Chapter 538

She released.

The arrow shot upward like a streak of liquid gold, slicing through the dim cavern air with a whistle that echoed off every surface of the thousand-foot shaft. It climbed and climbed and climbed, defying every law of physics that applied to projectiles fired by exhausted women in volcanic tunnels, and struck the rim at the very top with a metallic crack that rang through the stone like a bell.

The moment it hit, Draken-Vorah runes ignited along the arrow’s entire length, blazing gold from tip to tail.

A thick rope of braided gold light unfurled from the arrow’s base, dropping the full thousand feet in a single, smooth descent, the end landing at Serena’s boots with a soft thud that had no business being that anticlimactic after a thousand-foot fall.

Gavriel blinked at it. “That is aggressively helpful.”

Serena grabbed the rope. Gavriel grabbed it behind her. The rope decided they were ready before either of them confirmed, and yanked them upward with a vicious, unstoppable force that turned his stomach inside out and rearranged his organs by altitude.

They shot through the tunnel in a blur of motion, alpha speed multiplied by ancient magic, the wind tearing past so hard it peeled his lips back from his teeth. Gavriel wrapped one arm around Serena’s waist and locked it there, holding her steady as they rocketed upward through a thousand feet of volcanic rock in the time it took to exhale a profanity he never finished.

They burst out of the opening and rolled onto volcanic stone beneath a sky so bright it slapped them both across the face.

Serena blinked at the sun, dazzling and warm, a shock after so much darkness that her eyes watered and her body flinched from the sheer audacity of natural light existing. The warmth hit her skin and she felt something loosen in her chest, a knot she hadn’t known was there, because darkness and underground tunnels and lava puzzles had a way of tightening things you didn’t notice until the sky came back.

Gavriel turned to look behind them as they stood.

A dozen more shafts peppered the volcano’s slope below them, dark openings scattered across the black rock like vents leading into the mountain’s heart. Tunnels. Exits. The temple’s exhaust system, or its escape routes, or both. The volcanic landscape sprawled beneath them in a brutal panorama of cooled lava flows and sulfur-stained ridgelines, and every inch of it looked like a planet that had given up on hospitality.

Above them, the volcano loomed.

Massive. Dark. Ancient. The peak they had been traveling toward since they first portaled into this hellscape, rising above them like a monument to every bad decision that had led them here. A winding trail carved into cooled lava spiraled around its face, steep and narrow, switchbacking up the slope with the grudging accessibility of a path that existed because the mountain allowed it, and for no other reason.

Serena took a breath and let the sun warm her face. The warmth felt earned in a way sunshine never had before.

Gavriel looked up at the blazing sky and relief flickered across his features, quick and genuine, the first time his face had fully relaxed since she’d found the bite on his shoulder. “Sun’s out. No vampires.” He turned to her. “Are you able to run?”

She nodded.

Gavriel stepped back, still catching his breath from the ascent, and rolled his shoulders like a man preparing to do something his body would complain about later. “Ready when you are.”

She didn’t hesitate. Serena launched forward at Alpha speed, boots striking volcanic stone, white hair streaming behind her as she hit the trail at full sprint. She made it roughly forty feet before her brain caught up to her legs and she remembered that Gavriel Sterling was a wolf without an Alpha’s speed in human form, which meant she was about to leave him in her dust, which meant she needed to slow down and—

Gavriel blew past her.

She stopped dead.

He was running at Alpha speed. In human form. Gavriel Sterling, who had never once in his life demonstrated this ability, was moving at a velocity that was reserved for shifted wolves and Alphas and people whose bloodlines came with fine print, and he was doing it in his thermal-weave training suit like it was a Tuesday.

He looked back over his shoulder at her standing there with her mouth open and gave her the flattest look she had ever received from a man moving at sixty miles per hour.

“Keep up, Serena. We went over this.”

A grin split across her face that had no business being there, born from exhaustion and delirium and the specific joy of watching Gavriel Sterling casually demolish a biological limitation he shouldn’t have been able to touch. She shook her head once, a single disbelieving shake, and then she was running, boots hammering the trail as she closed the gap.

Gavriel matched her stride as they shot up the volcanic trail together, side by side, the wind whipping past them and the mountain rising and the sun blazing overhead.

They ran for at least an hour at full Alpha speed, which was a sentence that should have been impossible to apply to Gavriel Sterling and yet applied to Gavriel Sterling, and neither of them slowed down.

The trail finally leveled out at the top ridge.

The temperature dropped like a trapdoor. Volcanic heat gave way to alpine cold, wind cutting across the exposed ridge with teeth in it, and snow covered the black volcanic stone in a thin white layer that crunched beneath their boots. The contrast was absurd, tropical to tundra in the span of a switchback, the mountain’s idea of climate control apparently designed by the same sadistic architects who built the temple’s puzzle rooms.

Serena drew another arrow without breaking stride, nocked it, aimed at the snow-capped peak above them, and released.

The arrow struck the summit with a resonant crack that echoed across the ridgeline, and a shimmering gold rope unfurled behind it, dropping toward them in a cascade of braided light.

Gavriel’s instincts had always been in sync with hers. But a matebond and Fae magic almost made verbal communication feel redundant. He was already stepping forward, already reaching for the rope, already knowing.

Without a word, they grabbed it together and launched upward, pulled in a blur of speed and ancient magic until they vaulted over the edge of the highest crest