“That is enough for today.”

Tiberon’s voice carried across the field with the finality of a man closing a book. His arms were clasped behind his back. His posture was unchanged from the first minute of the session. Thirty minutes of cat-slapping, seven takedowns, one gladiator speech, and a twelve-second spite-shift had produced zero visible wear on the King of Drakenfell’s composure, which was either a testament to his discipline or evidence that he had stopped being surprised by anything decades ago.

“SHIFT, Serena.”

White light. Six seconds. The last de-shift of the session hit her body like a closing tab on a bar bill that had been accumulating for an hour. Serena landed on her hands and knees, panting, nose bleeding again, every muscle filing its resignation simultaneously.

She stayed down for four seconds this time. Then stood. Her hands found her knees and she bent forward, breathing in ragged pulls, her hair hanging around her face in sweat-damp curtains.

The crowd deflated.

The deflation was subtle, collective, and unmistakable. Two hundred soldiers who had been watching the most entertaining training session in Drakenfell’s military history realized the entertainment was over and the realization produced the specific energy of an audience whose show had been cancelled mid-season.

“Same time tomorrow?” a soldier in the back row muttered to the man beside him.

“I’m bringing the whole unit.”

“Bring chairs.”

“Bring ale.”

“Somebody should sell tickets to this shit.”

Halvek shot a look toward the back rows. The look was thermal. The muttering stopped. The soldiers who had been muttering developed a sudden, intense fascination with their own boots.

Serena was still on the field, hands on knees, panting, bleeding, unaware that she had just become the most popular training act in Drakenfell and that tomorrow’s attendance was going to double.

Dexmon moved.

He cleared the distance from the sideline to center field in three strides, Alpha speed carrying him across the dirt before the decision to move had fully formed in his conscious mind. His hands were already reaching for her, the instinct to lift her, to carry her, to put her body against his body and remove her from the field and the pain and the visibility of two hundred soldiers who had been watching his mate bleed from the nose for thirty minutes while he stood on a sideline doing nothing.

Serena stiffened.

She took one step back. Small. Deliberate. Her eyes flicked sideways to the crowd, then back to Dex, and the flick was the message and the message was clear: the Draken Forces are watching and you are the Crown Prince and I am the Crown Princess and we are on a military training field and you are absolutely, categorically, under no circumstances picking me up right now.

They had seen Dex do it a hundred times. In hallways, in corridors, after sparring sessions, in the grand hall. The picking-up was public knowledge. The picking-up was practically a Drakenfell tradition at this point.

But training was different. Training was where Serena was a soldier and Dexmon was a commander and the distance between those two roles was maintained by a protocol that existed because Serena had insisted on it and her insistence was law.

Dex stopped. His hands dropped to his sides. His jaw did the thing where it locked and then unlocked and then locked again because the locking was the only acceptable expression of the frustration currently eating him from the inside out.

He was pouting. Visibly. Openly. The pout of a man whose mate was bleeding and exhausted and standing ten feet away and whose ten feet might as well have been ten miles because the ten feet were being enforced by a rule his mate had created and his mate’s rules were the only authority on this continent he respected enough to obey while hating it.

“Serena, can I borrow you?” Elara’s voice cut across the field with the bright efficiency of a woman executing an extraction.

Serena nodded. Straightened up. Wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Turned toward Elara.

Then she saw Gavriel.

The seeing happened in stages. Her eyes found him on the sideline, standing beside Elara, arms crossed, alive, upright, conscious, present, and the stages collapsed into a single reaction that wiped every other expression off her face and replaced it with a smile so wide and so genuine it rearranged her entire demeanor.

“Gav! You’re awake.”

She moved before she thought. Crossed the distance in four steps and wrapped her arms around him in a hug that was instinct and relief and the specific warmth of a woman who had watched her friend dying and was now watching him standing and the gap between dying and standing was a miracle she was expressing through physical contact.

Then she stiffened.

The stiffening was instant. Total. Every muscle in her body going rigid simultaneously, a full-system lockdown that started in her shoulders and spread to her arms and ended in her hands, which were still on his back, and the hands were suddenly very aware of where they were and the awareness was screaming.

“Good to see you,” she said.

She pulled away. Controlled. Measured. The pull was a retreat disguised as a casual release, her body creating distance with the calculated precision of a woman who had realized, mid-hug, that the hug was a mistake and the mistake needed to end before the ending became suspicious.

She moved toward Elara. The moving was a little too fast. The trajectory was a little too direct. The shift from Gavriel’s space to Elara’s space was a little too clean to be organic.

Elara watched the entire sequence with the quiet attention of a woman cataloguing every micro-expression, every stiffened muscle, every degree of retreat, and filing all of it into the folder that was getting thicker by the hour.

To her relief, Dexmon appeared behind Gavriel a second later and clapped him on the back hard enough to stagger him. “Good to see you, brother.”

The “brother” landed with the genuine warmth of a man whose best friend had been in a coma and was now vertical and the vertical was the best news Dex had received all week. His hand stayed on Gavriel’s shoulder for a beat. Firm. Grounding. The contact of a prince who did not express relief through words and whose back-clap was the emotional equivalent of a three-paragraph letter.