The first through the ruined doorway was Beck Driscoll, his wolf’s eyes already scanning for threats. Behind him came Theo Vance, Wyatt Gentry, and a team of Haven Shores’s emergency responders.
“Damn.” Beck dropped to his knees beside Delos, his face going pale. “What the hell happened?”
“Nerissa.” The name tasted like poison. “She’s been behind everything. The weather manipulation, the attacks, all of it. She’s building a tsunami. Something massive. Delos tried to stop her and she—” Cassia’s voice cracked. “She hurt him. She hurt him protecting me.”
“Healers,” Theo commanded, and two witches Cassia vaguely recognized pushed through the crowd. “Get him stable. Now.”
Strong hands pulled Cassia away from Delos’s body, making room for the healers to work. She fought them for a moment—instinct, protectiveness, the need to keep doingsomething—before recognizing Wyatt’s steady grip on her arms.
“Easy,” the panther shifter said, his voice calm despite the chaos. “Let them work. You’ve done your part.”
“Aero.” The name came out ragged. “Someone needs to—he needs to know?—”
“Already done.” Wyatt’s golden eyes held hers. “Theo sent word the moment we heard the commotion. He’s on his way.”
Cassia sagged against the sheriff’s grip, exhaustion crashing through her now that the adrenaline was fading. Her magic felt scraped hollow. Her lungs still burned from the water Nerissa had forced into them. Every muscle ached from being thrown against walls and fighting for her life.
But Delos was alive. The healers were stabilizing him, their magic glowing soft and steady as they worked. And Aero was coming.
“The tsunami,” she forced out. “Nerissa said she’s building something. A wave. Bigger than anything we’ve seen.”
“We’ll handle it.” Wyatt’s voice was steady. “But first—” He turned as a commotion erupted at the cottage entrance.
Aero tore through the remnants of the doorway with the barely contained violence of a dragon about to lose control.
He wasn’t running. He was prowling. Each movement precisely controlled despite the fury radiating from every line of his body. His eyes swept the room—found Delos on the ground, found Cassia standing blood-soaked and shaking, found the destruction that marked a battle he hadn’t been here to fight.
For one terrible moment, Cassia saw his dragon rise to the surface. Scales flickered beneath his skin. Lightning crackled in his eyes. The air temperature spiked as eight hundred years of suppressed emotion threatened to explode into catastrophic release.
Then his gaze locked on hers.
“You’re hurt.” His voice was barely human.
“I’m fine.” She wasn’t. But compared to Delos— “Aero, I’m so sorry. We didn’t expect her to attack. We thought we were just asking questions, and then she?—”
He crossed the distance between them and pulled her against his chest.
The embrace was fierce, desperate, nothing like the careful distance they’d been maintaining for the past week. His arms wrapped around her with crushing intensity. His face pressed into her hair. His whole body shook with something that might have been rage or relief or both.
“You’re alive,” he breathed against her temple. “You’re alive.”
“Delos protected me.” Tears streamed down her face, the shock finally catching up to her. “He shifted and fought her, and when she summoned that construct, he—he put himself between us. Aero, I’m so sorry?—”
“Don’t.” He pulled back just enough to look at her, his hands framing her face with desperate gentleness. “Don’t apologize. You’re alive. He’s alive. That’s what matters.”
“But—”
“That’s whatmatters.” His thumbs brushed the tears from her cheeks. His eyes were still wild, still edged with his dragon’s fury, but the violence was being channeled. Focused. “Nerissa will pay for this. I will hunt her to the bottom of the ocean if I have to. The only thing I care about is that you’re standing in front of me.”
Cassia’s breath caught. Even now—blood-soaked, exhausted, surrounded by the wreckage of a fight she’d barely survived—the pull between them was there. Not destructively. Not chaotically. Just… reaching. Seeking. Finding its match.
“The tsunami,” she whispered. “She’s building toward something catastrophic.”
“I know.” His jaw tightened. “And we’re going to stop her.”
Behind them, the healers lifted Delos onto a stretcher, his unconscious form wrapped in magical stabilization fields. Beck walked beside them, his hand on the young dragon’s uninjured arm, his expression a mix of anger and grief.
“He saved my life,” Cassia said quietly. “He barely knows me, and he threw himself between me and that thing because?—”
