Chapter 536

Gavriel’s arms tightened around her, and he didn’t respond.

Her back was against his chest. Their heartbeats had synced without either of them deciding to let that happen, two rhythms falling into step like they’d been rehearsing in secret for months and finally dropped the pretense.

His insides were a war zone. She could feel every detonation, guilt and want and terror and relief crashing into each other with no referee, and she understood all of it because the same war was raging in her chest and the casualties were identical.

Her hands found his beneath the water and held them against her. He let her, and for a full minute, neither of them spoke or moved or tried to make sense of anything.

They just stayed.

Then a calm washed into her that was absolutely, categorically, without question, his.

It wasn’t just the matebond. The matebond carried emotions. This was something else, something structural, his Fae magic reaching for hers the way a hand reaches for a drowning woman, steady and sure, saying lean on me in a frequency her pink magic recognized before her brain did. Her magic went to his like it had been waiting for permission, and the relief was so immediate it nearly took her under.

Her insides had been burning every time she tried to use her magic. Every attempt was a tax she couldn’t afford on reserves she’d already bankrupted. She could feel him jumpstarting it now, the same way Maelor jumpstarted her pink, except Maelor’s method felt like a mechanic kicking an engine and Gavriel’s felt like a current she could rest inside without drowning.

A noise escaped her mouth that lived somewhere between a groan of relief and a shaky sob. She couldn’t have classified it if she’d tried, and she didn’t try, because the sound was involuntary and honest and carried the weight of something she hadn’t realized until this exact second.

She hadn’t known how drained her pink magic was. She hadn’t known how much the depletion had been weighing on her, grinding her down, sitting on her chest like a slow suffocation she’d adjusted to because the tightening happened one degree at a time. Every day a little heavier. Every day a little harder to breathe. The kind of decline you miss because you’re too busy surviving to notice you’re drowning.

He was lifting it.

Whatever his green magic was, whatever this Fae frequency was that he shouldn’t have and somehow did, it was reaching into the place where her magic lived and shouldering a weight she had been carrying alone for so long that the absence of it felt like vertigo. Like stepping off a ledge and finding a floor she didn’t know was there.

She wondered if it was the tether. The shadow-tether to the Emperor that Maelor kept recloaking every seven days, the one the ancestors warned was accelerating, the one that tightened every time her emotions spiked. Or if it was something else, something older, something that had been choking her before the tether even existed.

Gavriel’s grip tightened even more, his arms locking around her like he could feel exactly how much that relief meant and was responding the only way his body knew how. By holding on harder.

“Serena,” he said after a minute. His voice was quiet, careful, the tone of a man standing at the edge of a conversation he knew would change everything.

“Mhmm.”

“Never mind. I have no goddamn clue how magic works.”

She started giggling.

The giggling was unhinged. Dehydration, delirium, exhaustion, emotional overload, the absurdity of definitely having a matebond to a third man while sitting in a green volcanic hot spring. All of it compressed into a laugh that shook her shoulders against his chest.

The laugh of a woman who had been drained, terrified, unconscious, wolf-possessed, and apparently mated in the span of a single evening, and whose only remaining emotional option was to find it fucking hilarious.

“Do you think this is safe to drink?” Serena asked, staring at the green glowing water. Her lips were cracked dry and her throat burned like she’d been swallowing sand for the last twelve hours.

Gavriel tilted his head, considering the question with the gravity of a man who had already consumed her blood, been bitten by a vampire, died briefly, and been resurrected by wolf venom in the span of a single evening. His threshold for “safe” had been recalibrated significantly.

“I’ll drink first. If I pass out, you can heal me. Seren—”

Too late.

She had already pulled out of his arms and was drinking straight from the pool, face down, swallowing greedily, desperately, her body folded over the glowing green surface like a woman who had been lost in a desert for a week and just found an oasis and did not give a single solitary fuck about decorum.

No cupped hands. No hesitation. No testing the temperature. Zero fucks given.

Gavriel watched her, jaw slack.

“Serena. That is.” He paused, recalibrating. “Wow. Okay. That’s one way to do it.”

She ignored him entirely and drank again, her white hair floating around her in the green-lit water like pale silver threads suspended in molten light. The image was stunning and ridiculous in equal measure, a gorgeous woman face-down in a volcanic hot spring drinking like a feral animal, and the matebond was delivering her satisfaction to him in real time, which tasted like relief and desperation and the particular bliss of hydration after prolonged crisis.

Gavriel stared for another beat. Then said, “Fuck it,” and leaned down to drink the exact same way she did, because at this point his standards had evaporated somewhere around the time his wolf had sex with her wolf and neither of them remembered it properly but he was certain happened because he did some thrusting.

Drinking green volcanic spring water with his face was the least unhinged thing he’d done today.

They came up together, breathless, water dripping from their chins, both equally wrecked and beyond the reach of shame.

Serena wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “We are drinking hot water.”

Gavriel nodded solemnly. “Completely aware.”

“It’s glowing.”

“I see that.”

“We drank it anyway.”

“We did.”

The silence that followed had the energy of two people who had collectively decided that the bar for acceptable behavior had been lowered to the floor and then someone had dug a hole beneath it.

Gavriel climbed out of the pool and reached for his thermal-weave armor. Only then did Serena register that she was still in nothing but her undergarments, a realization that hit her circulatory system like a slap.