Aero felt Cassia’s grip tighten on his hand. Felt her magic drawing more from him—not demanding, but asking, and he gave it freely. His dragon roared approval as their power merged, storm meeting storm, chaos finding harmony.
The wave shuddered. Cracks appeared in its massive face—fractures spreading like spider webs across glass. The wind pushed harder. The lightning struck faster. The pressure built and built and built.
“It’s working.” Cassia’s voice was strained, her face pale with effort. “We’re actually?—”
The wave broke.
Not crashed—broke. Shattered into a thousand smaller waves that still rushed toward shore but no longer carried the devastating force of Nerissa’s creation. The seawall wards flared bright as they absorbed the impact, ancient magic holding against the assault.
Water surged over the breakwater, flooding the lower docks, but it wasn’t the catastrophe it could have been. Wasn’t the town-ending disaster Nerissa had planned.
Aero pulled Cassia against him, relief flooding through his veins. They’d done it. Against all odds, they’d?—
Something rose from the harbor.
Nerissa emerged on a pillar of churning water, carried upward like a goddess ascending from the deep. Her hair moved around her face as if still submerged, her iridescent eyes blazing with fury. She was beautiful in the way that storms were beautiful—devastating, deadly, utterly merciless.
“You think you’ve won?” Her voice carried impossibly clear over the chaos, cutting through wind and waves like a blade. “You’ve won nothing.”
Something ancient erupted in Aero’s chest.Threat. Enemy. Kill.
He started to move, to put himself between the siren and Cassia, but he was too slow. All his ancient speed meant nothing when Nerissa opened her mouth and sang.
The sound was wrong. Not music—weaponized fury, years of rejection compressed into a sonic blast that tore through the air like a physical force. It wasn’t aimed at him.
It was aimed at Cassia.
“No!” The word ripped from his throat as he threw himself toward her.
Too late. Too fucking late.
The blast hit her full force. Her body lifted off the seawall like a rag doll, flying backward with sickening speed. He heard the impact—heard something crack, bone or stone, he couldn’t tell—and then she crumpled.
She didn’t move.
The world stopped.
FORTY-TWO
AERO
Aero’s dragon tore free.
Not the controlled shift he’d mastered over centuries—this was violent, primal, his human form shredding as the beast erupted from within. Scales ripped through skin. Wings burst from his back, membrane spreading in a forty-foot span. His jaw elongated, teeth lengthening into razors, claws punching through fingertips.
His roar shook the foundations of buildings, cracked windows, sent Haven Shores’s remaining residents fleeing. It was a sound of pure rage—eight hundred years of control destroyed in a single moment of devastation.
He didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything except the creature who had hurt his mate.
Lightning exploded from his body—not called, not controlled, just pure rage made manifest in electrical discharge. It struck the water around Nerissa’s pillar, superheating it into steam. The harbor boiled where his fury touched it.
He launched from the seawall, wings catching the wind he’d helped summon, and dove toward the siren with murder burning in his ancient heart. No thought. No strategy. Just the primal, screaming need to destroy.
She was diving. Her pillar collapsed as she abandoned it, her body cutting through the water toward the open ocean. Running. Fleeing.
His dragon screamed its rage at the siren’s retreating form, demanding she turn and face what she’d done. She didn’t.
He pursued her, lightning striking the surface in massive arcs, steam rising in clouds. But she was faster in the water than he was in the air, and she dove deep—deeper than he could follow, deeper than his fire could reach.
