Warmth floods through me. Not fire—something gentler. Healing magic, maybe. Aisling’s steady hands working to repair what the Crown destroyed.
“Tamsin.” Auren’s voice, closer now. His hand wrapped around mine, cold against my too-hot skin. “Tamsin, stay with me. Please. Don’t leave me.”
I want to tell him I’m trying. Want to tell him I love him too—that I figured it out somewhere between the Crown’s first surge and my collapse on the obsidian floor. Want to tell him so many things.
I can’t make my mouth work.
“She’s fading.” Aisling’s voice is grim. “The Crown took too much. I don’t know if I can?—”
“You will.” Auren’s tone brooks no argument. “Whatever it takes. Whatever you need. She doesn’t die. Not here. Not now.”
More warmth. More healing. I feel Selene’s gold fire joining Aisling’s orange, two Fire-Bringers pouring their power into me. Feel something else too—Nasyra’s shadow-touched flame, different but no less potent, weaving through the healing, shadow and light intertwined.
The sisters. All three of them. Fighting for my life.
I hold onto that warmth. Use it as an anchor the way I used Auren’s cold. Pull myself back toward consciousness one agonizing inch at a time.
When I finally open my eyes, Auren’s face is the first thing I see.
He looks wrecked. Pale beneath the blood and grime of battle, golden eyes red-rimmed in ways I’ve never seen. His hand grips mine so tightly, it should hurt. It doesn’t. It feels like a lifeline.
“Hey.” My voice comes out as barely a whisper. “Did we win?”
The sound he makes is half laugh, half sob. “You almost died. You almost—” He pulls me against his chest, his whole body shaking. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”
“Can’t promise that.” I curl into him, letting his cold soothe the residual burn in my veins. “Trouble seems to find me.”
“Then I’ll find it first.” His lips press against my hair, my forehead, the corner of my eye where blood has dried. “I’ll find it and destroy it before it can touch you. Whatever it takes. I’m not losing you, Tamsin. Not now. Not ever.”
“I love you.” The words come easier now that I’ve accepted how close I came to never saying them. “I should have told you before. Should have told you when I first realized?—”
“When?” He pulls back enough to look at me, golden eyes searching my face.
“When you were fighting Ulrik. When I saw you stagger and thought—” My throat closes. “I couldn’t let you die without knowing. I couldn’t let either of us die without you knowing.”
“I knew.” He cups my face in his cold hands, so gentle despite the strength I know they hold. “I’ve known since you opened the Crown for him. Since you started bleeding for us. Since you chose to die rather than let him win.”
“But I didn’t die.”
“No.” He kisses me—soft, reverent, full of desperate relief. “You didn’t. And I’m going to spend every moment of the rest of our lives being grateful for that.”
“Our lives?” My heart stutters for an entirely different reason now. “That sounds like you’re planning to keep me.”
“I’m planning to claim you.” His forehead presses against mine. “Properly. Permanently. If that’s what you want.”
“Yes.” The word comes out fierce despite my weakness. “Yes. That’s what I want. That’s all I want.”
Around us, the throne room is chaos—Zyphon standing over Ulrik’s corpse, the purple cracks in his scales finally beginning to fade. The Fire-Bringer women pulling back from their healing, exhausted but triumphant. Drayke and Rurik arriving through the shattered doors, taking in the scene with a mixture of relief and concern.
But in Auren’s arms, wrapped in his cold and his love and his fierce determination to never let me go, none of it matters.
We won.
We survived.
And we have our whole lives ahead of us to figure out what comes next.
“Can you walk?” Auren asks.
