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Another cannon blast rattles my teeth, and I see the moment one of Draven’s ships begins to sink.

Its bow drops low, water swallowing the front half rapidly, while men throw themselves into the sea. Some of them are shifting as they leap, bodies twisting, bones snapping, wings bursting through skin as they fight to take dragon form before the water drags them under.

Kylian stands near the center mast, one hand covered in blood that is not his, shouting orders while two guards reload one of the deck cannons beside him.

His head turns the moment I emerge, and the bond snaps tight.

His face changes. “Why are you not on a lifeboat?” he demands, crossing the deck toward me with murderous rage in every step.

“I sealed the breach,” I shout.

“You what?”

I’m not given a chance to answer as the remaining dragon ship swings wide across the water, turning its side toward us.

Eagan sees it first.

“Brace,” he bellows. “They’re lining up another shot.”

Kylian turns, lifting one hand toward the approaching ship.

“Down,” he roars.

Arlo grabs my wrist.

I don’t know whether I move too slowly or the blast comes too fast.

The side of our ship erupts. I don’t hear the cannon fire—I feel it. The deck lifts beneath my feet, a violent heave that sends me stumbling. Time stretches thin. I see the splintering wood in fragments, each shard catching the firelight like glass. A sailor near the rail is lifted off his feet, suspended in air for one impossible second before being thrown into the dark water below. Smoke rolls across the deck in a wave, thick and black, carrying the smell of burning pitch and something worse—cooking meat.

Someone is screaming, and I realize distantly that it’s me. The heat is a physical wall, pushing me backward, stealing the air from my lungs. Then Arlo hits me.

The impact throws the world into fire, smoke, wood, metal, and screaming, and for one weightless second, my body is no longer mine. I’m hurled backward by the force of it as the deck disappears beneath my feet.

I see the sky and the dragon circling above us. See Kylian turning toward me with his mouth open around my name.

Arlo’s arms wrap around me at the last possible moment, pulling me hard against his chest and twisting his body so he takes the worst of the impact as we slam into the cabin wall with a force that knocks the breath from my lungs.

The sound he makes is small, yet it cuts through the destruction louder than the cannons.

For a moment, neither of us moves.

His arms are still around me. His chin rests near my temple. His breath comes in a gargled gasp against my hair.

“Arlo?” I ask, blinking through the smoke. My ears are ringing so badly, and something sharp is digging into my back.

His arms tighten once when he makes a pained noise.

My heart stops as I twist to check on him. Blood slips from the corner of his mouth. It spills over his lower lip and down his chin, dark against his pale skin.

“Arlo,” I say, my voice turning frantic as I grip his shirt.

His eyes stay on mine as the light of dragon fire moves across his face. He tries to smile when I look at him. “I told you,” he chokes, his mouth curving with the faintest shadow of that old smile, the one from cold mornings and stolen food and fields we were never meant to survive. His fingers brush my cheek. “I would always catch you.”

A jagged spar of broken steel has gone through him from behind, driven deep into his side and out through the front of his shirt below his sternum. The dark metal is slick with blood, the fabric around it turning dark too quickly, spreading like ink in water.

Arlo’s weight sags forward, heavier than it should be, and I feel the wet warmth spreading across my chest where he’s pressed against me. It takes a moment for my mind to catch up, to process that the warmth is his blood, that he’s bleeding out on me, that the thing sticking out of his back is inside him.

The scream that leaves me does not sound human. It tears out of me so violently that every head on the deck turns, a sound ripped from somewhere deeper than my throat, from the place where I keep everything I cannot bear to lose.