I exhale, and the decision crystallizes. “Scar, Coil, Maul, you’re with me. We go get Roxy. We bring her back. And we don’t stop till she’s home.”
Wreck materializes from the shadows, gaunt frame radiating hunger. “Deep down, she knows our secrets. We can’t let the fae have her.”
“She’s part of us,” Coil adds. “Even if she doesn’t remember.”
Maul cracks his knuckles. “I’ll pack the heavy artillery. They’re about to learn why you don’tfuck with the Kings.”
“We’re coming too.” Rhett’s shadows writhe around his boots. “Roxy deserves—”
“No.” The word carries enough cold to make frost race up the nearest beam. “You stay here… both of you.”
Bennett’s wings flare. “We can help—”
“The clubhouse needs protecting,” I finish. “The fae are coming. They’ll strike here first, and this place needs defenders who can work together.” I pause. “Prove to me you can do that. Guard the clubhouse. And when we come back with Roxy, you’ll have earned the right to tell her you kept her home safe.”
Rhett’s jaw tightens, hellfire burning brighter, but he nods. “Guard it from what, exactly?”
Thorn steps forward. “The Seelie Court moves in darkness between trees. The Unseelie hunt in shadows that have no names. They will strike at the heart of what you love. And they willnotstop until everything you’ve built has been hollowed out from the inside.”
Scar’s expression darkens, fangs fully descended, red eyes blazing. “Then we make sure they bleed for every inch. We split forces, cover both fronts, and show these fae bastards why the Kings of Anarchy don’t negotiate.”
I turn back to the broken dome, something in my chest cracking open, and for the first time since the witch restored my flame, it coils instead of exploding, heat gathering like a promise instead of a weapon. Heat pours from my skin in waves that make the air shimmer, frost melting as flames lick up my forearms. My eyes blaze blue-white, cold fire reflecting in the shattered glass until the entire club room is bathed in light that’s both freezing and burning.
“We ride after dusk. Wreck, you take command here. Flux, Thorn, Ruckus, the prospects, the girls, fortify this place until it’s a fortress even the fae can’t breach. And when we come back with Roxy, we end this war before it starts.”
Scar grins, fangs glinting. “About damn time, Prez.”
I don’t answer with words.
My dragon surges forward, no longer content to pace beneath my skin, and I let it take me. Bone splits with a sound like breaking stone, heat and cold detonating outward as my body tears free of its human limits. Scales erupt across my flesh in overlapping plates of ice-blue and ember-orange, fire threading through the frost in glowing veins as wings unfurl with violent force, massive and unstoppable.
The club room can’t contain it.
Fire and ice pour off me in equal measure, the air snapping between burning heat and killing cold in rapid, brutal cycles.Windows shatter outward, frost crawls across the walls, even as scorch marks bloom beneath it. Floorboards groan, then crack, as the weight of my true form settles for a single, breathless moment among them.
Then I launch.
Stone explodes beneath my claws as I tear through the ceiling that Wreck only just fixed from my last outburst in a storm of shattered rock and screaming air, wings catching the mountain wind, hurling me skyward. Fire roars from my throat, lighting the night in molten gold, chased immediately by a blast of glacial frost that crystallizes the flames into sparkling ruin as they scatter across the sky.
Ice and fire spiral along my scales as I climb, a living contradiction made whole at last.
Three weeks without her.
Three weeks of holding the line while everything that mattered threatened to fracture.
I angle my wings and turn toward the dark horizon.
Waiting for action is over.
I’m going after Roxy.
And fuck anyone or anything that tries to stop me.
Chapter Twenty
ROXY
The apartment smells like stale coffee and the lavender oil I diffuse at night to help me sleep. However, neither scent does much to mask the underlying current of obsession that permeates every corner of this space I’ve come to occupy without truly inhabiting.
