The question was whether he was brave enough to try.
The storm clouds continued to build. By morning, they would cover the sky.
Aero went inside, closed the door behind him, and began reviewing the harbor anchor data Cassia had sent.
But his mind kept drifting to dark curls and sea-colored eyes. To the electric charge between them that no amount of analysis could explain.
To the alarming, exhilarating possibility that maybe—just maybe—he was done running.
His dragon purred approval.
Outside, the first rumble of thunder echoed across the harbor.
Somewhere in town, Cassia Gale was awake. He knew it the way he knew the angle of the wind.
And for the first time in centuries, the knowledge didn’t make him want to flee.
It made him want to stay.
THIRTEEN
CASSIA
Cassia was going to lose her mind.
Three days. Three impossibly long days of working beside Aero Tau, of breathing the same air, of pretending that every nerve in her body didn’t catch fire when he stepped into a room. She’d tried everything—keeping the workstation between them, arriving early to claim space, burying herself in data so thoroughly that she had an excuse not to look at him.
None of it worked.
He was everywhere. At the weather station when she arrived each morning, already working, barely glancing up when she entered. In her thoughts when she finally crawled into bed at night, exhausted from fighting her own magic and losing anyway.
Last night, she’d dreamed about him. About the way heat radiated from his body when he stood too close. About hands that had never touched her but that she somehow knew would be warm, rough-palmed, certain.
She’d woken to a thunderstorm rattling her windows, and Gust perched on her headboard, staring at her with avian judgment.
You’re losing it,he’d sent through their bond.Over a lizard.
“Shut up.”
Make me.
She hadn’t been able to.
Now it was barely past nine in the morning, and she stood on the main dock watching Aero examine the ward anchors embedded in the seawall. The harbor spread before them, fishing boats rocking gently at their moorings, the smell of salt and diesel thick in the cool air. Above them, clouds gathered. Not natural clouds—her clouds, responding to the churning in her chest.
Cassia clenched her fists and tried to will them away.
Aero straightened from his crouch by the seawall, tablet in hand, his dark hair lifting in the breeze. “The ward readings are showing interference patterns consistent with external manipulation. Something is—” He turned, caught her staring, and stopped mid-sentence.
Their gazes held.
The clouds darkened overhead.
“You’re doing it again,” he observed.
“Doing what?”
“Summoning weather.” His gaze flicked upward, then back to her face. “Every time your emotional state shifts, the atmosphere responds. It’s become predictable.”
