DRAKENFELL — DEXMON’S CHAMBERS

Serena made it to their chambers on fumes and stubbornness. The stubbornness was doing most of the heavy lifting because the fumes had run out somewhere between the third corridor and the staircase, and the staircase had been a negotiation her legs almost lost.

Dexmon was behind her. Close. The specific close of a man who had been denied the right to carry his mate on a training field and whose denial was expiring the second they crossed the threshold of a private room.

The door closed.

His arms were around her before the latch clicked. He pulled her against his chest, her back to his front, and pressed his face into her hair and inhaled with the deep, full-lung intake of a man who had been standing on a sideline for thirty minutes watching his mate bleed and shift and get thrown across a training yard and whose intake was the first unrestricted breath he had taken all day.

“You’re sore,” he murmured against her hair.

It was a statement. The matebond was open again, the necklace off, and every ache in her body was broadcasting through the channel at full volume. He could feel all of it. The joint pain, the muscle fatigue, the bone-deep exhaustion of several shifts in thirty minutes, every receipt her body had been accumulating while the necklace held the tab.

“A little,” she said.

“A little.” His voice carried the specific skepticism of a man whose matebond was currently receiving a symphony of pain from a woman calling it a little. “I can feel everything, baby. You’re more than a little.”

She leaned back into him. Let herself be held. The holding was warm. His scent and the particular warmth that her body had been craving.

“Bath,” he said. A decision, delivered as a word.

He ran the water himself. Hot. Steam rising from the stone basin, filling the bathing chamber with warmth that loosened the knots in Serena’s shoulders before she was anywhere near the water. Dex tested the temperature with his hand, adjusted it, tested again. The testing was precise, careful, the attention of a man whose mate’s comfort was a project he took seriously and whose project had specific parameters.

He got in first. Settled against the back of the basin, legs extended, and pulled her in after him. Her back rested against his chest. His arms wrapped around her midsection, loose, warm, the hold of a man who was containing her without constraining her because the difference mattered and he knew it.

The water was perfect. The heat sank into her muscles and started undoing the damage that multiple shifts had written into her body. Her head rested against his collarbone. His chin settled on top of her hair.

For thirty seconds, there was quiet.

Then Dex’s hands stilled on her waist.

“You’re tense,” he said. “Something’s on your mind.”

Everything.

“I feel funny,” she said.

“Funny how?”

She was quiet for a moment. Sorting. Deciding what to say and what to bury and how deep to bury it and whether the burying would hold. The sorting took four seconds and the four seconds were long enough for Dex to notice and short enough that the noticing could be attributed to fatigue.

“I feel bad about how harsh I was with your mother.”

Her voice cracked on mother. Small. Barely audible. The fracture of a syllable that carried more weight than the sentence around it, and the weight was genuine, and the genuine was the part she hadn’t expected.

“She was so kind today.”

She turned her head slightly, enough to look at him over her shoulder.

Her eyes were red at the edges.

Dex’s arms tightened around her. Gentle. His lips pressed against her temple. Warm. The press lingered.

“You were honest with her,” he said. His voice was low, steady, the register he used when she needed grounding and the grounding required warmth rather than wit. “Everything you said was true. You called her cruel because she was cruel. You told her to stop because she needed to stop. Being honest with people who hurt you is never too harsh, Serena. It’s the minimum.”

He kissed her temple again. Slower this time.

“And if she’s being kind now, then maybe what you said landed. Maybe she heard it. That’s a good thing. That means your words did something her own conscience couldn’t.”

Serena let out a long breath, and her shoulders relaxed. The slow deflation of a woman whose guilt had been sitting on her lungs and whose lungs were finally being given permission to expand.

“She surprised me,” Serena said quietly.

“She surprised me too,” Dex replied.

That was the truth. The part he said out loud, the warm part, the part that settled against Serena’s skin the way his arms settled around her body, was the truth. His mother had surprised him. The dresses, the cookies, the tuxedos, the “failure as a Luna” admission. All of it was surprising.

Serena turned her face back toward the water. Her eyes closed. Her breathing was evening out. The tension was leaving her shoulders in increments, each increment a layer of the day being released, and the releasing was happening because she was safe and warm and held and the holding was doing the work that words had started.

Dex held her, but his face hardened behind her because he knew his mother well enough to know something wasn’t adding up.

She was up to something.

He didn’t know what.

“I love you, Dex,” Serena whispered, giving his hand a squeeze.

“I love you too, baby,” Dex said, kissing her temple. “You’re mine.”

His hands tightened on her waist.

His breath changed. The rhythm shifted from steady to controlled, which was a different thing, because steady was automatic and controlled was manual and manual meant he was managing something that automatic could no longer handle.

“Dex,” she murmured. Half a word. Half awake. Her voice was the voice of a woman who had been drifting and whose drifting had been interrupted by a sensation she was still cataloguing.

He was the opposite of fine. He was hard against her lower back with a specificity that eliminated all ambiguity, and the ambiguity had been eliminated approximately two minutes ago when she shifted her hips, and the shifting had been the ignition and the ignition was burning and the burning was his to manage.