I tell it to shut up again. Louder this time.
“You should be careful.” Zyphon’s attention shifts to me now, those ancient eyes reading things I’d rather keep hidden. “I recognize what I see in you. The claiming instinct. The need to possess what you want to protect.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Isn’t it?” He tilts his head, shadows pooling around his feet. “You’ve been watching her for days. Hovering. Bringing her gifts she didn’t ask for. Learning her habits. Her preferences. The patterns of her behavior.” He glanced at the garden again. “That’s not protection, brother. That’s obsession wearing protection’s mask.”
The accusation cuts deeper than I want to admit. “She needs?—“
“She needs someone who’ll give her back what was stolen—her autonomy.” Zyphon’s voice goes quiet. Almost gentle, which is terrifying coming from him. “Not another person trying to control her. Even with good intentions. Especially with good intentions.”
In the garden, Selene helps Aisling to her feet. They’re talking in low voices, heads bent together. Aisling’s mask is firmly back in place—the professional distance restored, vulnerability lockedaway. But a change has occurred. Some of the rigid tension has eased.
Not because of me. Because I stayed back. Because I let someone else provide what she needed.
The realization burns.
“She’s not ready for what you’re feeling,” Zyphon says. “May never be. The claiming instinct doesn’t guarantee acceptance. Doesn’t guarantee anything except pain for both parties if it’s forced.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” He melts back into shadow, voice lingering after his form has vanished. “Make sure you do, brother. Some wounds don’t heal.”
I stand alone in the doorway, watching Aisling walk back toward the fortress with Selene at her side. She doesn’t look in my direction. Doesn’t acknowledge that I’m here, that I’ve been watching, that I care about what happens to her in ways I can’t explain and don’t entirely understand.
My dragon snarls its frustration.
Ours. She’s ours. Claim her. Mark her. Make her understand.
But she doesn’t need another person trying to own her.
She needs someone who’ll let her own herself.
Even if it kills me to wait.
SIX
AISLING
Idon’t return to the infirmary that evening.
Instead, I find my way to the room they’ve assigned me—small, stone-walled, sparsely furnished but clean. There’s a bed with actual blankets. A window too narrow for escape but wide enough for light. A desk with paper and ink that I suspect Rurik left, though I can’t prove it.
I sit at that desk as darkness falls, and for the first time since Cork, I try to write something that isn’t a list.
I don’t know how to do this.
The pen hovers over the paper. Three weeks of surviving on clinical detachment, and now someone’s asking me to feel things on purpose.
They used me as a battery. That’s the simple version. The complicated version involves ancient magic and blood rituals and a presence in my mind that felt like drowning in someone else’s hunger.
She’s still there. Valdris. Not in my head anymore—not right now—but in my blood. Waiting. Watching. A key already fitted to a lock, they said. And I’m supposed to just... live with that?
My hand shakes. I set the pen down. Pick it up again.
I used to know who I was. Veterinarian. Daughter (disappointing). Woman who had her life planned out in neat five-year increments. Now I’m something else. Fire-Bringer. Target. The person monsters want to drain dry so they can wake up bigger monsters.
And there’s a dragon who looks at me like I’m something precious. Something worth protecting. I don’t know what to do with that. Don’t know if I want it or if it terrifies me more than Valdris does.
