Chapter 602 The Dead King Is Fucking Pissed
Gavriel laid her down on the infirmary bed with the care of a man placing something fragile on a shelf.
Serena was off it in two seconds.
“I’m soaking wet.” She was already standing, water pooling on the stone floor around her boots, the bed linens darkened in a Serena-shaped silhouette. “Oh shoot.”
“Serena.” Gavriel looked at the bed. Looked at her. Looked at the bed again. “It’s a sheet. It’s a sheet on a mattress. In an infirmary. Where people come to bleed. You think a little lake water is what’s going to ruin the ambiance?”
She didn’t sit back down.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “You just made me carry you through a portal like a drowned cat and your concern is the thread count. I want you to hear that out loud.”
Alaric walked in. His eyes swept Serena head to toe in under a second, the clinical intake of a man whose brain sorted patients by severity the way other people sorted laundry.
“Can you check on Charlie first?” Serena said before he could open his mouth. “Or can we do this in his room? I want to be there when—”
“The Draken Prime comes first, Natalia.”
Dexmon’s voice. The dragon king’s tone. Calm. Final. The verbal equivalent of a door being closed and locked from the inside.
Serena turned to look at him. The golden eyes stared back at her with the patient, immovable authority of a man who had given this exact instruction before and had no intention of giving it differently now.
She’d heard it once. On Velkaris’s back, at sunrise, somewhere above the clouds. One time.
But he said it like they’d had this argument a thousand times. Like this was a well-worn groove in a conversation that had been playing on repeat across lifetimes, the part where she tried to put someone else first and he redirected her with the same four words and the same ancient, unblinking certainty that the Draken Prime’s health was not a negotiation.
“I’m fine,” she insisted.
The dragon king did not respond. His expression communicated very clearly that he was not fucking around.
Alaric worked in silence while three men watched him.
Two of them weren’t the men they appeared to be. Dexmon and Fin watched with identical golden eyes.
Gavriel stood between them. His eyes were his own. His opinions were his own. And he was keeping every single one of them behind his teeth, but Serena could feel them bleeding through, a low, steady hum of protective fury and worry and something territorial that he was leashing with visible effort.
She could feel all of it. She wished she couldn’t.
Alaric’s hands moved across her ribs, clinical, efficient, his expression giving nothing. Then he stopped.
“Who is the man?”
Serena blinked. Alaric didn’t ask personal questions. Alaric asked medical questions. What hurts, where does it hurt, how long has it hurt, and stop lying about how much it hurts. The backstory of someone was outside his usual diagnostic territory.
“When Elara and I were in Viremont,” she said, “he was with us. He saved my life.”
Alaric’s eyes stayed on her. He studied her for a moment, then asked, “How did he save your life?” He paused, then added: “And knowing you, it was probably more than one time.”
She almost smiled. The sarcasm was so perfectly Alaric that it loosened something in her chest she hadn’t realized was clenched. The almost-smile lasted about half a second before the memory killed it.
“When slaves get forty lashes, they’re left out on the street to die.” Her voice was flat. Factual. Her filter was gone, burned through somewhere between the crying and the bleeding and the lake, and what was left was truth with no packaging. “He risked his life to come get me so I didn’t die that day.”
She swallowed.
“And during my year in silver, he would help Elara sneak food to me. Otherwise I would have died then too.” She looked at her hands. “And when Elara and I finally made a run for it, he created a distraction so we could get away.”
The room changed.
It didn’t change loudly. It changed the way air pressure changes before a storm, a silent, molecular shift that turned the space between four walls into something volatile.
Alaric nodded. Slow. Measured. The nod of a man who had asked a question he already suspected the answer to and was filing the confirmation somewhere clinical where it couldn’t touch him.
But when Serena glanced up, the room wasn’t clinical anymore.
Dexmon’s eyes were blazing. The gold had gone from steady to solar, burning so bright the shadows on his side of the room had been erased entirely. His jaw was set in a line that didn’t belong to the dragon king or to Dexmon but to something older and angrier than both.
Fin’s fists were clenched at his sides. His knuckles had gone white and the golden eyes behind them had shifted from ancient calm to ancient fury, the kind that belonged in war rooms and on battlefields, the kind that preceded sieges.
All the humor had drained out of Gavriel’s face. Every trace of warmth, every flicker of the easy, gentle man who had carried her through a portal and joked about thread counts. Gone.
All three of them were looking at her like pissed-off wolves two seconds away from attacking.
Her hand flew to her mouth. The hostility in the room had shifted from background radiation to a physical force, and the jolt of it hit her nervous system before her brain could intervene. She took a step back, away from Alaric, eyes wide.
Alaric froze. Then followed her line of sight. Looked at Dexmon. Looked at Fin. Looked at Gavriel. Looked at the ceiling like it might offer professional guidance. It did not.
“For fuck’s sake.” He pulled his flask from his coat and took a long, deliberate swig. “Dexmon and Gavriel, you already knew about the lashes and the year in silver. This is not new information. Manage your faces before you give my patient a cardiac event on top of everything else.”
Neither of them managed their faces.
Dexmon stepped forward. When he spoke, the voice that came out was ancient and volcanic and vibrating with a fury that had been aging in a chest that didn’t belong to this century.
“Who touched her.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a door opening onto something very old and very violent.
“Answer me. Who dared lay hands on her.”