Heat rushed to her face so fast it could have powered a steam engine.

Gavriel felt the flush before he saw it, her emotions brushing against him with an unnerving clarity that was sharper than anything he’d experienced, embarrassment and awareness and a very particular panic.

“We both passed out, and I woke up with both of our training suits off,” he said, keeping his voice even, like this was no big deal even though his heart was thudding like a humming bird. “But I would have taken them off regardless. We would have overheated.”

Technically true. Strategically worded. He left out the part where he’d slid her thong up her legs while barely breathing. That detail could live and die in this cavern.

Serena was too drained to interrogate it. Her brain had the processing power of a candle in a hurricane, and she was choosing to spend what remained on standing upright.

She climbed out of the pool behind him, thick white hair dripping around her shoulders, water streaming down her skin, the green glow still clinging to her like she’d been dipped in liquid starlight.

Gavriel watched her. He couldn’t look away. She stole his breath the way she always stole his breath, effortlessly, accidentally, with the devastating obliviousness of a woman who had no idea what she looked like and never had.

When she looked up at him, he grabbed her thermal-weave training suit and tossed it at her, as if that had been the reason he was staring the entire time.

It was a terrible cover. The matebond ratted him out in real time. She chose mercy and pretended she didn’t feel it.

She caught the suit and slid into it, zipping up with practiced efficiency, only to freeze halfway through.

It hung looser than when they’d left Drakenfell. The thermal-weave that had fit her properly three days ago now sagged at the shoulders and gaped at the waist, the fabric telling a story about exactly how much this temple had taken from her body in calories and magic and structural integrity.

Gavriel’s did the same. His suit, which had been tailored to his frame, now hung off him like he’d borrowed it from a bigger man. The temple had put them both through a meat grinder and their wardrobes were the receipts.

He looked down at himself. Then at her. Then back at himself.

“We look like two scarecrows that escaped a barn fire and found a spa,” he announced, eyes flicking between their suddenly bedraggled forms. “I’ve seen refugees with better tailoring. This is genuinely offensive.”

“What? We look great,” Serena said dryly.

He laughed, warm and real, the first laugh that sounded fully like Gavriel Sterling since before the vampire bite. He gave her a playful shove, and she barely moved because her center of gravity had the stability of a wet napkin, but she shoved him back, and the shove was so weak it was essentially decorative.

Serena stepped forward, and her eyes flashed pink.

The old Fae words left her mouth in a language that predated every kingdom currently drawing breath on the continent, syllables rolling off her tongue with a resonance that belonged to a woman with ten times her arrogance. The words rose from the same place her fabrications rose from, the place beneath thought, beneath intention, the place where instinct and inheritance stored the things her conscious mind hadn’t earned yet.

Symbols along the cavern wall woke up.

They pulsed to life in sequence, one after another, flaring from dormant stone to brilliant white with the synchronized enthusiasm of an ancient security system recognizing an authorized user. The light raced along the wall in a pattern that was too deliberate to be decorative, carving a shape, an outline, a door that hadn’t existed three seconds ago.

Stone split apart with a grinding roar. The wall peeled open like a wound healing in reverse, revealing a small chamber beyond it, bathed in light from above. Clean light. Natural light. The kind of light that came from a sky, which was a commodity neither of them had seen in what felt like a geological age.

They moved forward together.

Gavriel tipped his head back and his eyes traveled up the shaft above them, following the narrow tunnel of rock that climbed vertically into the mountain’s guts. At the very top, impossibly far overhead, a distant point of daylight glowed like a coin-sized sun. He ran the math on the distance and the math came back laughing.

“That’s a climb,” he murmured. At least a thousand feet of vertical stone between them and open air, which was the kind of distance that would’ve been daunting on a full night’s sleep with a meal in his stomach, and was currently fucking hilarious given that he was running on volcanic spring water and wolf venom.

Then he felt it.

Heat bloomed deep in his core, sudden and familiar, the specific warmth that preceded a memory trying to claw its way to the surface from wherever memories went when they weren’t ready to be remembered yet. The sensation mirrored instantly through the matebond, Serena’s version hitting him a half-second later, which meant she was feeling it too, which meant whatever was coming was coming for both of them.

Serena reached back and pulled an arrow from her quiver.

The quiver was restocked by the temple, or by her magic, or by the universe deciding that two half-starved wolves deserved one goddamn break today. She didn’t question it.

Questioning gifts from ancient temples was a hobby for mages who had energy to spare, and she had none.

“Get ready to hold onto me,” she said, nocking the arrow and angling it straight up at the distant pinprick of light. Then she hesitated. “I think.”

The confidence in the first sentence and the uncertainty in the second were so perfectly Serena that Gavriel almost laughed. She wasn’t certain what was coming. Neither was he.

But the same tug pulled at his bones, the same low thrumming vibrated through his marrow, warning him that something long-forgotten was about to surface and make itself known whether they were ready or otherwise.

He stepped in behind her, hands ready at her waist.

“Whatever happens, I’ve got you.”