The ice gave way beneath them like a trapdoor, and the lake swallowed them whole.

The cold hit like a wall of knives. Freezing, instant, the kind of cold that bypassed the nervous system entirely and went straight to the bone, the kind that should have locked every muscle in his body and started the countdown to hypothermia in under sixty seconds.

Gavriel’s body glowed green.

The magic erupted from his skin brighter than before, a full-body shield of emerald light that wrapped him in warmth so total the cold couldn’t touch him. It snapped around Serena in the same instant, the green energy reaching for her before he consciously decided to extend it, his magic treating her protection as a default setting that didn’t require input from his brain.

Serena blinked underwater, stunned.

She didn’t need to shield him. His body was protecting itself without any effort from her, the green magic humming at a frequency that repelled the freezing water the way her gold magic repelled dark magic, instinctively and absolutely. And he wasn’t just protecting himself. He was protecting her too, his magic wrapping her like a second skin, and she could feel through the Fae frequency that his reserves weren’t even straining. He was running at idle. Barely a ripple in the ocean she’d felt during the parachute.

His magic didn’t want her to use hers. She could feel that intention radiating through the matebond and the Fae connection simultaneously, a wordless insistence that she conserve, that she rest, that she let him carry this one, and she was grateful for it because this was the kind of cold that would’ve cost her dearly and her reserves were still recharging from the cave.

She reached outward with her senses, feeling for what she always felt for in deep water near volcanic stone.

Velkaris’s flame found her first. Distant, steady, burning gold somewhere far above them, her dragon’s presence a warm constant she could locate the way a sailor locates north. He was alive. He was waiting. He was pissed, probably, because Velkaris was always pissed when she went underground without him.

Then she felt a second flame.

It was smaller. Younger. Green.

She knew this flame the way you know a song you’ve heard once and can’t forget, recognized it in her marrow before her mind caught up with her instinct. The juvenile dragon. The one that had ripped through a portal at terminal velocity with the landing skills of a drunk pelican and interrupted Guinevere Ashford’s execution.

The little guy who breathed fire that was supposed to be a myth.

She hadn’t met him yet. She’d planned to, had put it on the growing list of things she needed to do when the world stopped trying to kill everyone she cared about for five consecutive minutes, a list that was getting longer faster than she could check things off.

But she could feel him now, his flame burning green and bright and eager somewhere in the dark, and her Fae magic reached for it the way it had reached for Gavriel’s, with the immediate, instinctive recognition of something that belonged to the same frequency she did.

The rope kept pulling.

Deeper. Faster. The kind of descent that stopped being a swim and started being a sentence, the water above them sealing shut like a door that had no intention of reopening. Pressure squeezed their ribs, compressing their chests inch by inch as the depth increased, and their ears popped with a pain that traveled through their skulls and settled behind their eyes.

The cold grew vicious. The silence became unnatural, the kind of silence that belonged to places where sound went to die, where the only thing audible was the blood in your own head and the grinding protest of a body being dragged somewhere bodies weren’t designed to go.

The rope didn’t care. The rope had an appointment at the bottom and was running ahead of schedule.

Next to her, Gavriel felt his Hidden Flame mark burn. The heat ignited beneath his skin like a pilot light flaring to full blaze, and a half-second later, the echo hit him. Hers.

The sensation arrived in three different ways at the same goddamn time.

His mark. Her mark through the matebond. Her mark again through the Fae frequency. A triple echo that wasn’t painful but was unmistakably hot, as if his body was being reminded of something by three different sources who all wanted credit for the notification.

It was a mindfuck.

Flame flooded into his chest.

It surged from the marks and spread through his torso, wrapping around his organs, radiating outward through his limbs, layering warmth over the green shield already humming against his skin.

The cold that had been pressing against the edges of his magic retreated another foot, repelled by a heat that felt ancestral, the kind of fire that had been burning since before anyone alive knew how to name it.

He still had one arm locked around her. He couldn’t explain half of what his magic was doing, couldn’t define it or diagram it or give Hyran a single satisfying answer about the mechanics.

But he could feel her. Through the matebond, through the Fae frequency, through the contact of his arm against her body, he could feel her reserves with a clarity that was almost medical.

And what he felt made his jaw clench underwater.

If his magic wasn’t doing what it was doing right now, she would have barely enough pink or gold to keep her organs from freezing solid and she wouldn’t have the energy to channel dragon flame.

The margins were that thin.

She wouldn’t have been able to do anything except survive on willpower and stubbornness, and he loved both of those things about her but neither of them generated body heat.

He knew it the way he’d known to run at Alpha speed earlier, the way he’d known to fabricate the parachute, without evidence, without explanation, with a certainty that lived beneath logic and didn’t require its approval.

She needed a full day to recharge. Minimum. Even with him actively feeding her reserves right now, pouring green into her like a transfusion, her pink magic was struggling. It needed a reset and he could give that to her, but he couldn’t when she kept using it.

The other thing he could feel and almost taste was that something was smothering her ability to recuperate and her power as a whole.

She was struggling harder than she should be. She was more powerful than this.

He could feel the obstruction the way you feel a knot in a muscle you can’t quite reach, a pressure sitting on top of her Fae magic that didn’t belong there.

It was starving her pink reserves at a pace her body had learned to accommodate, the way a plant tilts toward a shrinking window of light, adjusting and adjusting and adjusting until the adjustment itself becomes the baseline and no one remembers what full sun looked like.

His magic surged towards it on instinct.

Whatever that was, it needed to go.