Chapter 365 Damn It All, We’re Burying Bodies

Was he shirtless? Yes. Was her best friend lying on top of him? Also yes.

But did Elara walk in on them naked? No. Did she catch them having sex? No.

Those would have been code red emergencies. But this? This was innocent. Dex and Fin did not need a play-by-play of EVERY single thing Serena did.

Elara had told Serena to bury that damn kiss with Gavriel with a ’Never Happened’ headstone. Did Serena listen? No. She confessed like a sinner and blew up a lifelong friendship in the process. Elara was not going to let her make that mistake again. She was going to fix this because she was the best Beta Luna in Skardos.

To get here, let’s rewind three minutes, when Elara entered Gavriel’s chambers.

“Serena?”

The fire had burned low, throwing amber light across the bed where Gavriel Sterling was lying shirtless, his chest rising and falling in a rhythm that was, notably, a rhythm, which was an improvement.

Serena was collapsed on top of him, her body draped across his chest.

Months ago during a siege, Elara watched Serena shove her bleeding hand into Gavriel’s mouth and save his life. No one knew about that, except for the three of them.

So when Elara saw a fabricated gold dagger on the floor, a gash across Serena’s palm, and blood around Gavriel’s mouth, she knew exactly what had taken place in this room.

Did Alaric and Hyran explicitly tell Serena NOT to try her blood on Gavriel? Yes. Dark magic, tether, all sorts of nightmare fuel. But Elara knew her best friend. If Serena went against explicit instructions, she had good reason to. Truthfully, Elara was about to suggest they sneak in here and just do it. So this worked out.

“Imagine them finding out you let him feed on you to save him,” she muttered.

Best friend mode engaged.

If Dexmon Drakenfell or Finnick Shadowclaw walked in and saw their mate collapsed across Gavriel Sterling’s bare chest… Elara wasn’t going to finish that thought.

She checked Serena’s pulse first. Steady. Strong. She checked Gav’s pulse second. Also steady. Also strong. Significantly stronger than the last time she had checked, which had been six hours ago, when his pulse had been a polite suggestion rather than a commitment.

The dark veins were gone. Every one of them. His color was back. He looked, by every available metric, like a man who had been dying and had stopped.

“You look a lot better. Thank the Gods.”

She pushed silver healing magic into Serena first, then Gav. Both felt fine to her. She was no expert, but normal was normal, and the guilt of delaying the healer to handle the crime scene receded enough for her to get to work.

That was when she saw a glowing mark on Gavriel’s shoulder.

Elara’s hand flew to her mouth.

She stared at the mark. She blinked. It was still there. She blinked again, harder, as if the second blink carried more authority than the first.

Still there.

“Serena.” Elara dragged both hands down her face. “What in the shitting hell did you do?”

She looked down at her best friend, who was draped across the man she had just marked, blissfully unaware, peacefully unconscious, her face carrying the serene expression of a woman who had committed the most complicated act in the history of matebond politics and was sleeping through the consequences like a cat in a sunbeam.

She was going to kill Serena. Not tonight. Tonight, Serena was unconscious and covered in blood, and killing an unconscious woman was poor form. But tomorrow. Tomorrow was wide open.

“You owe me. You owe me so much. I cannot even begin to calculate what you owe me, but I am starting a tab, and the tab will have interest, and the interest will compound, and you will be paying it off for the rest of your natural life, Frostborne.”

She took a breath. Another. A third, because the first two were insufficient for the task ahead of her.

“All right.” She clapped her hands once. “Bodies. We are burying bodies.”

She pulled Serena off Gavriel’s chest, maneuvering her into the armchair beside the bed. Set her upright. Stepped back.

Serena’s head lolled forward. Her chin hit her chest. Her body began a slow, inevitable slide toward the left armrest.

Elara caught her. Pushed her back upright. Tried to angle her sideways against the chair back in a position that would at least look intentional.

Serena’s body slid the other direction.

“Are you shitting me?” Elara grabbed her shoulders. “Stay. Stay there. Goddammit.”

She did not stay. It was like trying to fit a drunk starfish into a throne.

She wedged Serena sideways against the chair. One arm dangled over the armrest. Head cranked at an angle that would make owls jealous. Legs? Folded by an angry origami master. Guaranteed pins and needles. Elara gave her a once-over and decided that was a Serena problem.

“When you wake up with a kink in your neck, just know I wasted five minutes trying.”

She moved fast.

Bathing chamber. Wet rag. She crossed back to the bed and wiped the blood from Gavriel’s mouth first. Serena’s hand was next. Then the mark.

She went back to the bathing chamber. Rummaged through Gavriel’s cabinets. Bandages. Gauze. Medical tape.

She returned to the bed and bandaged gauze over his glowing mark. It looked like a wound dressing.

She exhaled.

It looked normal.

Her eyes landed on the blood splatters on the blanket. Fuck. She ripped it off Gavriel and threw it in his closet. Then she rummaged through his closet because she had zero boundaries at this point, they were past this, and found a folded clean one.

Just as she kicked the dagger underneath Gavriel’s bed, the door opened.

“Elara?”

She jumped. Her hand flew to her chest. Her heart rate, which had been operating at a frequency reserved for criminals mid-heist, spiked so hard she saw white at the edges of her vision.

“You scared me.”

Alaric Kestrel stood in the doorway. His eyes found Serena in the chair. He stared for full seconds.

Serena was wedged sideways like a broken marionette someone had angrily shoved into storage.

“I tried to situate her, but she kept going like that,” Elara snapped.

Hyran and Maelor entered at that moment.

Maelor was mid-sentence. “—the Gamma dies, my cloak dies with—”

He stopped mid-sentence. Mid-step. His mismatched eyes locked onto Gavriel.

Hyran stopped beside him.

The two mages looked at one another.