Then the memory slowed, and Dexmon’s stomach dropped.

A temple. Ancient stone. Columns cracked and groaning under the weight of a ceiling that was losing its argument with gravity. Dust fell in curtains. The floor shook.

Dexmon watched himself kneel.

Ronan was on the ground.

His body was convulsing, spine arching off the stone, his limbs jerking in patterns that were too rhythmic to be random and too violent to be survivable. His eyes were open, and something was happening to them. The whites were darkening, black spreading inward from the edges like ink dropped in water, consuming color in slow, deliberate increments.

"Why did you do that?" Asher’s voice was raw, broken, the voice of a man watching his brother die and unable to understand the arithmetic that had led them here. "Why the fuck did you do that, Ronan?"

Ronan had taken something meant for Asher. The specifics blurred, the memory protecting itself from its own sharpest edges, but the equation was clear: Asher should be on the floor. Ronan had intervened. Ronan had always intervened. Since they were boys, Ronan Goldenvein had been placing himself between Asher Valerion and every threat the world could invent.

This time, the threat won.

Ronan convulsed again. His hand shot out and caught Asher’s wrist with a grip that was already weakening.

"Natalia," he managed through clenched teeth. "She needs to break it. Or it will infect her through the matebond."

"No." Asher shook his head. "We’re getting you out of here. We’ll find, there’s always—"

"ASH." Ronan’s voice cut through the rambling with a clarity that shouldn’t have been possible for a man whose eyes were turning black. "Look at me."

Asher looked. The black had consumed half of Ronan’s irises. Dark veins were creeping along his neck, spreading outward from his chest, branching and multiplying under his skin like roots of a tree growing in the wrong direction.

"Tell her to break it. Now. Before it reaches her."

Running footsteps. A sound that shattered the air, half-scream, half-sob.

Natalia rounded the corner and collapsed to her knees on Ronan’s other side. Her hands found his face immediately, cupping his jaw, her fingers trembling against skin that was already changing color.

"No." Her voice was barely a whisper. "No, no, no."

"Natalia." Ronan’s hand found hers. "You need to—"

"I am going to fix this." Tears poured down her face, and her voice cracked on every word but refused to break entirely. "We are going to get you out of this temple and find a healer and figure out a cure, because you are going to be a father, Ronan."

The temple groaned. A column behind them split with a sound like a bone breaking.

Ronan went still.

His convulsions stopped for exactly three seconds. His black-veined hand tightened on hers, and he looked at her, really looked at her, and the expression on his face, the one that surfaced through the darkness eating him alive, was the same expression he’d worn in a courtyard when she talked about a book, the same softness, the same devastating tenderness that had survived the loss of two sets of parents, a kingdom, a first mate, and everything else the world had thrown at him.

"A father," he repeated.

"Yes." She was sobbing. "Your son is going to need his dad. So you are going to fight this."

A tear slid from Ronan’s eye. The eye that was still partially his. It traced a path through the dark veins on his cheek and fell to the stone floor.

He smiled.

Then he convulsed again, harder than before, his entire body arching off the stone. His teeth clenched so tight Dexmon heard enamel crack. The black veins spread faster, racing down his arms, branching across his hands, consuming the fingers that were still wrapped around Natalia’s.

"Please," Ronan gasped. His voice was layered now, a second tone bleeding through underneath, something that didn’t belong to him. "Please, Natalia. I don’t want my son touched by this. Or you."

His eyes locked onto hers, and the desperation in them was total.

"Break it. Break it now, before I can’t ask anymore."

Natalia’s face twisted. A sound came from her that Asher had never heard, would never forget, and hoped to never hear again. The sound of a woman being asked to choose between the man she loved and the child she was carrying, and finding that the answer, the terrible, obvious, unforgivable answer, was already decided.

"I, Natalia Moonveil, reject you, Ronan Goldenvein, as my fated mate."

The matebond severed.

Ronan screamed. The sound filled the temple, bouncing off crumbling walls, and then Natalia collapsed forward onto his chest, unconscious, her body going limp like a marionette whose strings had been cut all at once.

The whites of Ronan’s eyes were gone. Black, edge to edge. His body seized one final time, his spine lifting off the stone in an arc that looked mechanical, inhuman, wrong.

Outside the temple, sounds that did not belong to any creature Dexmon recognized. Wet, guttural noises. Scraping. The particular horror of movement that operates on joints bent the wrong direction.

Dexmon turned his head toward the temple entrance. Through the dust and collapsing stone, he saw a figure crawling backward on all fours, its head twisted at an angle that no living spine could accommodate, its movements jerky and rhythmic. It was coming toward them.

More behind it. Shapes in the darkness, moving in the same broken, percussive gait.

Ronan’s hand found Asher’s arm. His grip was iron, fueled by whatever was left of the man underneath the darkness consuming him.

"Leave me." The voice was Ronan’s. Barely. The second tone was louder now.

"Absolutely the fuck I will not."

Asher hauled him up. Ronan’s weight nearly buckled his knees, dead weight and muscle and the particular heaviness of a body that was trying to become something else. He got his shoulder under Ronan’s arm and dragged, Natalia unconscious over his other shoulder, moving toward the far wall where a breach in the stone opened to sky.

Ronan convulsed against him. His fingers dug into Asher’s armor.

"Don’t let me turn into one of them." His voice was wrecked. The second tone underneath was winning. "Asher. Promise me."

"Shut up. You’re coming with me."

"There’s no cure. You know there’s no cure."

"I said shut up." 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

"ASHER."

Asher reached the breach. Open air. A drop he couldn’t see the bottom of. Behind them, the crawling figures were closer, the wet scraping louder, the temple shaking hard enough that pieces of the ceiling were falling in chunks.

"ONYX!"

His voice tore through the sky with everything he had left.

A roar answered. Distant, then closer, then deafening. A black dragon dove from above the clouds, wings tucked, gold eyes blazing, descending with the velocity of a creature that had heard its name from the mouth of the man carrying its bonded and had decided that physics was a suggestion.

Onyx pulled up at the last second, claws finding purchase on the broken temple wall. His gold eyes found Ronan and a sound left him that Asher felt in his sternum, a keening, desperate, grieving noise that dragons were never supposed to make.

Asher threw Ronan across Onyx’s back. Ronan’s body went rigid, then limp. The black veins had reached his hands, his jaw, the edges of his mouth.

Asher climbed on, pulling Natalia up with him, holding them both.

Onyx launched. The temple collapsed behind them in a cascade of stone and dust, and the crawling shapes vanished beneath the rubble, buried but still moving, still scraping, the sounds carrying upward through the dust cloud like prayers said in a language designed to make the listener lose their mind.

The wind took the sounds away. Onyx’s wings beat hard, climbing, putting distance between them and whatever was becoming of the world below.

"Asher." Ronan’s voice was a whisper. The second tone was all but dominant. "Have Onyx burn my body. When it’s done."

"No."

"It’s the only way to make sure—"

"I said NO."

Ronan’s hand found Asher’s. Squeezed. The grip was weak, the fingers already darkening, and then the squeeze stopped.

Ronan’s heart stopped.

Dexmon heard it at the same time Asher heard it.

The sudden, absolute absence of a heartbeat that had been constant since they were boys, a rhythm he had fallen asleep next to in shared tents and war camps and the marble floors of a castle where they’d hidden from guards with a stolen crown and a goat they’d never accounted for.

Gone.

Onyx felt it through the bond at the same instant. The dragon’s flight stuttered. His wings missed half a beat. Then a roar erupted from him so vast it shook the air currents around them, a grief that existed in frequencies below human hearing, a vibration that Asher felt in his teeth, his ribs, the fluid in his eyes.

Asher held Ronan’s hand. Natalia was unconscious against his chest. Onyx was screaming into a sky that offered nothing back.

Then, in the silence between one roar and the next, Asher heard it.

His wolf, quiet for so long, so obedient, so contained. Looking down at Natalia’s unconscious face, her white hair streaked with dust and blood, her body small and limp against his armor, carrying a child who would never know his father.

Mate.

The word landed in his chest like a key turning in a lock that had been sealed for years. His wolf surged, certain, absolute, the recognition this was right and had been stolen from him at a banquet by a woman with a vial of tincture and the patience to let the lie compound.

She was his.

She had always been his.

And the man lying dead across the dragon in front of him had known, had probably always known, and had loved her anyway, and had loved Asher anyway, and had died making sure both of them survived.

Dexmon looked at Ronan’s face. The black veins had stopped spreading. His expression was peaceful, or as close to peaceful as a face could manage when the body it belonged to had been claimed by dark magic and only stopped because the heart powering it had chosen to quit before the conversion was complete.

"I can’t do it," Asher whispered. "I can’t burn him."

Onyx roared again. Softer now. Broken.

The dragon was grieving. His bonded, the man who had carried him as a hatchling, the man whose heartbeat Onyx had fallen asleep on a thousand times, was gone, and the dragon’s grief was so total it was structural, built into his flight pattern, his wing beats heavier on the left where Ronan’s body lay, as if the weight of the loss was physical.

"I can’t," Asher said again, to no one. To the sky. To a Moon Goddess who had finally, cruelly, given Asher what he wanted by taking everything.

He closed his eyes. Held Natalia tighter. Held Ronan’s hand.

And flew.