Of all the things that had tried to kill them today, the door was the most polite about it. But it had a type, and the type was not male.

Serena stepped into the light holding Fin’s hand. Her fingers were locked around his with the grip pressure of a woman who had been separated from people she loved too many times today and whose too-many had produced a holding instinct that was going to require surgical intervention to release.

Runes flared violently. The flaring was aggressive, interrogative, the sigils cycling through colors and frequencies with the rapid assessment of a security system scanning an entrant and finding the scan inconclusive.

For a second, it seemed the doorway wasn’t sure what she was. The hesitation was visible in the light, the white pulsing unevenly, the runes flickering between acceptance and rejection, the portal’s ancient intelligence processing a woman who was wolf and Fae and dragon and mage and human all at once, and whose all-at-once was producing a categorization error that the portal had never encountered in ten thousand years of operation.

Then it flared white, as if recognizing her. The recognition was total. The runes locked into a steady, brilliant pulse, the portal’s uncertainty converting to certainty in a single frame, the ancient magic identifying her bloodline and the identifying producing a warmth that was physical, tangible, the threshold welcoming her the way a door welcomes the person who holds its key.

Her back was pressed to Fin’s chest and the portal seemed to be measuring him now.

Pain tore through him like lightning through bone, sharp, blinding, absolute. It slammed into his chest and spine, driving the air from his lungs. The pain was precise. Surgical. Targeted at points along his body that corresponded to nothing he could identify, the portal running its fingers along his nervous system with the invasive thoroughness of a diagnostic that was designed to test structural integrity and whose testing was using pain as its metric.

For the first time, he was grateful she had that necklace. It was the only reason she wasn’t feeling it through their matebond.

He kept composed, jaw locked, breathing through it. His teeth were grinding hard enough to produce a sound that Serena could feel through his chest against her back. His hands on her waist tightened by one degree. That was it. That was the only visible evidence that ancient magic was trying to tear him apart from the inside, because Finnick Shadowclaw’s pain tolerance was a geological formation and the formation was holding.

Both of their wolves surged, revealing themselves. The surging was involuntary, both wolves pushing to the surface simultaneously, Xeon and Aurelia responding to the portal’s probe with the instinctive defensiveness of animals whose territory had been invaded by something they couldn’t bite.

Fin: What is this?

Xeon: I’m unsure. It’s calling for me.

Fin: I don’t hear anything.

Xeon: You are human. You hear human things. I am wolf. It is speaking wolf. The speaking is old. Very old. Older than my oldest memory and my oldest memory is VERY old, Finnick.

The pain spiked again, harder, the portal demanding a reason the way a gate demands a password, the ancient magic pressing against Fin’s body with a force that was asking a question in a language his bones understood and his brain didn’t.

The question was: why should you pass? The answer was being provided by his wolf.

The pain receded. The portal had gotten its answer and the answer was satisfactory, the ancient intelligence releasing its grip on Fin’s nervous system with the abrupt indifference of a bouncer who had finished checking ID and was already looking at the next person in line.

Serena walked forward in the light, pulling Fin with her.

As soon as they exited on the other side, Fin bent slightly, panting, as the last shockwaves of pain faded. His hands were on his knees. His breathing was ragged. The composure he had maintained inside the portal was cracking now that the cracking was private, the pain’s aftershocks rolling through his body in diminishing waves that were taking their time leaving.

He wasn’t the only one. Gavriel and Dexmon were both in the same state. Three men, bent at various angles of recovery, breathing hard, scattered across the chamber like survivors of an explosion that had been internal and invisible and deeply, profoundly unpleasant.

“I’m good. I’ve had worse negotiations,” Dexmon said. His voice was rough. Strained. The delivery was aiming for casual and landing somewhere in the neighborhood of running a marathon.

Gavriel straightened slowly, breath still rough, but his eyes were clear.

“Ah yes. I distinctly remember you saying that after a negotiation, while we were running and everything behind us was on fire,” he said, clapping him on the back. The clap was the clap. The Gavriel-Dexmon clap. The specific percussion of a friendship that had been built on the foundation of shared catastrophe and whose foundation was producing structural integrity that nothing, including ancient portals and volcanic continents, could compromise.

Dexmon shot him a murderous look. The look was fond. The fondness was buried under seven layers of exhaustion, irritation, and the specific energy of a man whose best friend was bringing up an incident that had been classified as “never discuss again” approximately two years ago and whose classification was being violated in front of his mate.

“That’s called a tactical exit. You were screaming too loud to notice.”

“I’d like it noted I was screaming because YOU were smiling,” Gavriel answered. “You were smiling, Dex. While running. Through fire. Your face was doing the thing where it decides the situation is fun and the fun is visible and the visible is TERRIFYING to everyone around you because smiling during a fire is the behavior of a man who should be evaluated by professionals.”

“The fire was manageable.”

“The fire was consuming a BUILDING.”

“A small building.”

“A GOVERNMENT building, Dex. With PEOPLE in it.”

“The people were already out.”

“Because I CARRIED THEM.”

Serena laughed before she could stop herself. The laugh was sudden, genuine, startled out of her by the image of Dex smiling through a fire and Gavriel screaming while carrying government officials, and the image was so perfectly, completely them that it bypassed every layer of trauma the day had stacked on her chest and hit the part of her brain that found these two idiots funny.

It reminded her of Elara as well. They had a similar story.

Fin straightened. His breathing had normalized. The man who had been bent double thirty seconds ago was standing at full height, watching Serena laugh at a story about his fellow Alpha running through a burning building with a smile on his face, and the watching was producing an expression on Fin’s face that was complicated and warm and contained zero of the jealousy it would have contained two months ago.

Xeon: She is laughing.

Fin: I hear it.

Xeon: Good sound. Best sound. I want that sound every day forever.

Fin: For once, we agree on something without arguing about it.

Xeon: I agree. We should celebrate by letting her mark us so we can glow gold like—

Fin: And it’s over. The moment is over. You ruined it.