could see it in his eyes as he stared at the three of us—me broken and burning, Phoenix at my side, Ignatius at my front like a shield.
He’d lost.
He just didn’t know yet what I’d do with that.
Chapter twenty
Backcheck – Rushing back to defend after losing possession.
Phoenix
Ignatius’s house didn’t feel like a house now I was seeing it for the second time and really taking it in. It felt like a mountain had grown a front door.
Vaulted ceilings. Stone walls. Warm lighting. Enough space for a dragon the size of a semi-truck to stretch out, if Ignatius ever shifted indoors. Or if Cole did.
But no one had said that. Cole sat curled on the couch anyway, small and tired and wrapped in a blanket like it was the only barrier between him and the last forty-eight hours.
He hadn’t said much since we brought him here. He was upright, breathing, alive—but it was like someone had unplugged the steady, quiet strength I’d seen in him since day one.
Ignatius set three mugs on the coffee table and dropped into the armchair across from us. The chair groaned under his weight like it regretted every life choice that brought it here.
“All right,” he said, rubbing a hand over his face. “Let’s go over the situation.”
Cole flinched at the wordsituation. I nudged my knee against his hip. He didn’t lean into it, but he didn’t move away either. Ignatius pointed a finger at him—not accusing, just directing. “First: the Dragon Council is fully on your side. Completely. No dispute there.”
Cole blinked. “They…are?”
“Yes.” Ignatius snorted. “You were bound illegally. The Council’s collective temperature rose thirty degrees when they heard.”
