Gavriel’s heart slammed against his ribs. “Serena?”

Her lashes trembled. Fingers twitched against his arm.

She stirred, and the exhale that left him was so ragged it sounded like it had been held since she lost consciousness. Her eyes fluttered open, green, unfocused, blinking slowly like she couldn’t quite determine what world she’d woken into. A soft groan escaped her as she turned her face toward the heat.

Towards him.

The moment her gaze locked onto his, her eyes flooded pink, and her entire body went still.

The matebond hit her like a freight train, but this train was running on different tracks than the other two.

Dexmon’s matebond had arrived like a storm, possessive and consuming, a force that grabbed her by the chest and rewired her heartbeat to sync with his. Finnick’s had been quieter, deeper, a current beneath still water that pulled with an undertow she never saw coming.

This one was something else entirely.

This one had her Fae magic tangled up in it, pink threads laced through green threads laced through something she had never felt before, a pull toward him that bypassed every logical pathway her brain owned and went straight to the marrow.

Her magic was drawn to him like it recognized him on a frequency she couldn’t name, couldn’t explain, and couldn’t have stopped if she’d been given a year and a manual.

She looked up at him.

His eyes were green.

The molten gold from earlier was gone. These were green, bright and vivid and lit from the inside, the exact shade of the water glowing around them. This was Fae magic green, and Gavriel Sterling did not have Fae magic last time she checked. He had gold magic. She had learned that. He still had that. She could feel it.

But this was different. The gold magic she pulled from him felt new, powerful but not trained. This green magic felt more powerful than any Fae she had ever encountered and that included Maelor. This was deeper. Ancient. Something that she knew was stronger than her pink magic and something her pink magic immediately recognized.

Her memory was fog. Thick, disorienting, fog with chunks of sensation floating in it that she couldn’t arrange into a timeline.

She remembered his body against hers.

She remembered an orgasm so intense her vision had strobed.

She remembered this cave, the heat, the steam, putting her hand in his mouth.

The fog she was having right now was identical to the fog she got after Fin or Dex marked her.

“Gav?”

Her voice came out rougher than she expected, scraped raw, the voice of a woman whose body had been through several events in rapid succession and was still compiling the incident report. Her hand moved to his shoulder on instinct, fingers finding the spot where the vampire bite had been, where dark veins had been spreading, where fatal had been the only word every mage who ever lived agreed on.

Instead of a dark wound, her fingertips found a white scar, already fading.

Gavriel looked down at his bare shoulder where she was touching him, then back up at her. His expression was unreadable, which was unsettling, because Gavriel Sterling’s face was always readable.

Her eyes moved to his other shoulder.

She remembered this part too. The memory arrived with the subtlety of a brick through a window. Aurelia wouldn’t answer her when she asked, which meant Aurelia had marked him. That was her mark. She knew that was her mark.

The question was, did he know that was her mark?

Heat flooded her face, which was a genuine accomplishment given that she was sitting in a volcanic hot spring.

“Hey. You’re alright,” Gavriel said, and his arms tightened around her, steady and warm, pulling her closer against his chest. His lips pressed against the top of her head, a kiss so natural and automatic that it landed before his brain caught up to his mouth.

Then he stiffened.

The stiffening was immediate, full-body, the rigid freeze of a man who had just done something on instinct and realized, mid-action, that instinct had outed a feeling he’d been keeping under lock and key for months.

He didn’t pull away because pulling away would confirm it, and holding still was somehow worse because holding still also confirmed it, so he existed in the particular hell of a man who had kissed Serena Frostborne’s head and was now stuck in the aftermath of his own tenderness.

She felt all of it.

Every shade of his emotions poured into her through the matebond with a clarity that made Dexmon’s feel like under water by comparison. Panic, affection, guilt, want, the sharp spike of “oh fuck I just did that,” and underneath all of it, a warmth so deep and so old that it couldn’t have started the day they met.

It had two textures to it. The first was something that had been growing for months, watered in silence, fed by proximity, and carefully, deliberately hidden behind every joke and every “Frostborne” and every moment he looked away a half-second too late.

The second was something deeper than that. Something innate that she had felt with Dexmon and Fin, both in unique ways. But this was somehow older than those.

And it wasn’t just through a matebond.

Her Fae magic was reading him too, layered on top of the matebond like a second feed from a different source, and the Fae frequency carried things the wolf frequency didn’t.

She could sense his energy, his vitality, his physical state, a sixth sense she had never experienced with Dex or Fin because neither of them had ever triggered her Fae magic during a marking.

She opened her mouth to say something. Anything.

What came out was, “Gav, you turned the water green.”

Because she was Serena Frostborne, and when the emotional landscape became a five-alarm fire, she defaulted to the simplest observation, something that Gavriel Sterling also had a knack for.