Chapter 231: She’s Already Pissed. Fuck It.

Dex had done a lot of stupid things in his life. Cocky, reckless things that made his advisors reach for alcohol.

Jumping off a cliff with a woman who was already mad at him was a new one.

As soon as Velkaris landed, he jumped off his back, still carrying her.

Drakenvault Falls. The last time he brought her here, she followed him off a cliff. The odds of her following him this time were zero.

What he was getting through the matebond right now could best be described as a door slamming in every room of a very large house, simultaneously.

Aegon: You know, most males bring flowers.

Dex: She doesn’t like flowers.

Aegon: Yes she does, Dexmon. Every woman likes those.

So he did what any reasonable, self-respecting Alpha would do. He sprinted off the cliff with her in his arms without any warning.

Air screamed past them. Her white hair whipped upward, catching the light in a blaze of gold as they fell, and her body went rigid against his for the first three seconds before instinct took over and her muscles unlocked and she let the fall happen.

She didn’t scream.

Which was more terrifying than if she had. She was too tired to perform fear. Too drained to do anything except let gravity have her and trust that whatever waited at the bottom was survivable because Dex was holding her and Dex had never once let her hit the ground.

Aegon: Mate is not reacting.

Dex: I’m aware.

Aegon: Just confirming you’re aware. You seem to miss obvious things lately.

The water swallowed them.

Cold. Immediate. Total. The impact tore his arm from her waist and the current seized her thin frame and dragged her sideways.

Gold bled from her skin the second the water hit, spreading outward in threads that caught the swirl and pulled downstream.

She let the force take her, not fighting it, until it let up. Then she kicked hard, breaking the surface a moment later.

Dex surfaced beside her. Water streamed down his face, plastering dark hair to his forehead, and he watched her tread water with her jaw set and her green eyes locked on anything that was not him.

"Hold onto me."

She didn’t move.

He tried again. "Please."

The "please" bought him exactly one degree of eye movement. Progress.

Her jaw tightened. Then, with the reluctance of a woman signing a treaty she disagreed with, she wrapped her arms around his neck from behind and locked her hands.

Aegon: Say please again.

Dex: I said it once. That’s my annual limit.

He swam.

The falls roared ahead of them, a wall of white water crashing into the basin with a force that turned the surface into churning chaos. Steam billowed off the impact zone, thick enough to erase the world beyond it.

Dex dove under.

The current hit them like a fist. The force of the falls drove water downward in sheets, and the undertow grabbed at their bodies from every direction, ripping her from him.

One second she was there. The next, his back was cold where her body had been, and the water had her, pulling her into the churn. For two full seconds he reached blind into the dark, his fingers closing on empty current twice before he found her.

Every nerve in his body fired the same signal: find her, find her, find her

Finally, his hand closed around her wrist, then her forearm, then he hauled her against his chest. She wrapped her arms around him and for two seconds it was just the two of them under water with the falls hammering above and the current trying to tear them apart and neither of them letting go.

He swam. Fast. Faster than he had any right to be in water this violent, his legs driving them forward with a power that reminded her, against her will, of another Alpha she knew who moved through water the same way. She wondered, briefly, if it was an Alpha trait or if Dex and Fin just happened to share the same terrifying competence in everything physical and had more in common than either of them would ever willingly admit.

She shoved the thought out before it could settle.

They broke the surface on the other side of the falls.

Air. Silence. The roar of the waterfall muffled behind them, reduced to a low, constant hum that vibrated through the rock.

A cave.

Serena blinked the water from her eyes and looked up.

Crystals embedded in the stone walls caught whatever light filtered through the falls and multiplied it, casting the cave in a soft, shifting glow that turned the water turquoise and the stone silver. The light moved when the water moved, rippling across the ceiling in patterns that looked alive.

And on the ceiling, constellations.

They were carved into the rock, ancient and precise, filled with some mineral that held light the way glass held color. The stars glowed faintly, arranged in formations she recognized from Drakenfell’s oldest maps, the kind Hyran kept locked in cases because the parchment was too fragile to breathe on.

For a moment, she forgot how to breathe. The cave was making it very difficult to stay committed to her anger.

He pulled her to shore. Soft moss covered the ledge where the water met the rock, thick and dark green.

She sat with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, wet hair clinging to her shoulders.

Dex sat beside her, close enough that their arms almost touched, but he held off.

Aegon: Say something.

Dex: I’m building to it.

Aegon: Build faster. She’s getting colder and angrier.

When he spoke, his voice was low. Stripped.

"Only one other person knows about this. My father. So you’d be the third."

She swallowed, but didn’t say anything. It was a really beautiful cave and if she wasn’t upset, she’d have appreciated it more.

"Serena, I need you to believe me. I was asleep. That woman picked my lock, entered my room, and tried to mark me while I was unconscious. She made cat noises."

She turned her head to look at him, her left eyebrow lifting by exactly one millimeter. It was the most reaction he’d gotten in hours, and it was devastating.

"She crawled into my bed wearing your mother’s necklace and nothing else. I woke up because she was touching me, and by the time I was coherent enough to understand what was happening, you were already in the doorway."

He paused. He could see her processing "naked" and "mother’s necklace" in the same sentence and arriving at a level of disgust that was almost architectural in its complexity.

"I never would do that to you, baby."

Aegon: Keep going.

"I know why you’re upset. It reminded you of what you saw with Agnes. Walking in on that. The feeling of it. The way it looked."

Her throat constricted so fast she couldn’t swallow. He’d named the thing that she had shoved down and buried. But it was never gone. It was sitting in her chest, perfectly preserved, waiting for someone to say the words and set it loose.

His voice roughened at the edges.

"I see what that did to you. Every time. It wrecked you the first time and I swore it would never happen again and then you walked into my room and saw exactly the same thing and I felt it through our matebond, Serena. Every second of it."

Her chin trembled. A single, involuntary fracture in the composure she had been holding together with both hands since the courtyard.

Hot tears fell from her eyes onto her knees fast, the kind she couldn’t stop.

"There is no version of my life where I choose anything over you. You’re it for me."

Then she did something Dex had only seen her do one other time before. She started full-on crying. Shoulder shaking, face buried in her hands. It was part relief, part sadness.

"Baby... Don’t cry.... Gods."

He caught her face in both hands, thumbs tracking the tears, and pressed his mouth to her forehead like he could absorb it through contact alone.

He’d fought wolves twice his size. He’d stood down his father in a war council. He’d flown into enemy territory on a dragon. None of those things made him feel as completely, catastrophically helpless as this woman crying.

"I was in Shadowclaw to tell you that I am sorry. I tried to find you, but you’d left."

Aegon: Do something.

Dex: What do you want me to do?

Aegon: I don’t know. You’re the one with hands. Use them.

"You have nothing to apologize for," she whispered, hiccuping. "I understand."

Her words were a bucket of ice water straight to the balls.

"No. You made a mistake, and told me. I handled it like a jackass. I shouldn’t have told you to leave." His voice came out smaller than he intended.

Aegon: Did you just call yourself a jackass?

Dex: Shut up.

Aegon: I’ve been calling you a jackass for years. Nice to see you’ve come around.

He pulled her on top of him, in his lap, and gently pressed his lips to the scratches on her neck.

"Do you believe me, Serena?"