DRAKENFELL – GAMMA QUARTERS – THIRTY MINUTES BEFORE EXECUTION

The castle was empty in the way castles are empty when the living go to watch the dying, and Serena Drakenfell was the only person left behind.

Gav’s breathing was ragged. Shallow, uneven pulls of air that sounded like they were being negotiated rather than taken, each inhale a concession his body grudgingly allowed before the next exhale tried to be the last.

Serena sat on the edge of the bed, her hand wrapped around his. His fingers were cold. They had been cold for hours, and she had been holding them for hours, and the warmth she was trying to push into him through her grip was accomplishing nothing and she refused to stop.

Dex had asked her point-blank before he left.

“Please stay here, baby. Don’t watch it,” he had said, and the words carried zero of his usual wit, zero deflection, zero of the cocky edge that made everything he said sound like a dare. He was asking her as a man, and she had heard the reason beneath the request before Maelor’s name had entered the sentence.

Watching Guinevere Ashford die would break something inside her, and the breaking would light a signal fire for the most dangerous man alive.

She understood and agreed. She also wanted to stay because Gavriel was dying in a bed and leaving him alone while the rest of the castle watched his fated mate’s execution was a cruelty she was incapable of committing.

Dex had known that too. Through their matebond, she had felt the truth he carried out the door with him: he didn’t want to leave Gav either. The emotion had moved through her chest in a single, sharp pulse, grief and loyalty tangled together in a knot that neither of them could untie, and then he had kissed her forehead and walked away because the Crown Prince of Drakenfell had charges to witness and a sentence to enforce, and the cost of the crown was paid in rooms you had to enter while the people you loved were in rooms you couldn’t be.

Elara was there. Hale was there. Fin was there. Alaric, Hyran, Tiberon, Bellatrix. Every person who mattered was standing in a courtyard watching a woman die.

Serena squeezed Gav’s hand. His fingers gave nothing back.

“You’re going to be fine, Gav,” she said, because the silence was worse than a lie.

The fire cracked once in the hearth. The shadows shifted. His chest rose. Fell.

Then it stopped.

The absence of motion was louder than any sound the room had ever held. His chest, which had been fighting for every breath since she sat down, went still. Flat. The ragged, uneven rhythm that had been her only proof of life for the last six hours ceased with the quiet finality of a machine being switched off.

“Gav?”

Her voice cracked on his name. She leaned forward, free hand pressing against his chest, feeling for the rise, the fall, anything.

Still.

She moved her fingers to his neck. Pressed them against the spot beneath his jaw where a pulse lived. Held.

The silence pressed back.

“No.” Her composure was disintegrating because the man under her fingers had no heartbeat and the room was empty and every person who could help was watching a woman die in a courtyard.

“No, no, no. You were supposed to have another day. No.”

She reached for the mindlink. Hyran. Alaric. Dex. Fin. Elara. Every person she knew.

Dead air. Every single one.

She was alone in a room with a dead man. And the dead man was Gavriel Sterling.

Serena fabricated a dagger. The gold came without thought, without intention, summoned by a desperation so total it bypassed every conscious process and went straight to instinct. The blade materialized in her right hand, humming with energy she barely had left to give.

She dragged it across her palm. Gold blood welled immediately, thick and warm, and she did the thing she should have done yesterday, the thing she had been told not to do, because she was recovering and because her tether may or may not make it worse.

She opened his mouth with her free hand and pressed her bleeding palm against his lips.

“Gav, wake up.”

Gold blood slipped past his teeth, pooling against his tongue, and she pushed gold into him too. She pushed everything she had left, forced through contact, forced through will, forced through the specific desperation of a woman who had watched this man sit on a cold stone floor beside her when she was breaking and refused, absolutely refused, to let him die in a bed while she sat beside him doing the same.

His body gave nothing back.

“Gav. Please.” The tears fell. She couldn’t hold them and she couldn’t stop them. “Please, Gav.”

The gold magic in her palms flickered. Dimmed. The reserves that should have been there were gone, burned through in the temple, in the lake, in every fight she had fought in the last week. It guttered the way a candle gutters in its final seconds, and the panic that moved through her chest was so total it tasted like metal on her tongue.

Pink surged in to fill the void. Her Fae magic, the backup system, the secondary reserve that Maelor had to jump-start every time she ran dry, flooded her hands in a wash of rose-colored light that was warmer than the gold and weaker than the gold and was all she had left.

“Don’t die on me like this.” Her voice broke in the middle of the sentence, fractured into something raw and uncontrolled, the voice of Serena before she learned composure, before she learned armor, before she learned that standing was the first verb that mattered. “You were never supposed to be the one who got hurt. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Gav.”

The pink pulsed against his skin. Her blood was still in his mouth, still pooling, still waiting for a body to accept it. His chest was still. His pulse was absent. The room was empty and the castle was empty and the man who had comforted her through every loss she had ever carried was lying beneath her hands without a heartbeat.

Aurelia surged.

Her wolf came from a place deeper than instinct, deeper than the rebuilt pathways, deeper than thought. She came from the place where wolves lived before they had names, the place where survival was the only language and love was the only fuel, and she took control of Serena’s body with a force that was absolute and ancient and left zero room for the woman who inhabited it.

Serena’s eyes turned molten gold.

For Serena Drakenfell, the world went dark.

Everything that happened next happened in the space between one heartbeat and the absence of another, in a room with a dying man and a wolf who knew what had to be done, and the details of it would live in the silence between Aurelia’s memory and Serena’s consciousness, unspoken and unreachable, belonging to the wolf and the wolf alone.

Because Serena’s wolf understood what no one else did, and her wolf had already made her choice.

The fire in the hearth surged once. Then twice.

Then the room fell silent except for two heartbeats. One hers. One his.

And something else between them.