The water had healed Gavriel’s other bruises and cuts, but did nothing for the fatal one. She dragged him out of the steaming pool with a strength she absolutely did not have.

Water sloshed off both of them as she pulled him onto the patch of warm moss beside the spring, her arms screaming, her legs buckling, every muscle in her body staging a mutiny she overruled through sheer, stupid stubbornness.

She pressed her palm to his chest and flinched. His skin was burning even hotter than before. The kind of fever that meant his body was fighting something it was losing to. It radiated off him in waves, and every wave felt like a countdown she couldn’t read.

Serena: We are trapped. Outnumbered. I don’t have enough magic left to make a portal.

Who was she mindlinking? She had no idea. Maybe nothing was getting through. Maybe every word she sent was dying three inches from her wrist, swallowed by whatever interference this place generated like a hobby.

Even if a message landed, what could they do? They couldn’t forge a portal to her location because they had never been. They couldn’t inject magic through a mindlink. They couldn’t do a damn thing except know she was in trouble, and knowing was the cruelest kind of useless.

She pressed both hands flat against his chest and held them there, as if the pressure alone could anchor him to consciousness. His heartbeat stuttered under her palms. Skipped. Found its rhythm again. She stopped breathing until it did.

Her eyes dropped to his Aureus Catenes cuff.

It hadn’t vibrated.

The cuff that was designed to activate when its wearer approached death. The cuff that was supposed to rip him from the edge and deposit him on the rune under the library. The cuff she had carved that rune for. The cuff that was sitting on his wrist, gold and silent, doing absolutely nothing.

It had worked for Fin and Dex.

Would it vibrate before he…

She couldn’t finish the thought. The word sat in her throat like a stone she refused to swallow.

“Stay with me,” she whispered. Her voice cracked down the center. “Please. Just stay with me, Gav.”

She leaned closer and what she saw made every ounce of remaining composure evaporate. The bite itself had swollen, angry and pulsing, black veins twisted around it in a pattern that looked almost deliberate, like dark magic was building a nest.

The veins had spread further in the last two minutes. She could track their progress against his skin like watching ink bleed through wet paper, slow and irreversible, each new tendril reaching deeper into territory it had no intention of giving back.

“No, no, no. Gav, I just got you back. I can’t lose you again.”

Her voice broke on the last word, grief already creeping into her tone like it had already decided the outcome before she had. She swallowed it back down. Grief was for people who had stopped fighting.

That was not her.

She grabbed a stone from the ground. Her hands were shaking so badly it took two attempts to grip it, and when she dragged it across her palm, the cut was crooked and jagged and she barely felt it over everything else.

Gold blood welled immediately. She squeezed her fist directly over his bite mark, letting it drip into the wound, watching each drop land on the darkened skin.

Nothing.

One second. Two. Three. Her heartbeat counted for her.

“Please work.”

Four seconds. Five.

Then the black veins stopped moving.

They halted mid-spread, frozen in place as if her blood had slammed a wall down in front of the infection and told it to go fuck itself. The advance ceased. The crawling darkness paused.

But the bite mark itself stayed. Dark. Pulsing. Swollen. Unhealed.

Her blood had bought him time. It had purchased a pause, a temporary ceasefire between the poison and his body. But the wound was still there. Still open. Still winning.

Serena swallowed hard. Then she leaned over him and pressed her bleeding palm against his lips.

Third time. Third goddamn time she had done this with Gavriel Sterling. Three near-death experiences, three slashed palms, three moments where the only thing standing between him and a body bag was her blood in his mouth.

If they survived this, she was giving him a vial of her blood to carry with him at all times because this man was accident prone. It takes one to know one.

The humor lasted half a second before it collapsed under the weight of what she was looking at. His face was gray. His lips were dry. His chest rose and fell in intervals that were getting longer, the gaps between breaths stretching out like his body was forgetting the rhythm.

“Come on,” she whispered, pressing her palm harder against his lips. “Drink. Please wake up, Gav.”

He didn’t move.

Didn’t swallow. Didn’t twitch. Didn’t give her the faintest flicker of the man who had a comeback for everything, who cracked jokes while bleeding out, who called her Frostborne like it was both an insult and a love letter.

Nothing.

The gold blood pooled against his lips and sat there, untouched, and the stillness of him was worse than any wound she had ever seen on his body. Gavriel Sterling was never still. Gavriel Sterling was motion and noise and sarcasm and warmth, and the absence of all of it was so wrong it felt like a violation of physics.

The air in the cave thickened. Her throat tightened like a fist was closing around it from the inside. She tried to breathe and got half a lungful before her body refused the rest, chest hitching, ribs locking, every inhale shorter than the one before it.

“I can’t breathe,” she sobbed to no one while she continued to hold her hand to his mouth.

She was kneeling beside him, gold blood still slipping between her fingers, still running over his lips, still doing everything she could do and nothing that was enough.

The silence was so complete she could hear her own tears hitting his chest.

Her hands went numb. Then her arms. Sweat broke across her forehead despite the fact that she was already soaked, and the cave started tilting at angles that caves don’t tilt at.

Her vision blurred. Then doubled. Then narrowed to a single bright point, shrinking.

Everything went black.