“I’m sorry, Gav.”

Her voice was a whisper and she didn’t look at him when she said it. She pulled out of his grip and straightened, boots hitting the ground, hands smoothing her training suit with the frantic composure of a woman pretending the last four seconds hadn’t contained information she would be processing at 3 AM for the rest of her natural life.

Gavriel said nothing about it. The matebond said everything about it. They both pretended the matebond wasn’t there.

Before them stretched the lake.

Black water beneath a lattice of ice, the frozen surface cracked and fractured in jagged veins that let the dark liquid beneath show through, the pattern spreading across the lake like lightning frozen mid-strike. The ice was still forming, still creeping, still sealing itself in real time, and the water visible through the fractures was so dark it looked like it went down forever.

Serena stared at it, and her breathing stopped.

The last lake she’d entered had nearly killed her. A hundred feet down in freezing water, her magic guttering, her body shutting down, coughing blood on the shore afterward while the cold ate her from the fingertips in. The ancestors had warned her, in the fire chamber, that this lake was different. That the Moon Blood was meant to bleed first. That she was forbidden from entering alone.

She was afraid. The fear sat in her chest like a stone she couldn’t swallow, heavy and cold, and it tasted like hypothermia.

“You haven’t breathed in thirty seconds. Breathe, Serena.”

She exhaled. The air left her in a shaky rush that confirmed exactly how long she’d been holding it.

“I wonder…” she said, the thought escaping her mouth before her brain authorized the release. She trailed off, eyes still locked on the dark water, her mind running calculations she hadn’t finished yet.

Gavriel already knew what she was thinking because the matebond delivered her thoughts in shorthand and his instincts translated the rest. The same pull was tugging at his bones, the same low hum vibrating in his chest, the same ancient frequency whispering that the lake was waiting for both of them and had been waiting for a very long time.

“I have a strong suspicion you’re right,” he said, looking at the ice with the calm assessment of a man who had drowned, been resurrected, run up a volcano, and base-jumped into a crater in the span of a single day, and was now being asked to get into a freezing lake, and was honestly surprised it took this long. “Because nothing says ’relaxing afternoon’ like another body of water that probably wants to eat us.”

Serena nocked an arrow, drew back, and released.

The shot climbed in a perfect arc, gold light trailing behind it like a comet’s tail, beautiful and precise and exactly the kind of thing that would have made Hyran nod once in grudging approval if he’d been here to see it.

Then the arrow stopped being beautiful and started being violent.

Halfway across the lake, it angled sharply downward with a predatory intent that had nothing to do with gravity and everything to do with ancient magic deciding where it wanted to go.

The arrow dove, cutting through the cold air in a savage descent, and speared the dead center of the frozen lake with a crack that echoed off every wall of the crater like a gunshot in a temple.

The impact sent a web of fractures racing outward from the point of entry, ice splitting in jagged veins that radiated across the surface in a perfect circle, the pattern expanding until the entire lake looked like a shattered mirror held together by stubbornness and freezing temperatures.

For a long breath, nothing.

The fractures settled. The ice held. The crater was silent.

Then.

FWUMP.

A golden rope detonated upward from the lake’s center like a harpoon line firing in reverse, ripping through the fractured ice and tearing into the sky at a speed that turned the air itself into a whip crack. It screamed toward them across the crater, trailing gold light and shattered ice, and right when it reached the rim where they stood, it snapped taut with a force that vibrated through the stone beneath their boots.

The rope had been yanked by the mountain itself, and the mountain was done being patient.

They both knew. They had run this drill enough times today that the rope’s body language was fluent. This wasn’t an invitation. This was a countdown, and the countdown had started at zero.

Serena grabbed the rope. Gavriel grabbed it behind her, one hand on the braided gold, one arm locked around her waist. The rope decided the word “ready” was a suggestion and ripped them off the rim.

The world jerked violently sideways, then forward, then DOWN.

They hit the ice at a momentum that should have shattered every bone below their knees, except the rope kept them horizontal, dragging them across the frozen surface at a speed that turned the lake into a blur of black and white beneath their bodies.

Gavriel’s instincts screamed to pull Serena on top of him so she wasn’t the one being dragged across ice like cargo on a sled, but the physics professor in his hindbrain, the one that had kept him alive through every temple puzzle, ran the math in half a second: more weight per surface area meant more pressure per square inch meant higher likelihood of the ice cracking beneath them, and cracking meant the black water beneath, and the black water beneath was the whole goddamn point but only when they reached the center, and they were not at the center yet.

He stayed flat. She stayed flat. The ice was smooth enough to forgive the velocity, which was the first kind thing this volcano had done for them all day.

Serena turned her head toward him mid-drag, wind slicing past both of them, ice screaming beneath their bodies, and flashed him a smile.

It was the smile she wore when she was terrified and exhilarated in equal measure, the one that showed up on dragon backs and during freefall and in every situation where a normal person would be screaming. The smile that made him forget, every goddamn time, that what they were doing was insane.

Normally, he would have matched it. Would have grinned back, cracked a joke, leaned into the chaos the way they always leaned into chaos together. If the circumstances were a little less “being dragged across a frozen lake toward probable drowning,” he would have been smiling.

Just kidding. He was fucking smiling.

He was smiling while being dragged at terminal velocity toward imminent death on a sheet of ice over a black lake inside a volcanic crater, and the grin was entirely her fault, and the matebond was carrying her delight into his chest like a hit of something illegal, and he couldn’t have stopped grinning if his life depended on it.

Which it did. And he was still grinning.

“Stop making me smile, Frostborne!”

“Can we do this again in Drakenfell?” Serena called over the wind, her voice bright with the particular reckless playfulness that only Serena Frostborne could have in a situation like this.

She had already decided the answer was yes. The question was rhetorical. She would be doing this with or without him, and they both knew it, and the matebond confirmed it before the words finished leaving her mouth.

“Yes! On snow! With a sled! Like civilized people who value their spines!” He was shouting over the drag, the wind shredding his words as fast as he could form them. “We are currently using our BODIES as the sled, Serena! There are better systems!”

“Hold your breath, Gav,” she called, right as the rope dragged them over the center.