Gavriel woke first.

Her blood was the reason. Still hot, still electric, still buzzing through his veins with enough voltage to drag him back to consciousness whether he wanted to come or go. His eyelids fluttered open, and the first thing he registered was warmth. The second thing was her body curled against his, her head tucked under his chin, her breath slow against his chest.

His arms were around her. They were both half-naked.

His breath caught. Heat climbed up his neck and kept climbing.

Fuck she was perfect.

Every inch of skin pressed against his was sending sparks through his nervous system like a live wire refusing to ground itself. He had wanted to hold her like this for so goddamn long, and now that he had her, the reality was so much better than the fantasy that his brain kept rejecting it as fraudulent.

He remembered hooking his arm around her waist and pulling her into this cave. Everything after that was fog.

Thick, impenetrable, suspiciously-pleasant fog. The kind of fog that felt like it was hiding something spectacular and catastrophic in equal measure, and the fog was keeping its goddamn mouth shut about which one.

He swallowed hard and shifted to sit up without disturbing her. His briefs were crumpled on the moss beside them, and he pulled them on with the speed of a man who understood that context mattered and “half-naked beside his best friend’s mate” was a context that could get him killed in eleven different ways.

Her thong was tangled in the grass beside her.

He knew Serena Frostborne. He knew her the way you know the weather patterns in a place you’ve lived your whole life: instinctively, without having to check, down to the micro-shifts that everyone else missed. She would lose her absolute mind if she woke up undressed. That was a certainty on par with gravity and Hyran’s disappointment.

She would also lose her mind if she woke up to him dressing her, which meant she was going to lose her mind either way, so he went with the option that had a small chance she would not lose her mind if she didn’t wake up.

He slid them up her legs carefully, barely breathing through the entire operation.

She stayed asleep. Heavy sleeper. Always had been. The woman could sleep through a siege if the siege happened past midnight, a fact he had learned on the road and filed under “endearing but terrifying.”

The cavern steamed softly around them, volcanic air shimmering with residual heat. He reached out and touched her forehead.

She was burning.

“Serena?”

He touched her shoulder gently. Zero reaction. Her breathing was shallow, too shallow, the kind of shallow that made his chest tighten because he’d heard that rhythm before and it never preceded anything good. He pressed two fingers to her neck, and her pulse stuttered against his fingertips, uneven, skipping, wrong.

His heart kicked so hard it bruised his sternum.

Gavriel scooped her into his arms without hesitation and walked straight into the hot spring.

He expected the water to turn pink. It always turned pink with Serena. Gold was her default setting. Pink made appearances from time to time. It was her Fae magic’s calling card, her involuntary color palette, the shade that announced “Serena Frostborne was here” with the subtlety of a neon sign.

The moment his foot touched the water, it turned green.

Bright, vivid, electric green, lighting up from the bottom of the pool and surging outward in a perfect circle around him with the same intensity her pink carried but in a color he had never once seen her produce.

“What the.”

He froze, staring down at the glowing water, then at her, then at the water again. He couldn’t tell if she had picked up a new color or if this was something else entirely, something the volcano had triggered, something on the long and growing list of shit involving Serena Frostborne that defied explanation and showed up uninvited.

It didn’t feel bad. Whatever the green was, his body accepted it the way lungs accept air, automatically and without debate.

He lowered them both deeper in the water, him holding onto her.

The glow exploded.

Brighter, hotter, flooding the cavern in a blinding green flash. The water vibrated beneath them, resonating like a struck bell, the sound so deep it traveled through his bones and settled in his teeth. Light rippled outward from their bodies in concentric waves, and the steaming pool became a goddamn beacon.

He held her securely, her head in the crook of his neck, her back resting against his arm, her body floating weightlessly in his grip. The green light pulsed around them in steady, rhythmic waves that matched her heartbeat, which was still too faint and too uneven for his liking.

“Serena? You’re scaring me.”

His hands moved over her with trembling urgency, and the trembling had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with the sharp, clean terror of a man who was watching the woman he loved stay unconscious. He checked for wounds, for burns, for bite marks, for anything his hands could find that his eyes might have missed.

She should have woken by now.

His palms traced her shoulders first, searching for cuts and claw marks and bruising beneath the skin. Then down along her ribs where she’d taken the worst hits earlier. His thumbs pressed carefully against her sides, her stomach, searching for any sign she’d been crushed or punctured or magically scorched in a way the water hadn’t caught yet.

Every visible wound dissolved into the green-lit water the moment he touched it, the spring doing in seconds what healing magic usually took minutes to accomplish.

Gavriel’s own bruises, the ones that had mostly healed, dissolved completely. The sensation barely registered because every ounce of his attention was locked on her, every synapse dedicated to the terror of her stillness and the unacceptable weakness of her pulse.

He held her there for minutes that stretched into hours, her head against his chest, her breaths too shallow, the green water pulsing steadily around them both like a second heartbeat trying to teach hers how to keep time.

Then a small, broken sound slipped past her lips.