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He was in full human form, the gold gone from his eyes, his forearm still bleeding, casually ignored—he’d deal with minor injuries when they became relevant. He looked at her hands on the ward stone. At the steady line. At her.

“You held it.” He glanced at the ward line.

“I held it.” She took her hands off the stone. The ward line kept running. “I held an entire ward anchor section with intention while Valene deployed a fire extinguisher against Rift creatures in the dock district.”

“She was effective.”

“Everyone keeps saying that.”

He put his arm around her, easy and present — the way he touched her, in front of people, without announcement, without asking permission from anyone, including himself, as if the question of whether she was his had been settled at the boardwalk and he was acting accordingly.

She leaned into him. She was too tired, too exhilarated, and too aware of the blood on his forearm to be properly flustered that Maelin was standing twelve feet away and had definitely noticed.

“Your arm.”

“Sealed.”

“Let me see.”

“Althea.”

“Drayce.” She turned to face him and held out her hand. He submitted to the inspection, exasperated yet patient, a large man who had learned this argument wasn’t one he was going to win. The claw mark was healing well. She ran her thumb along the edge of it — not healing, only checking, the gesture she’d apparently developed as a default response to him getting injured — and he watched the top of her head with the look she’d stopped pretending she didn’t know about.

“I’m fine.” He stopped. “That was—” She didn’t finish it for him. Some things didn’t need finishing.

“I know.”

He pulled her back against him. She let him. Maelin had been joined by Pike, who had the notebook out, and by Selke, who was studying the ward line with professional interest, applying slightly too much effort. Yoren was watching the sky.

The ward line ran steady. The dock district fires were out. The Rift had retreated to its baseline pressure.

Somewhere toward the eastern anchor, Fiora’s voice floated across the night: “The mirrors worked. I want credit for this. I have never wanted credit for anything in my life, and I want it now.”

Garnet’s response was inaudible, but even from a distance, the tone was clearly: you get credit.

“She had been practicing.”

“Yes.”

“Nobody was going to say it.”

“No.”

Her gaze moved over the ward line. At the dock district lights coming back on. At the town settling into its post-emergency quiet that comes from having survived this enough times to know there’s another side. Her mind went to the marketing campaigns she’d run from the seventeenth floor of a Boston office building, to the quarterly crises, the team deployments, and the moment when panic became the enemy and calm the only viable tactic.

She’d been good at that job.

She was, apparently, good at this one too.

“The ward anchor section held. I held it. With intention, for thirty minutes, under active breach conditions.”

“Yes.”

“That’s nothing.”

“That’s the real thing.” He turned to face her. “That’s what you are.”

She looked at him. At the steady gray eyes, the forearm that was healing, the man who had been telling her this in one form or another since the training clearing and who had apparently decided to keep telling her until she believed it.