Chapter 598 When The Draken Prime Goes Missing
The six dragons folded into formation around Velkaris like an escort falling into step.
No riders. Six wild dragons flanking a seventh like a military detail that had been summoned by something older than orders. Two on each side, one above, one below, their wingbeats synchronized with Velkaris’s in a rhythm that looked choreographed but felt instinctual.
Velkaris grumbled at them.
It wasn’t the polite kind. Serena could feel his irritation bleeding through their connection like heat through thin glass, a low, simmering annoyance that said he hadn’t asked for company and he wasn’t grateful for it. One of the flanking dragons, a deep bronze, drifted closer, and Velkaris snapped something at it that made the bronze pull back two wingspans immediately.
Whatever they were saying to him, he didn’t like it. Whatever he was saying back, he liked even less.
Her eyes closed.
She didn’t let go of Charlie. Her arms had locked into position somewhere over Viremont and the muscles had seized there, frozen into a grip that her body was maintaining on principle because her brain had left the building. Charlie’s heartbeat was still there, faint and stubborn against her forearm, and she counted it the way a drowning person counts breaths: one at a time, each one a small miracle she refused to take for granted.
She wasn’t sure how much time passed.
Minutes. Hours. The dark behind her eyelids shifted from black to gray to a warm amber that pressed against her closed lids like a hand on a door. She opened her eyes and the sun was bleeding over the horizon, spilling gold across the clouds beneath them, turning the six dragons around her into burnished silhouettes edged in fire.
She was still here. Charlie was still breathing. Both of those things felt like accidents she’d gotten away with.
Then she saw more dragons ahead.
A cluster of them, hovering at the edge of the sunrise like a wall built out of wings and scales. The six around her tightened formation. Velkaris didn’t slow down.
The cluster moved.
She wasn’t ready for it.
They split and dove with a speed that made the escort dragons look lazy, peeling apart and converging on Velkaris from three directions simultaneously, and before her blood-drowned eye could track what was happening, something landed on Velkaris’s back behind her with the graceless thud of a man who had jumped from one dragon to another without waiting for an invitation.
Dexmon.
She knew before she turned around. She knew because Velkaris’s grumbling shifted from annoyed-at-strangers to annoyed-at-family, the specific, long-suffering vibration of a dragon whose bonded rider had been screaming at him through their connection for the last several hours and had finally gotten close enough to do it in person.
Velkaris huffed. The huff translated roughly to: I heard you the first four hundred times.
Serena blinked. Once. Twice. Three times, trying to clear the red from her left eye, trying to make the shape behind her resolve into something her broken vision could confirm.
Dexmon’s arms came around her and pulled her back against his chest. The contact was immediate, solid, warm in a way that had nothing to do with Velkaris’s heat. His heart was hammering against her spine. His breathing wasn’t steady. Nothing about him was steady, but his hands were sure when they settled on her, one across her collarbone, one braced against her ribs like he was holding her skeleton together through the skin.
His eyes dropped to the man in her arms.
His jaw worked. She could feel it, the muscle flexing against the top of her head where his chin rested, the grind of teeth against teeth as he processed the skeletal stranger his mate was clutching like a lifeline at sunrise.
“Dex, he saved my life. I—”
She didn’t finish.
Gold flooded into her so fast the word dissolved in her throat. Her gasp was involuntary, a full-body inhale that arched her spine, because this wasn’t healing the way Alaric did it, clinical and measured. This was a river breaking its banks. Gold magic poured through her and into Charlie by extension, a warm, liquid current that found every broken thing and wrapped around it like it had been doing this for thousands of years.
Serena’s eyes snapped to Dexmon’s face.
His eyes were gold. But it was the wrong gold. It wasn’t the amber flash of his wolf pushing forward, wasn’t the wolf-bright flare she’d seen a hundred times when his temper ran hot. This was deeper. Older. A gold that looked like it had been poured from the same furnace that made Velkaris’s scales, ancient and certain and completely, unsettlingly calm in a face that was never calm.
The magic kept flowing. It moved through her body like it was reading a map it had memorized, finding the burst vessel in her eye, the shredded muscles along her ribs, the places where she’d overdrawn her reserves and left the walls of herself tissue-thin. Then it moved through her arms and into Charlie, finding the damage there too, and it didn’t hesitate, didn’t falter, didn’t ask permission. It just knew.
Against her forearm, Charlie’s heartbeat found a rhythm it had been missing for hours. The flutter steadied into a pulse. Still weak. Still too slow. But present in a way that had stopped being a question and started being a commitment.
When Dexmon spoke, it wasn’t his voice.
The cadence was wrong. The depth was wrong. The words came out of his mouth the way light comes through a stained glass window, filtered through something that changed their color before they reached the air.
“You hurt yourself, Natalia.”
The name landed like a stone dropped into still water.
Serena stopped breathing.
She looked up at him through the red still flooding her left eye. His magic was moving through her like warm water filling a cracked vessel, patient and deliberate, and the voice that had come out of his mouth was one she didn’t recognize with her ears but knew somewhere deeper. Somewhere in the marrow. Somewhere in the part of her that existed before she had a name for it.
His lips pressed against the top of her head. The gesture was tender in a way Dexmon wasn’t. Gentle in a way that belonged to someone who had a lifetime of practice at it.
She blinked and forced herself to look around.
Fourteen dragons. She counted twice to make sure her one functioning eye wasn’t doubling them. Fourteen. The original six from the escort were still in formation, wingbeats steady. Eight more had joined, and six of those carried riders and spotters, military pairs strapped in and scanning the sky with the disciplined alertness of soldiers on a search detail.
That was surprising. Surprising enough to cut through the fog in her skull. Six riders meant this wasn’t a rescue. This was a response. The kind with ranks and chain of command and someone very high up giving orders.
The voice behind her spoke again. Still Dexmon’s mouth. Still not Dexmon’s voice.
“When the Draken Prime goes missing, this is protocol.”