The strange thing about dying was how small the world got.

Then the instinct arrived, the one every living thing recognizes, where the body tells the soul that they are about to pass.

She wanted to tell him she was sorry for doing it here, in his arms, where he would have to feel it happen and carry the memory of it for the rest of his very long life.

Somewhere far away, her muscles were shaking from holding her own body weight, which for a wolf should’ve been nothing. A sword clattered on the ground and one of Maddox’s arms came up to support her.

Air rushed past them with the sensation of being heavier. Maddox must have made a large jump.

Then she heard wings.

"You can open them."

She couldn’t.

Reality shrank until there was nothing left but his heartbeat and her breathing and the narrowing distance between each exhale.

And her last conscious thought was if this was the last thing she heard, then at least the world had gotten that part right.

✦✦✦

"Gwen. Baby. Stay with me."

She didn’t respond.

Maddox’s arms tightened around her. His dragon was fully recharged, thrumming under his skin with a heat and a fury that had no outlet, and the only reason he was riding instead of flying was to hold her.

Maddox: Sterling. I ordered Ryker and our army to return home. You are supposed to be in Drakencrest.

Sterling: Good to see you too.

Maddox: How the fuck are you here?

Sterling: I flew, Commander.

Maddox: How did Kael get his hands on my wife?

Sterling: He picked her up and carried her.

Maddox snorted internally. Sterling was about as informative as expected.

Unbeknownst to Maddox, Sterling just had the most stressful fourteen hours of his entire dragon life.

He had calculated the odds of finding her alive at nine percent.

The fact that he had wound up in the right place, at the right time, made him thank gods he did not believe in.

✦✦✦

Guinevere hadn’t moved.

Maddox held her against his chest with one arm locked beneath her and the other braced across her back. His chin rested on top of her head. Her white hair whipped behind them in the wind, catching the sunset, and he could smell vanilla and snow.

At her scent, his dragon rumbled in his chest, wanting to pin her down mid-air and fuck the fever out of her. Maddox clenched his jaw so hard he tasted blood. Not now. Not like this.

Three minutes into the flight, her breathing had gone shallow, each exhale faint and warm against his collarbone, but the rest of her body had not loosened at all. Arms still locked around his neck, fingers threaded through the hair at his nape, legs cinched around his waist with a strength that should have faded when consciousness did but hadn’t.

The hold was pure instinct, maintained by a wolf who had decided that this man was where they lived and was not releasing him for anything.

Heat drained from her body into his at every point of contact, and the relief that came with it was so profound it carried through in waves he could feel in his own chest.

Sterling banked east. The treeline dropped away beneath them, replaced by open valley, the terrain falling in cascading ridges of snow and dark stone.

The air thinned, temperature dropping, and she audibly groaned in relief. The sound was so obscene it had no business coming out of an unconscious woman. Two of Sterling’s scales rippled. Maddox’s hand went to her hair, pressing her face harder into his neck, as if burying the sound at the source would stop his body from responding to it. It did not.

Ten minutes passed in silence. Fifteen. The only sounds were Sterling’s wingbeats and the wind and the faint rhythm of her breathing against his throat.

Maddox’s dragon bristled under his skin. He turned his head.

Behind them, rising from the direction of Cinderfall Keep, a line of shadows cut across sunset. Wings. Dozens of them. The formation was tight, disciplined, moving at pursuit speed, and the distance between their position and Sterling’s tail was closing rapidly.

Maddox: We have company. Forty in the first wave.

Sterling was fast, but forty dragons in pursuit formation could run rotations, fresh wings replacing tired ones, and a black dragon carrying two passengers could only outrun that math for so long.

Sterling: Formation?

Maddox: V-pattern. Kael is at the lead. And he brought friends.

Maddox narrowed his eyes against the wind. The shapes on the dragons were wrong. Standard dragon riders sat low, hugging the neck, distributing weight for aerodynamics. These figures sat upright. Stiff. The air around their silhouettes was blurry, displaced not by wind but by something artificial.

Maddox: Dark fae are riding on dragons. I have never seen this configuration.

Sterling: Since when does Kael have Fae?

Fae on dragonback. Armed, trained, and augmenting dragon fire with something that smelled like burnt ozone and old blood. This was not a skirmish Kael had thrown together. This was a configuration that took months to develop, which meant Kael had been planning this war long before he walked into that throne room in chains and smiled.

Maddox: Apparently a while.

The first column of fire came from the lead dragon, passing thirty feet to their right, close enough that the displaced air rocked Maddox sideways and his arm cinched tighter around Guinevere.

"If you sleep through this too, Gwen, I am going to take it personally."

She made a sound against his neck, still unconscious. He pressed his lips to her temple.

Sterling dove. Maddox went light on his back, gravity pulling wrong, as the wind roared past them. He leveled out ten feet above the canopy, using the trees as visual cover.

A second column hit the forest behind them. Fire blossomed across the snow in a molten orange apocalypse, hissing on contact.

He crushed Guinevere tighter against his chest, her training suit rasping against his leathers as his painfully swollen shaft throbbed viciously between them.

His dragon roared in frustration, surging so hard behind his ribs that his fangs dropped before he could stop them.

Full extension. Involuntary. The same fangs that had saved her life now descending for an entirely different reason.

He tasted blood from biting his own tongue, cock leaking hot and useless into his pants as the dragon inside him demanded he breed his mate right there while the world burned behind them.

"Fuck..."

He’d never fought his dragon this hard, and his body shook with the effort to remain in control. When she made another sound against his neck, that was the thing that broke him.

"Gwen..."

His fangs sank into the mating mark on her neck before he realized what was happening.

The moment her skin broke under his teeth, his hips jerked forward hard. Once. Twice. A third savage thrust. He dry-humped her like an animal on top of his third-in-command while black fire streaked past them and trees detonated below.

There was no stopping it.

His dragon snarled in his mind.

Not enough. Never enough. Mine. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

His cock pulsed violently against her and he came with a groan he stifled. Thick, hot ropes of cum flooded his leathers in heavy, uncontrollable spurts. Each pulse harder than the last.

Sterling was either too distracted by the incoming fire or had the intelligence not to say a single fucking word.

He stayed buried in her neck, chest heaving. His cock kept twitching, still painfully hard, still furious that it wasn’t inside of her.

Dragons only marked once. The instinct goes away after one time. That was a biological fact. And he’d just marked his mate for the second time in two weeks. His fevered, unconscious mate who was not in great shape at the moment.

But the relief flooding through their matebond told him all he needed to know. The literature could go to hell. Whatever he had just pumped into her was pulling the fever down in real time. And even if he had wanted to stop, he couldn’t have.

He let go of her neck, fangs retracting back in his mouth, then glanced down at her.

"Gwen... baby... "

Maddox: They are gaining. The fae are augmenting their range.

Sterling: How much time do we have, Commander?

Maddox: At this trajectory, four minutes before they close to striking distance. Three if the fae accelerate the volley rotation.

Three minutes.

He made a decision.

Maddox: I am putting her on your back.

Sterling: Understood.

Maddox: Don’t let anything happen to her, Sterling.

Sterling: On my life, Commander.

The irony didn’t escape Sterling in that moment. That was a tomorrow problem.

Maddox: If anything happens to her, I will personally dismantle you scale by scale regardless of whose fault it is.

Sterling: Noted with the appropriate level of concern.

Maddox shifted Guinevere’s weight. Every muscle in his body resisted the motion. His dragon thrashed again inside his ribs, the instinct to keep her against his chest was so loud it nearly overrode the tactical calculation.

Teeth gritted, he peeled her arms from around his neck. The tiny whimper that escaped her when he did went straight to his cock.

"I’m sorry, baby. I am going to be right next to you."

He laid her down on her stomach on Sterling’s back. Sterling felt the heat immediately and was about to say something, but then it dawned on him that he was the reason why she was boiling so he kept the mindlink quiet. Smart man.

Maddox stood, wind hitting him full force, ripping through his hair, pressing against his chest. Behind them, the pursuit had closed to half a mile.

Columns of fire, black, red, and green, streaked through the sky in staggered volleys.

Maddox lifted his palms and let the flame come.

Gold. Pure Drakencrest flame. It erupted from both hands and crossed the distance between Sterling and the nearest column of incoming fire, intercepting the black flame at the midpoint. The collision detonated in the air, a shockwave of heat and light that scattered the volley and lit the sky gold for two full seconds.

Another column came from the left. A red dragon, its rider standing upright, hands extended, the air around him vibrating. Maddox pivoted, his flame colliding with theirs.

Sterling was throwing his own fire from his jaws.

Two pursuing dragons broke formation to avoid his volleys. A third took a glancing hit and dropped altitude, smoke trailing from its left wing.

The Fae retaliated. Three of them, standing on the back of a brown dragon, raised their hands in unison. The air between the shimmered, and something that was neither fire nor magic launched toward Sterling in a spiral.

Maddox intercepted it. The impact drove him back two steps on Sterling’s spine. The force of it vibrated through his arms and into his shoulders and he absorbed it because the alternative was letting it reach Guinevere.

Maddox: Sterling. I need space.

Sterling: Copy, Commander.

Maddox stepped off Sterling’s back.

The air caught him for thirty feet before gold light exploded outward from his chest in a burst that turned the sky white. The dragon that unfolded was massive, bigger than all the other dragons there. His roar split the sky in half.

Draconic command.

The roar carried authority. A specific, bone-deep frequency of a High Dragon King, hitting every dragon in range with the biological imperative to submit.

Maddox: STAND DOWN.