“Then I’ll come for you, little sister. And I’ll take what’s mine.”
The smoke disperses, the magic spent, and Morrigan’s presence fades from the air. But her words hang in the silence that follows—a promise, a threat, a declaration of war that makes everything that came before feel like prelude.
No one speaks. The Fire-Bringers are still at my sides. The brothers stand in a loose semicircle, their expressions ranging from grim to murderous. And Auren?—
Auren is watching me with that same unreadable expression, but now I think I understand it better.
Not confusion. Not calculation.
Concern. Actual, genuine concern for the witch princess he should by all rights despise.
“She’s trying to scare you.” His voice is quiet enough that only I can hear it. “To isolate you. Make you think you’re alone.”
“I know what she’s doing.” I meet his gaze. Hold it. “She’s very good at mind games. Always has been.”
“You’re not alone.” The words seem to surprise him as much as they surprise me. He looks away, jaw tight, but he doesn’t take them back. “Whatever else is between us—you’re not alone here. She can’t have you.”
I don’t know what to say. Don’t know how to process this—the dragon who hated me days ago, standing in front of me, telling me I’m not alone. Telling me she can’t have me, as if he has any personal stake in my survival beyond his duty.
But his frost still lingers on my skin from where he caught me. And his eyes, when they finally meet mine again, hold something that looks almost like hope.
“Okay.” My voice is rough. Exhausted. But I manage a small smile—barely a curve of my lips. “Then I guess we’d better figure out how to stop her. Before she kills everyone I’ve started to care about.”
Including you, I don’t add.
But from the way his expression shifts, I think he hears it anyway.
NINE
AUREN
The cleanup takes hours.
Bodies of twisted creatures that need burning before their residual magic can corrupt anything else. Injured warriors requiring Aisling’s attention, her steady hands and sharp tongue equally in demand. Wards to be repaired, walls to be inspected, damage assessments to be compiled and analyzed.
I throw myself into the work with a focus that borders on desperation. Cataloguing casualties. Interviewing witnesses about enemy movements. Calculating resource expenditure and estimating recovery time. The familiar routine of strategic analysis, where numbers and patterns make sense in ways that feelings never do.
It doesn’t help.
Because beneath the calculations, beneath the assessments and projections and carefully ordered lists, one image keeps surfacing: Tamsin vaulting over the rampart edge. Falling toward stone and death with nothing but white fire between her and destruction. Throwing away her life to save mine.
A witch princess from Valdoria, risking everything for a dragon who spent five days treating her with barely concealed hostility.
The logic doesn’t compute. I’ve run the scenarios through every analytical framework I possess, and none of them produce an answer that satisfies. Self-preservation should have kept her on that wall. Strategic calculation should have told her I could handle my own defense. Even simple self-interest—the Crown needs her alive, the Brotherhood needs her alive—should have prevented her from taking that risk.
Instead, she jumped.
For me.
The sun is setting by the time I finish my duties. Orange light bleeds across the fortress walls, painting the stone in shades of fire and blood. Appropriate, given what these walls witnessed today. The attack is over, the enemy retreated, but Morrigan’s message lingers in the air like smoke that refuses to disperse.
Did you really think stone walls could keep me from what’s mine?
I find myself walking toward the eastern ramparts without consciously deciding to do so. My feet know where I’m going even if my mind hasn’t caught up. The same ramparts where the battle was fiercest. Where Tamsin’s fire turned the tide. Where she threw herself into empty air because I wasn’t watching my own back.
She’s there.
Standing at the rampart’s edge, exactly where she landed after I caught her. The sun sets behind her, turning her silhouette into something that belongs in paintings—a warrior queen surveying her domain, unbowed by the battle that should have broken her.
