"Stay with me, Serena."

Hyran surged gold magic into her.

Behind him, the Gamma of Drakenfell dove back into the water. No one was dying on his watch today.

The cold hit Gavriel for the second time and it was the worst yet. The cold hit every inch of him at once, and his muscles seized so hard his vision whited out for one full second. He was the only one the creature hadn’t spiked. Lucky. The kind of lucky that felt borrowed, temporary, like the lake was keeping a tab it intended to collect.

His body had no reserves left and his muscles were screaming. The screaming quickly turned into a numb, grinding silence that was more dangerous.

His body was surrounded in a gold glow that he knew was Serena’s magic.

He kept swimming down, eyes scanning for gold light. It’d be the only way he could find either.

The sapphire glow guided him down. Sixty feet. Seventy. A depth that would not be easy for a wolf in regular circumstances, let alone this. The cold crushed his chest and his lungs burned from an oxygen debt he’d been accruing since the first dive and had never repaid. Every stroke cost more than the last, and there was nothing left to pay with.

He caught a golden glow in the distance and torpedoed towards it.

The Alpha King of North Varos was still surrounded in Serena’s gold magic, pinned against a large boulder on what looked like a hill. There were multiple tentacles wrapped around his body.

His eyes were open. But his movements had slowed, his kicks weakening, his mouth clamped shut against the involuntary urge to breathe that was going to kill him in the next fifteen seconds.

A golden blade lay ten feet away, definitely fabricated by Serena and just out of reach.

Gav didn’t slow down, grabbing it. As soon as he touched it, gold flame lit around it, so strong Gav could feel the heat radiating off of it. His Hidden Flame mark lit with it.

He didn’t question it.

He drove the golden blade through the first tentacle with a two-handed strike that sent corrupted ash spiraling into the water. Then the second. The third. Each strike weaker than the last as the sword dimmed, but each one precise, because Gavriel Sterling had trained with a blade since he could walk and precision was the last thing his body would forget.

The fourth tentacle released on its own, recoiling from the gold still emanating from Fin’s body.

Fin kicked free. His eyes met Gav’s underwater, and something passed between them that would never be spoken aloud. An acknowledgment. A debt. The kind of thing that two men who loved the same woman would carry in silence for the rest of their lives.

Gav motioned for him to go. Then kept swimming, scanning in the water for gold light.

He found Dex thirty feet deeper.

The Crown Prince of Drakenfell had stopped fighting. Gav noticed the stillness of Dex’s body even thirty feet out. Dexmon Drakenfell did not do still. Dexmon Drakenfell fought until the thing he was fighting quit or died, and then he fought whatever was standing behind it. Stillness meant his body had made a decision his mind hadn’t authorized.

He was wrapped in six tentacles. Two of them were dead, their severed stumps dissolving into ash around him, evidence of the war he’d been winning before his lungs betrayed him. His gold was still burning, but dim now, guttering the way a torch did in its last thirty seconds of fuel. His sword hand was open. The blade was gone, dissolved somewhere in the water below him, and his fingers were drifting in the current like he’d forgotten they belonged to him.

His eyes were open. That was the worst part. Open and unfocused, staring at nothing, the gold in them flickering in slow, irregular pulses that matched a heartbeat that was running out of reasons to keep going.

Gav drove downward. Every kick sent white fire through his cramping thighs. His vision was tunneling, his own oxygen debt compounding with every second, but he locked his focus on the dim gold light around Dex’s body and refused to let his eyes track anything else.

Thirty feet. Twenty. Fifteen.

Dex’s mouth opened.

Bubbles streamed from his lips in a slow, steady cascade, and Gav watched the prince’s chest compress as the last of his air left his body. His eyes rolled.

By the time Gav reached him, Dex wasn’t moving.

His body hung limp in the tentacles’ grip, arms floating, head tipped back, the gold around him reduced to a faint amber glow that clung to his skin the way embers clung to wood.

Gav drove the blade through the first tentacle with everything he had left. Ash exploded into the water. He swung again. The second tentacle split and dissolved.

Slice. Ash. Slice. Ash. ’Die, motherfucker,’ was playing on repeat in his mind with each strike, his form deteriorating with his oxygen but his accuracy holding because muscle memory didn’t need air to function.

The creature recoiled, retreating into the abyss with the grinding, reluctant withdrawal of something that had calculated the cost of keeping them and found the price too high.

Gav hooked his arm around Dex’s chest and kicked upward, driving on a fuel source that had nothing to do with oxygen or muscle fiber and everything to do with the fact that he would not let his best friend die in this damn lake. Failure was not an option.

The golden blade was still locked in Gav’s other fist, burning low but burning, and he used it like a torch, cutting a line of light through the dark water above them.

Dex’s head lolled in the water. Blood was pouring from his torso in three places. The gash across his ribs. A puncture wound in his chest. And something on the back of his shoulder blade that Gav couldn’t see but could feel, hot and slick against his forearm every time he adjusted his grip.

You are not dying in a lake on me. You’re not dying in a lake, you stubborn bastard. We are almost there.

The words repeated in Gav’s mind like a war drum, to himself and to the gods. Mindlink hadn’t worked since they entered the temple. But even if it was working, the man pinned against his chest was in no condition to receive.

Legs burning. Lungs collapsing inward like wet paper. The blade’s gold light flickered with every kick, dimming in time with his heartbeat, which was slowing in a way that the tactical part of his brain recognized as early-stage oxygen deprivation and the rest of his brain refused to acknowledge.

Forty feet. Thirty.

Twenty feet. The water was shifting from black to deep blue.

A shadow cut through the water above them. Fast. Deliberate. Diving straight down with the controlled aggression of a man who had already done the math on how long he could hold his breath and decided the number was irrelevant.

Fin.

He must have surfaced, dragged air into whatever was left of his lungs, and turned right back around.

He reached them at fifteen feet. His dislocated arm was pinned against his body, useless, but his good hand found Dex’s other side and took half the weight without a word. His eyes weren’t on them. They were scanning the dark below, sweeping the blue-black water beneath Gav’s kicking legs, tracking every shadow, every shift in current, every place a tentacle could come from.

He was running a perimeter check while drowning. His gaze locked on Gav’s. One look. Clear below. Move.

They kicked together. Fin one-armed, Gav one-armed, Dex suspended between them like cargo neither of them was willing to drop. The blade in Gav’s hand sputtered its last flicker of gold and dissolved. The gold around him and Fin both flickered once. They were on more than borrowed time.

Onshore, Hyran’s hands pressed against the wound in Serena’s side, mage-light pulsing between his fingers. Aeron and Maelor were beside him.

No one had surfaced.

Hyran’s eyes found Aeron’s. No words were needed. Their Alphas had been under too long.

"Take over, Maelor," Hyran called, sprinting towards the water, Aeron behind him.

They hit the water at the same time.

Both slowed immediately.

Hyran made a noise that no grown man should be capable of producing.

"I think this lake just sterilized me," Aeron said.

Gold magic surged around both of them. Their own. Instinct taking over.

"Right. We can do that," Hyran said, like he’d been waiting for the dramatic moment and he hadn’t just squealed.

"Incredible that we’re mages and that wasn’t step one," Aeron said.

They froze. Looked back at Maelor. Then at each other.

"We were testing the water temperature first."

"Obviously."

"Standard protocol."

"Textbook."