“Because he’s known from the start what you mean to me.” Aero’s voice was rough. “From the day he noticed what was happening, he would burn down the entire ocean to protect it.”
The words landed in her chest andstayedthere, warm and terrifying and impossibly real.
“We should go,” Wyatt said, breaking the moment with professional efficiency. “The healers need to get Delos to the Siren’s Rest. And we need to start planning.”
Aero nodded, but he didn’t release Cassia. Instead, he tucked her against his side and guided her toward the ruined doorway, keeping her close despite the magical volatility they’d been so careful to avoid.
No hailstorm materialized. No lightning struck.
Maybe crisis burned off the excess energy. Or maybe their magic had finally figured out how to coexist without destroying everything in range.
Either way, Cassia let herself lean into his strength and didn’t pull away.
Ahead of them, the healers moved around Delos with quiet urgency, their magic glowing soft and blue as they worked. Stabilization fields. Pain dampening.
Cassia watched the soft pulse of the healing fields and couldn’t look away. Delos’s breathing was shallow. The wing membrane, shredded down to exposed bone an hour ago, had been bound in magical gauze that flickered with every exhale. The healers’ expressions were careful, controlled—the particular blank focus of people who needed not to show how worried they were.
She felt Aero’s arm tighten around her.
“He’ll make it,” she said, because one of them had to.
Aero didn’t answer. His eyes didn’t leave Delos.
THIRTY
AERO
The healers wouldn’t let him in.
Aero stood outside the treatment room at the Siren’s Rest, hands flat against the closed door, and fought the urge to tear through it.
His dragon clawed at his control, a frenzy of demands he struggled to contain.
Through the door, he could hear the murmur of voices. The crackle of healing magic. The occasional grunt of pain that made his dragon snarl with impotent fury.
Fifteen years. Fifteen years of Delos following him from community to community, translating his emotional dysfunction into something resembling normal interaction, refusing to let him retreat into complete isolation. Fifteen years of that bright, insufferable grin cutting through his darkness.
And now Delos was lying on a healer’s table with his wing shredded and his body broken because Aero hadn’t been there to protect him.
Because of Nerissa.
Because ofhimself.
The rage was unlike anything he’d experienced in living memory. Hot and consuming, it filled every corner of hisbeing, drowning out rational thought. His dragon wanted blood. Wanted to hunt Nerissa to the deepest trench of the Pacific and tear her apart with claws and fire. Wanted to burn everything that threatened what was his—his assistant, his friend, his?—
Mate.
Aero’s hands curled into fists against the door. Scales rippled across his knuckles—dark gray shot through with lightning patterns, threatening to erupt. The air around him crackled with restrained energy.
“Sir.” Beck Driscoll’s voice came from behind him. Careful. Cautious. The tone of someone approaching a predator who’d slipped its leash. “The healers need space to work. Maybe you could?—”
“Don’t.” The word tore out of him, barely human. “Don’t tell me to leave.”
“Wasn’t going to.” Beck moved into his peripheral vision—slow, hands visible, every inch the trained beta managing a volatile superior. “Just thought you might want to murder the wall in a location with fewer witnesses.”
Aero barked a laugh that held no humor. “Are you attempting to manage me, wolf?”
“Absolutely. Is it working?”
