Hyran, Gavriel, Fin, Maelor, and Aeron stumbled out of the nightmare tunnel, singed, panting, and looking like they’d survived fourteen separate exorcisms.

Maelor’s robes had crossed from ’ruined’ into ’conceptual art.’ Hyran’s hair was standing in three directions that hair should never stand. Aeron’s thermal weave suit had a handprint burned into the shoulder that he was choosing to examine later. Gavriel’s entire left side was coated in a substance that was either ash, stone infant residue, or liquified ghost, and the identification was a project he was declining to undertake.

The second Fin saw Serena hiccuping, eyes red, his heart cracked clean open. He crossed the distance without thinking and pulled her into his arms. His grip was tight. Too tight for public, too tight for protocol, too tight for an Alpha King in the presence of his entire team. He didn’t care. The caring had been left somewhere in the corridor behind him, between the stone infants and the doppelganger wearing his face, and the caring was never coming back.

Dexmon didn’t react to it. He and Fin locked eyes over her head. Silent communication. The communication lasted one second and contained an entire debrief.

Fin already knew this was nobody’s cup of tea. He was just as relieved to be out of that place and understood her state completely. His relief bled straight into her through their matebond. The relief hit her and her shoulders dropped two inches, the tension releasing from muscles that had been locked for over an hour, and the releasing produced a fresh round of hiccups that she buried against Fin’s chest.

Gavriel stepped closer, eyes softening with genuine worry. “You alright there, Serena?”

Serena didn’t trust herself to speak yet. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. The words were there but the delivery system was compromised and the compromised was producing nothing but air and the occasional hiccup.

“She’s okay,” Dexmon answered for her. “Just fought off ancient tendrils, survived psychological warfare from a corridor that read her memories, and stabbed a wall with an arrow. Standard stuff.”

“That is a concerning baseline,” Aeron said.

“She didn’t cry on me at all. Not even a little,” Dex added playfully.

Serena laughed, shaking her head. The laugh was watery, fragile, held together by the sheer stubbornness of a woman who had been crying for the last hour and was choosing to stop because her team was here.

Hyran braced his hands on his knees.

“Let it be known,” he wheezed, “that if anyone ever asks us to walk through that tunnel again, I am faking my own death. I will stage the funeral. I will write the eulogy. I will lie in the coffin and I will STAY there.”

Aeron nodded, hair wild, face pale. “That tunnel can get absolutely fucked.”

“With respect,” Maelor added, still breathing hard, “and I say this as a scholar who values architectural history: that tunnel can get fucked with ZERO respect. I retract the respect. The tunnel does not deserve respect. The tunnel deserves to be filled with cement and forgotten.”

Gavriel looked at Dex. Dex looked at Gavriel. The look was the look. The one they’d been exchanging since they were fourteen. The look that contained an entire conversation built on the foundation of mutual survival and whose foundation was producing a very specific impulse.

“So,” Gavriel said, “scale of one to ten, how pissed would Serena be if we told everyone she screamed so loud the corridor flinched?”

“She’d kill us,” Dex said.

“Immediately,” Gavriel agreed.

“With arrows.”

“The special arrows. The ones that turn things to ash.”

“We’d deserve it.”

“Absolutely. Full ash. Complete disintegration. Justified.”

“So we’re telling everyone?”

“Obviously. First feast. Opening speech.”

Serena’s head lifted from Fin’s chest. Her eyes were red and puffy and her glare was delivering a message that required no translation.

“There she is,” Gavriel said, grinning. “Welcome back, Frostborne.”

She shook her head. Her mouth twitched. The twitch was involuntary. The twitch was the first sign that Serena Frostborne’s sense of humor was rebooting after an hour of being offline, and the rebooting was Gavriel Sterling’s doing, and the doing was the reason he existed in her life, and the reason was going into the vault alongside every other moment he had pulled her back from the edge by making her almost smile.

✦✦✦

TWENTY MINUTES LATER

Maelor groaned as they stepped out of the cavern and onto the mountain slope. Lava geysers roared in the distance, streams of molten fire hissing down the rock. Steam shot into the sky like volcanic dragon breath. The heat was immediate, oppressive, the kind of heat that existed near active magma and had very strong opinions about mages in shredded robes.

“Lava. Of course. Because what this day was missing was LAVA. We had vampires. We had death tunnels. We had stone infants and corridors that impersonate you. But we were SHORT on lava, and the universe corrected the oversight.”

“Beautiful, though,” Gavriel said, looking out at the geysers. “Very scenic. Five stars. Would recommend.”

“I love a good lava field,” Aeron said, scanning the terrain with professional interest. “Excellent natural fortification. Impossible to approach from the south. If we had to hold this position, the geysers would—”

“Aeron, if you turn this lava field into a tactical lecture, I will push you into the nearest geyser,” Hyran said.

“I am never following Serena into a tunnel again,” Maelor announced. “The next tunnel she finds, I am standing outside. I will wait. I will set up a chair. I will read a book. When she emerges covered in blood and ancient debris, I will say ’how was it.’ End of discussion.”

“You said that about the volcano,” Aeron pointed out.

“The volcano was different.”

“You said it about the chute.”

“The chute was ALSO different.”

“You have said ’never again’ four times today. Your ’never again’ has a half-life of approximately eleven minutes.”

“This time is DIFFERENT.”

“Someone start a timer,” Aeron said.