Four people in a sacred healing lake. Two of them mated to the same woman. One of them had just landed on her. The fourth was the woman, dazed and bleeding.

The awkwardness had its own gravitational field.

If the ancestors were watching, they were selling tickets.

None of them said a word.

Dex was holding her and pressed a kiss to her forehead.

She wanted to comfort him, she could feel his and Fin’s emotions through the dual matebond. It was odd how identical it was, yet she could tell the difference.

She shoved comfort into both of them without looking at either and went under the water.

Dex’s body was tense. He was livid at himself for not being more aggressive about her training. Trusting protocol over instinct. That stopped now. Even if she were a regular recruit, he wouldn’t have approved no magic. No other warrior was on storm dragons. Why would they not take all precaution?

The logic gap was so wide you could fly a dragon through it. Which someone had, and it had nearly killed two people.

She was going to get special treatment and he would be overseeing it all moving forward.

She came up a minute later, right when Hyran appeared.

"Serena. There you are. You are late, taking the most uncomfortable bath in Drakenfell history that I’m not going to ask about. We have—"

She went back under the water. It was the aquatic equivalent of leaving a room mid-sentence, and Fin respected it so deeply he almost smiled.

She surfaced like someone checking if the coast was clear. It was not.

It hurt to take a full breath, and there was no way she’d be able to do magic at the level they required.

"Hyran, unfortunately I am unable to train today. My apologies for not notifying you sooner."

She delivered it as formal notice, like she was cancelling an appointment she had never made.

Hyran gave her a flat, unimpressed look.

"Not training, Serena. Those scrolls. Aeron mentioned you shifted last night. That’s what we were waiting on."

A bomb detonated in the room. Serena shot Aeron a look of pure ’I can’t believe you.’

Next to her, Dex was very still. Silent. She could feel his hurt washing through their matebond and her wolf whimpered.

It came through clean. Just the raw, specific pain of a man who had wanted to be there for her first shift. The one she told first about never having shifted. The one whose wolf is her wolf’s true mate. And he not only wasn’t there, he was the last to know and was trying not to let it show in a room full of people who were already watching him.

She turned to him. "I’m sorry, Dex. I was going to tell you after training."

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

His jaw worked once around nothing.

She coughed, her ribs screaming. Blood. Red. Not gold.

She looked down at her hand surprised by that. Fin said something that didn’t register for a moment. She caught the tail end of it, when he said her name.

Fin repeated whatever that was, touching her arm. His voice was coming from far away.

She could feel his hand on her arm, could feel the pressure of his fingers, could feel the matebond delivering his anxiety in waves so dense they had texture.

He was terrified and trying to sound calm and failing at both, and she wanted to tell him she was fine but the word wouldn’t form because her lungs weren’t cooperating and her vision was narrowing.

Dex moved her hair, unzipping the back of her training suit fully. It didn’t register that he’d done that until Fin peeled it down her.

The lake always worked. But at the moment, it wasn’t. It was like it healed her barely then stopped.

The lake had never failed healing her. It was the one constant, the one thing in this world that had always put her back together no matter how broken she arrived. And at the moment, it was missing something.

Spots danced in her vision. The part of her that was still thinking understood with absolute clarity that she was about to pass out and that the men holding her were about to feel it through the matebond and there was nothing she could do to spare them from it.

She tilted forward. Dex caught her.

His arms locked around her before she finished falling. He pulled her into his chest and held her there, one hand behind her head, his mouth pressed against her temple, and through the matebond she felt the exact moment his composure gave out. It lasted one second.

The grief and the guilt and the fury hit her so hard her unconscious body flinched against him.

✦✦✦

Serena blinked once, twice, three times, and the blur sharpened into focus.

A stone ceiling. A familiar one. The infirmary in Drakenfell.

Her ribs were wrapped. Tight enough that she could feel the compression on every inhale, the kind of binding that meant fractures, possibly worse. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

She was out of her training suit entirely, dressed in silk shorts and a camisole that she did not remember putting on. The vulnerability of that settled over her like cold water.

Her shoulder was wrapped separately, the bandage layered in a figure-eight across her clavicle and around her upper arm with the precise, almost architectural technique of a healer who had done this thousands of times.

An I.V. line ran into the crook of her left arm. She followed it up to the bag and saw the dark, unmistakable color of blood flowing through the tube. A transfusion.

Ice packs sat heavy on her femur, the cold radiating through the silk into muscle that throbbed underneath like a second heartbeat.

She blinked again. This was new.

The door burst open.

Fin came through first, Dex behind him.

Alaric entered with Aeron a moment later.

"Both of them gave blood for you." Alaric gestured between Dex and Fin without looking at either.

Serena opened her mouth. Shut it. Those words hit somewhere behind her sternum and stayed there, pressing outward.

It took her a second to find her voice.

"Why did I need blood?"

"The lake heals, but your internal injuries were as severe as anything I’ve treated. The day after a painful shift I hear. Even you have limits, Serena. Physical limits you don’t seem to set for yourself."

The silence that followed had weight. Serena’s gaze moved from the I.V. line in her arm, the blood flowing through it, to Dex, then to Fin. Both of them had given blood for her. Both of them had sat in this room, or paced outside of it, bleeding into bags so that she could have what her body had lost.

She swallowed against a tightness in her throat that had nothing to do with injury.

"The lake started the repair, but it stalled halfway through, which is why Alaric and I intervened with traditional methods," Aeron added. "Fated mates means your blood is a perfect match. And you are damn lucky to have two because it took them both. And your blood is gold. So there are no backups."

Alaric spoke from the corner without looking up. "None of that is scientifically proven."

"It worked," Aeron said flatly. "She started healing. Her silver poisoning is already better too."

"Aeron made a medical decision with zero precedent, zero research, and the confidence of a man who has never read a liability waiver. I was present to document the inevitable catastrophe. The fact that it worked is an insult to the scientific method."

"I saved her life."

"Welcome to the club. Get in line."

Serena could feel Dex’s hurt layered underneath the tangle of his emotions.

Alaric cleared the room. Aeron followed. Fin hesitated at the door long enough that Serena felt his unease through their matebond, then he walked out.

"Dex."

He looked at her. The hurt was still there. Underneath it, something else. Something she had never seen on his face before.

Fear. That he was losing her. Not to danger. To distance.

"I wanted it to be with you. But I couldn’t control it. It happened last night and I was going to tell you today."

Her eyes filled. "I’m sorry."

He shook his head. Without a word, he got up and left.

"Dex. Wait-"

He didn’t look back.

Panic moved faster than pain. She tore the I.V. out of her arm and swung her legs off the bed, socks hitting the floor.

"Dex—"

He turned the corner without looking back.

She tried to follow him, but her knees buckled and she hit stone. The corridor was surprisingly empty, which was a mercy.

Aurelia: Give him space.

Serena: I don’t want to give him space.

She pushed herself up with her good arm, putting her back against the wall.

"Serena?"

She turned her head and saw Gav coming from the other direction. "Why are you on the ground? I leave for twenty minutes and you’re awake and on the literal ground."

Serena blinked, tears falling, looking away from him.

She didn’t realize he was still there until he sat down next to her.

"What happened?"