Aurelia rose through Serena’s body like a tide, taking control with calm, instinctive finality.

Earlier, when she had surfaced, Serena was present and aware. But this time, Serena was gone because Serena was at her limit. The lights were off but nobody was home.

Her human had poured herself dry and collapsed, and the wolf had caught the keys before they hit the floor.

Aurelia didn’t panic or spiral. She didn’t flip through the mental encyclopedia of mage briefings and poison classifications her human had memorized like a goddamn honors student preparing for a final she was never going to take.

Wolves run on instinct, and instinct didn’t need a bibliography or a second opinion.

The majority of her instincts had been burned out by silver, but not this one. She knew what to do because she was a white wolf.

She didn’t have the full memories of her past lives, but she remembered the grief of Natalia Moonveil, the first Dragon Queen. Natalia had lost her mate because she did not know that she could do this and the grief from that was so devastating that not even silver could burn out the echo in her soul.

Still fully in human form and eyes blazing molten gold, Aurelia kept her bleeding hand pressed to Gavriel’s mouth. Her free hand found his chest, palm flat against the furnace of his fever, the heat cooking him alive while the venom colonized his veins.

She leaned forward with the unhurried certainty of a creature following a map written in her goddamn marrow.

Her mouth found his shoulder, the marked one, clean of vampiric teeth and clean of black veins and clean of everything except a history that both her human and his human had been tap-dancing around.

Two people pretending a grenade wasn’t sitting between them.

She went to the exact spot where she had marked him the first time.

The mark Serena finally recognized.

Aurelia looked directly at it.

Her fangs elongated, and she bit down.

Power detonated through the cavern like a bomb going off in a temple.

Pink and gold magic tore from both bodies in a blinding pulse that turned the volcanic air into a lightshow. Energy screamed between them in a circuit that closed with the force of a dam breaking.

The cavern walls caught the blast and threw it back, amplified, because ancient stone had been watching moon-blooded magic, old fae magic, and wolf instinct collide and recognized what it was seeing.

The steaming pool surged behind them, water climbing three feet before crashing back down like it was applauding. Crystals embedded in the rock walls flickered gold, then pink, then gold again, pulsing in a rhythm that matched the venom flooding Gavriel’s system.

Volcanic vents hissed louder as steam billowed in thick curtains, the earth itself exhaling because it had been holding its breath for this exact moment.

Aurelia’s jaw locked tighter as her venom poured into him, hot and ancient, carrying the full weight of a white wolf’s claim.

This venom was threaded with gold magic, with the bloodline that made healers stammer and mages take notes, with the kind of potency that predated every living mage’s understanding of how any of this worked and couldn’t be bothered to wait for them to catch up.

It collided with the vampiric infection at the wound site, and the collision was brutal and visible, gold light crackling against black corruption in a war fought entirely beneath his skin.

The black veins on Gavriel’s shoulder started to reverse. The dark lines retreated slowly at first, then faster, pulling back from his extremities toward the vampire bite like a tide obeying a new moon.

Gavriel’s body arched as a sound tore from his throat, half groan, half something older, something that came from Rook, his wolf, stirring in the dark for the first time since the bite had shoved him under.

Aurelia held and did not release. Her fangs stayed buried, her venom still flowing, her molten gold eyes open and fixed on nothing because she didn’t need to see. She was operating on the only frequency that mattered: this male was hers, and he was going to live, and the universe could take its “fatal prognosis” and choke on it.

Her insides were on fire. Serena’s reserves had been empty for hours, and Aurelia was pulling from somewhere deeper, somewhere that wasn’t meant to be accessed and was charging interest by the second. Her arms shook. Her vision blurred. The gold and pink magic between them flickered and dimmed, threatening to go out entirely, and she clamped her jaw tighter and refused to let it.

Then Gavriel swallowed.

His throat moved against her bleeding hand, still pressed to his lips, and the gold blood that had been sitting untouched finally slipped down. A second swallow followed, then a third, each one stronger and greedier than the last as his body remembered how to take what it needed.

Aurelia didn’t let up.

✦✦✦

For Gavriel Sterling, no time had passed. Darkness had been swallowing him whole, thick and suffocating, the kind of black that didn’t leave room for thought or time or the memory of his own name.

Then he tasted it.

The sweetest thing he had ever tasted in any life he’d ever lived. The same taste that had wrecked him the first time, the taste that had made him grab her hand and refuse to let go, the taste that haunted every dream he’d had since.

Sweeter now. Stronger. Laced with venom that made his blood sing and his heart slam back to life so hard his ribs cracked under the impact.

His lungs filled in a single convulsive gasp.

Her scent flooded in with the air, the same scent he was tasting in his mouth, and the combination of both at once was so overwhelmingly HER that his brain short-circuited before it finished rebooting.

His fingers twitched. Then they curled around her wrist.

Ecstasy hit him like a freight train with no brakes.

Her venom poured through his bloodstream in waves, each one crashing harder than the last, pleasure so intense it lapped over into agony and came back around for seconds.

Every nerve ending in his body fired at once, every instinct he owned roared awake, and the combination of her blood on his tongue and her venom in his veins and her scent in his lungs built with no release until the pressure behind his ribs felt like it would crack him open from the inside.

His eyes flew open.