“Cassia. What happened tonight—our magic working in sync—that doesn’t happen. Not without a bond. Not without—” Another stop. His jaw working.
“Without what?”
He didn’t answer. Just looked at her with something desperate and terrified in those storm-gray eyes.
“Goodnight, Cassia.” His voice was rough. “Lock your door. Ward your windows. I’ll come by in the morning.”
He turned and walked away before she could respond.
Cassia stood on her porch and watched him go, her hand pressed to her chest where her magic still hummed with the echo of his.
Everything was different now.
She didn’t have words for it yet. Whatever was building between them—electric and terrifying and absolutely inevitable—putting language to it would make it real.
And real things could be destroyed.
She went inside, locked her door, warded her windows, and dreamed of lightning.
TWENTY-FOUR
AERO
Aero couldn’t sleep.
He’d tried. For hours, he’d lain in his too-short bed in his too-quiet cabin, staring at the ceiling and willing his body to rest. The forest outside was silent—no wind, no animals, nothing to distract from the chaos inside his own skull.
His dragon wouldn’t settle. The beast clawed at his control, demanding things he’d denied it for centuries.
The dragon’s demands had circled the same two imperatives all night. Claim. Protect. Two words that laid bare everything he’d spent centuries refusing to want.
The dragon’s demands had been building for weeks. Since the moment he’d first caught Cassia Gale’s scent in the council chambers—ozone and sea salt and something sweeter beneath. Since his beast had roared a recognition he’d tried to classify as a surge anomaly and failed.
Now his own behavior had become the data. And the data was damning.
The way his every carefully constructed framework dissolved the moment she walked into a room—that was the datum he couldn’t explain away.
Delos’s words echoed through his skull:You finally met your mate, and your brain is short-circuiting because you’ve spent eight hundred years pretending you don’t have feelings.
Aero threw back the covers and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The clock on the nightstand read 3:47 a.m.—two hours before his internal alarm would sound. Two hours of restless waiting stretched ahead of him.
He padded to the window and stared out at the forest. The cabin at the edge of Haven Shores had been meant to provide privacy. Isolation. A refuge for an antisocial elder who preferred data to company.
Now the isolation felt like a cage.
His dragon strained at its leash.
She wasn’t unprotected. She was a powerful witch with atmospheric wards on her foundation and a familiar who would raise hell if anything threatened her. She didn’t need him standing guard.
He turned from the window and caught sight of the photograph on his dresser. The only personal item he’d brought to Haven Shores. The only personal item he carried anywhere.
His parents. Storm dragons, both of them, captured in a rare moment of stillness. His mother’s hair was wild around her shoulders, streaked with the same gray that touched his own temples. His father’s arm around her waist, protective and possessive in a way Aero had never understood.
Until now.
They’d been killed when he was barely two hundred. Hunters seeking dragon components for magical artifacts. He’d been too young to fight, too weak to save them. He’d hidden in the mountains and watched the smoke rise from their bodies and sworn he would never be that vulnerable again.
That vulnerability had been their undoing. His father had stayed to fight instead of fleeing because his mother couldn’t flyfast enough. His mother had returned to the battle instead of escaping because she couldn’t leave her mate behind. Love had made them slow, made them stupid, made them dead.
