The first thing Dexmon registered was sixty pounds of attitude sitting on his lungs.

He didn’t know it yet, but he’d been dead to the world for seven days.

His eyelids were heavy. Consciousness returned in fragments. His throat felt like he’d swallowed sand and chased it with gravel. There was an I.V. in his left arm, and the tubing caught the low firelight when he shifted, a thin line tethering him to a stand he had no memory of agreeing to.

He blinked. Twice.

Gold eyes blinked back.

Onyx was curled on his chest, his small body a dense knot of black scales. The dragon’s chin rested directly over Dex’s heart, as if he’d been monitoring the beat of it, counting every thud to make sure it kept going.

Dex stared at him.

Onyx stared back. Then chirped once, soft and uncertain, the way he did when he was checking if something was real.

Something cracked open behind Dex’s ribs that had nothing to do with injury.

The memory surfaced uninvited. A black dragon, the grief sound it made when its bonded died, and the way it flew away from the world and never came back.

Dex’s hand came up slowly. His fingers found the ridge between Onyx’s wings and scratched, gentle, deliberate, with an intimacy he would deny under oath if anyone ever asked.

"Hey, little man," he rasped.

Onyx’s entire body vibrated. A purr rolled through him so deep it rattled Dex’s sternum, and the dragon pressed his face harder into Dex’s chest, his claws flexing against the fabric of the bedsheet in rhythmic, contented kneading.

Dex kept scratching. His jaw tightened, and something burned behind his eyes that he would also deny under oath.

"I know who you are," he whispered. "I know who you were."

Onyx lifted his head. His gold eyes locked onto Dex’s with an intelligence that had no business existing in something that small. Then he pressed his forehead to Dex’s chin and held it there, still, like a vow renewed in silence.

Dex closed his eyes and let his hand rest on the back of Onyx’s neck.

If the room had been full, he would have already been making a joke, and poured himself a drink. But the room was dark, and the fire was low, and no one was watching.

So he held on.

He held on the way Onyx’s past life had held his brother. Fierce and final and unashamed.

A minute passed. Then his senses sharpened, and a second presence registered.

To his right. Close. Sitting in a chair pulled flush against the bed.

Serena.

Her white hair fell loose around her shoulders, catching firelight at the edges where it turned to gold, thick and unruly and cascading past the arm of the chair.

But that was where the beauty ended and the damage began.

Her skin was drawn tight across her cheekbones, hollowed in a way that made his chest seize. Dark circles bruised the skin beneath her eyes. The smell of salt. Tears that had dried and been replaced by fresh ones so many times that the scent had soaked into the fabric of her training suit and the leather of the chair itself.

She looked wrecked.

Dex’s hand stilled on Onyx’s neck. His throat tightened so hard he couldn’t swallow.

He let out a breath and forced himself to move. He needed water ten minutes ago. He looked at the I.V. in his arm, then ripped it out.

Onyx, who had been purring contentedly on his chest, was displaced without ceremony. A sound escaped his throat that was less chirp and more personal betrayal, high-pitched and theatrical, as if Dex had committed a war crime against his comfort.

Onyx huffed and gave a look that said, You moved me.

"Relax," Dex rasped. "I’ll be right back."

Onyx did the opposite of relaxing. He puffed up to roughly twice his size, every scale bristling, his tail lashing once against the sheets in a display of fury that would have been terrifying if he wasn’t a baby.

Dex ignored him and crossed to the cooling cabinet built into the stone wall.

He grabbed a tonic and drank it standing. The liquid hit his throat like mercy. He finished it in four swallows, gasped once, and grabbed a second.

The second one he drank slower, only because his hands were shaking and he needed the extra seconds to pretend they weren’t.

Behind him, Onyx settled into a seething loaf on the mattress, wings still half-raised, gold eyes tracking Dex’s every movement with unblinking irritation.

Dex turned back to the bed. To Serena.

She was still asleep. Utterly unconscious, folded in that chair like exhaustion had dragged her under mid-vigil and she’d gone without a fight. Her breathing was slow and shallow, the kind of sleep that came after a body had been pushed past every reasonable limit and finally surrendered.

He moved to her carefully, more carefully than he moved through any battlefield, any war room, any negotiation.

One arm slid beneath her knees. The other curved around her back, gathering her against his chest. He laid her on the bed gently. Then he unzipped her training suit slowly, easing the material down her shoulders, then her arms, working it off her body with a patience he reserved for precisely two things: disarming explosives and undressing Serena when she was asleep. Both required steady hands and an acceptance that one wrong move ended everything.

He found a chemise folded on the dresser across the room, crimson and soft. He worked it over her head, guided her arms through the sleeves, and smoothed the fabric down over her body, his knuckles brushing skin that was too warm and too dry from days of crying and too little sleep.

She didn’t stir. Whatever had drained her had done it thoroughly.

He leaned down and pressed his lips to hers. Soft. Slow. A kiss meant for the space between dreaming and waking, where promises lived and explanations could wait.

Dex straightened, jaw tight, and headed for the bathing chamber.

The water was scalding, and he let it be. It peeled the unconsciousness off him in layers. The fog, the stiffness, the bone-deep ache of a body that had been lying still for too long. He stood under the stream and let the heat do its work, pressing both palms flat against the stone wall, head bowed, eyes closed.

He tried to piece together what had happened. He remembered Guinevere chasing him, and his father wanting to speak with him.

Then nothing.

A blank. A void where memory should have been. The I.V., the tonics, and Serena’s tear-stained face told him it was worse than he thought. But the specifics were smoke, dissolving every time he reached for them.

He turned off the water, dried himself, and dressed. Dark trousers. A shirt he left partially unbuttoned because his body was still running hot and he had limited patience for fabric right now.

He stepped back into the room.

Onyx had moved.

The dragon was no longer a seething loaf of indignation on the mattress. He was curled on top of Serena’s chest, his wings tucked against his body, his chin resting in the hollow of her throat, his gold eyes closed. The exact same position he’d been in on Dex.

Dex stared at them.

Serena’s hand had found the dragon in her sleep, her fingers resting on the curve of his back. Onyx was purring. Low and steady and deeply, in a way a dragon should never do.

He exhaled through his teeth.

The last thing he remembered clearly was his father’s mindlink before he went to find Serena.

He needed to find his father.

He moved for the door, quiet, deliberate, casting one final look at Serena and Onyx asleep together on the bed before he turned the handle.

The door opened outward.

And directly into Finnick Shadowclaw’s face.

Fin’s hand was raised, knuckles an inch from the wood, frozen mid-knock. His dark eyes locked onto Dex’s, and for exactly one second, neither of them moved for different reasons.

Dex saw Ronan, alive and his throat closed. The brother who gave his life to save Asher’s. The man who refused a crown to be by his side. His father always referred to Fin as an honest king, and a good man. Dex now fully believed it.

Fin recovered first. His hand dropped. His chin lifted. Those sharp, assessing eyes swept over Dex in a single pass: the damp hair, the partially unbuttoned shirt, the fact that he was standing upright and conscious for the first time in what was clearly longer than Dex realized.

"You look like shit," Fin said.

Ronan would have grabbed him by the shoulders and called him an idiot. Dex missed Ronan’s version.

"And you look like a man who was about to knock on my door. So which one of us has the bigger problem?"

Fin’s mouth twitched. A thousand years ago, that smile would have landed. Would have split into a full grin, followed by a shove and a insult that meant I’m glad you’re alive, brother.

Fin’s eyes flicked past Dex’s shoulder, into the room behind him, and found Serena on the bed.

Something shifted in his expression.

Dex watched him look at her and recognized the exact weight behind it, because he’d watched Ronan wear that same expression on a balcony thousands of years ago, giving away the woman he loved and calling it the right thing to do.

"She’s asleep," Dex said. The words carried weight he didn’t bother disguising. Mine. She’s in my bed. She stays there.

The territorial instinct was real. So was the guilt underneath it, because the man he was snarling at had once been the person he trusted most in any life, and Dex was the only one in this hallway who knew that.

Fin’s gaze returned to his. Steady. Unreadable.

"She’s been in that chair for seven days, Dex."

The words landed like a fist.

Dex blinked. "What?"

"Seven days. She hasn’t left this room for more than twenty minutes at a time."

Dex’s hand tightened on the doorframe.

Seven goddamn days.

Fin had stayed too. Dex could see it in the shadows under his eyes, in the tension he carried across his shoulders.

In another life, he would have gripped the back of this man’s neck, pressed their foreheads together, and said thank you without words. In this one, he walked away.