Her gasp woke him.

Kael’s eyes opened to a woman with her hand clamped over her mouth, her body rigid against his.

"Good mor—"

She launched off him, her back hitting the opposite wall of the cave, arms wrapped around herself. She glanced down. Undergarments. Then she looked back at him. Briefs gone, everything visible.

Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened. No sound came out.

Then the tears started.

They came fast and silent, the kind that didn’t ask permission, spilling down both cheeks in lines that caught the dim light from the cave mouth. Her hand stayed over her mouth. Her shoulders shook. Her breathing fractured into short, shallow pulls that weren’t getting oxygen anywhere useful.

Kael sat up. He had managed wars, rebellions, a fae mutiny, and one memorable assassination attempt involving a poisoned harp. He had never managed a crying woman.

"Okay. That’s... happening." He pushed himself to sitting. "Let me—"

A sob broke through her hand. Loud. Raw. The sound of a heart breaking in real time.

"—explain. I was going to say explain. Can you—"

She crumpled and her forehead dropped to her knees. The sobs came harder, each one shaking her frame, her white hair falling around her in a curtain that hid everything except the sound.

"Right. So. This looks significantly worse than it is. I need you to understand that before—"

Her crying intensified. Every word he said was making it worse, which was a new experience for a man whose words had historically been his most reliable weapon.

He tried silence. That was also bad. The silence let her fill the cave with the kind of grief that made the stone walls feel too close.

"I have talked my way out of a treason hearing, two coups, and a very aggressive customs inspection in the southern reach. This should be within my range." He paused. "It is apparently outside of my range."

She lifted her head. Her face was red, wet, destroyed.

"What am I going to tell Maddox?"

The words came out broken. Fractured across hiccups and sobs and the specific kind of panic that lived in the chest of a woman who had woken up half naked beside a man who was not her mate and had arrived at the worst conclusion available.

Her breathing went from bad to worse. Shallow, rapid, her chest rising and falling in a rhythm that was headed toward hyperventilation with the momentum of a body that had already decided to panic and was committed to the decision.

"Nothing happened."

She couldn’t hear him. The panic had her. Her hands were shaking against her knees, her fingers white where they gripped, and each inhale was shorter than the last.

"Listen to me. You jumped through a fae portal. It opened into open sky over a mountain range I have never seen in my life. You were in freefall at fifteen hundred feet. I shifted, dove after you, and caught you in my claws."

He waited. She was still hyperventilating, but her eyes had found his face.

"Your fever was killing you. The gold flame inside you was eating you alive because the body that should have been absorbing the heat was five hundred miles away fighting a war I started. The only reason you are breathing this morning is because I pulled that fever into my own body through skin contact. That’s it. That is the entire story."

Her mouth opened. Closed. Her breathing was still too fast, still too shallow, but the rhythm had shifted by a fraction.

"I swear on my dragon that I did not touch you. You are a wolf, so you might not understand the significance of that oath. I will tell you: a dragon shifter who swears on his dragon is not lying." His iron eyes held hers without blinking.

She stared at him, tears still falling and chest still heaving.

He reached for his briefs. Found them wadded against the cave wall where he had kicked them in the night. He pulled them on without ceremony, then picked up the remains of her fire suit and tossed it to her.

It landed in her lap. She grabbed it with both hands and pulled it on so fast she nearly tore what was left of the seams. Her fingers fumbled with the zipper three times before it caught. Her entire body was shaking, the tremor running from her hands through her arms and into her shoulders.

He stayed on his side of the cave, giving her every inch of distance the stone allowed.

"Is Maddox the only person you’ve been with?"

A hiccup. Her face crumpled. She didn’t answer, but the answer was written across her expression in a font large enough to read from orbit.

He exhaled. Something in his chest shifted, and it was the thing he had been ignoring since the mountain.

He moved to her slowly, then dropped to one knee in front of her. His iron eyes were level with her green ones.

"Wolf girl. I need you to calm down. You still have a fever. If your temperature spikes again while we are on a mountain with no shelter and no backup, I will have to do this again, and neither of us wants that."

She swallowed. A hiccup broke through. Then another.

He waited until her breathing had three consecutive inhales that reached her lungs.

"Maddox is my half brother. The flame you carry is the Drakencrest family flame. That is why my body absorbs the heat from yours. The fire recognizes my blood the same way it recognizes his."

Her brow furrowed. Confusion cut through the tears, a crack in the grief that let something else in. Maddox had never told her that. She could feel the truth of it sitting in her chest beside the flame, in the way Kael’s skin had pulled the burning out of her the same way Maddox’s did.

"What is your name?"

She didn’t answer. Her eyes dropped to the cave floor between them.

"I just told you a secret." He tilted his head. "And you cannot tell me your name."

There was a moment of silence with a hiccup.

"Guinevere." Her voice was hoarse. Scraped raw from sobbing and screaming and the residual damage of a fever that had burned her throat from the inside.

"Guinevere." He repeated it the way a man tastes a wine he wasn’t expecting to like. "I gather you are my brother’s mistress at this point. The evidence is obvious. A virgin before him. Am I right?"

She didn’t answer. Her jaw tightened, and the tears came fresh, sliding down cheeks that were already streaked.

He reached forward. One finger. He caught a tear at the edge of her jaw, wiping it away with a touch so light it barely registered on her skin.

She flinched. Hard. Her head pulled back and hit the cave wall.

He withdrew his hand, and placed it on his own knee.

"My dragon will not let me hurt you, Guinevere. But I also don’t want to." He paused, a pained expression flashing across his face before he caught it. "Don’t cry. Fuck."

Her face was back in her hands. The sobs were quieter now, exhausted, the body running out of fuel for the grief but continuing anyway because the grief didn’t care about fuel.

He sat back on his heels. He looked at the cave ceiling, then at the snow piled at the entrance, then at the woman falling apart three feet from him, and the expression on his face was the expression of a man realizing that every plan he had made for this woman had been built on the assumption that she was a piece on a board, and pieces on boards did not cry in caves with their faces in their hands while their bodies shook from a fever and a broken heart.

"I’ll take you back to Maddox."

Her hands lowered an inch. Green eyes, swollen and red, found his through the gap in her fingers.

"Have you ever ridden a dragon while conscious, Guinevere?"

She nodded. The motion was small. A single dip of her chin that cost her visible effort.

"Good. Then you know the drill. Hold on. Don’t let go. Try to refrain from jumping through any portals on the way."

He stood. Walked to the cave mouth. Looked out at the mountain range stretching in every direction, white and grey and nameless.

He looked back at her. The woman his dragon had called mate. The woman whose fever he had pulled from her body while biting through his own hand to keep from marking her. The woman he was about to return to the man he had sworn to destroy.

His strategist brain filed another formal objection.

"Shut up," he said to the part of his brain that was already calculating the cost of what he was about to do, and finding the number unacceptable.

He shifted.

The black dragon filled the ledge, wings tucked, iron eyes looking down at the woman in the cave with a patience that did not belong to the creature and did not come from the man.

She stood. Her legs shook. She walked to the cave mouth on boots that wanted to buckle with every step, and looked up at the black dragon whose rider had choked her, kidnapped her, held a blade to her throat, carried her through a cave full of monsters, and pulled a killing fever from her body with his bare skin.

Her hand pressed against his scales.

Gold light flowed into him. Warm. Willing. The flame recognizing the blood beneath the black, finding the Drakencrest signature in his marrow, settling into his body the way it settled into Maddox’s.

A sound came from the dragon. The rumble of an animal receiving something it had been starving for, from the only source that could provide it.

She jumped onto his back. Her fingers gripped the ridge of scale at the base of his neck, and her body pressed flat against his spine, and the heat that transferred between them was steady, manageable, a controlled exchange that kept her fever in check and kept his dragon quiet.

Kael spread his wings. The ledge crumbled beneath his weight as he launched, and the mountain dropped away beneath them, and the sky opened in every direction.

He flew east toward Drakencrest to the man he was returning her to because his dragon had said mate and his hand said I stopped myself and the woman on his back had said what am I going to tell Maddox with a voice so broken it made him feel something he had spent fifteen years learning to kill.