Serena was conscious. Her green eyes were open, glassy with pain, and her breathing was shallow and wrong. Her white hair was soaked, plastered to the stone beneath her in heavy, tangled ropes, and her skin had gone a shade of gray that made Gav’s chest constrict so hard he forgot to breathe.

She had been there the entire time. Through every scream, every extraction, every second of triage on Fin and Dex, she had been twenty feet away with dark magic burrowing into her body. And she hadn’t called out once.

Gav found the zipper on the back of her training suit and pulled it down.

The bottom dropped out of his stomach.

Three black spikes protruded from her body. One buried deep in her left side, wet with blood that was still running. One in her lower back, angled toward her spine. And one embedded between her shoulder blades, the skin around it already blackened and pulsing with the same sickening rhythm they had seen in Dex and Fin.

The corruption had spread further than either of theirs. Dark veins branched outward from each spike in dense, deliberate patterns, threading beneath her skin in roots that were actively digging for something to feed on.

And they were feeding. On her magic. The faint gold shimmer that always lived beneath her skin was dimming in real time, the light retreating from the blackened veins like a tide being swallowed by oil.

"Gods," Aeron breathed.

Fin’s head snapped toward them.

He saw Gav crouched over Serena. He saw the look on Gav’s face. And the sound that came out of Finnick Shadowclaw was beyond language, beyond rank, beyond anything his training had ever prepared him to contain.

Every wound he had just endured, every spike, every extraction, every ounce of agony still burning through his body, became irrelevant in the span of a single heartbeat.

He tried to stand.

"Stay down," Aeron ordered.

Fin ignored him entirely. His legs buckled on the first attempt, and he caught himself on one knee. On the second push he was upright and moving, his dislocated arm hanging at his side, blood still running from his ribcage. He crossed those twenty feet with the grim, relentless stride of a man who would crawl across broken glass before he let another second pass without reaching her.

He dropped beside Gav. His good hand found Serena’s, and his grip was immediate and crushing.

"How long." Fin’s voice was quiet. The wrong kind of quiet. "How long has she been here."

"The whole time," Gav answered, and the guilt in his voice was a living thing.

Serena’s eyes shifted to Fin. Her lips barely moved. "The boys first."

Fin’s jaw clenched so hard the muscle jumped. Through their matebond, he felt everything. The pain, layered and relentless, a white-hot agony radiating from three separate points in her body. Each spike was feeding corruption into her blood with every pulse, and she had been feeling this the entire time they worked on Dex and him. She had stayed silent on purpose. She had chosen this.

"Don’t you ever do that again," Fin said, his voice cracking at the edges.

Six feet behind them, Dex made a sound. Half-conscious on the stone where Hyran’s magic was still working through his system, the Crown Prince of Drakenfell had heard Serena’s name. His eyes were barely open, but Serena’s pain was flooding through their matebond in waves so vicious his body jerked with each one. He tried to push himself up. His arms gave out.

He tried again.

"Stay down, Dex," Hyran said firmly, pressing him back with one hand, gold magic still flowing from the other. "I’ll handle it. She’s right here."

The look on Dex’s face was something Hyran would carry for a long time. Helplessness on a man who had never once in his life accepted that word as an option.

Maelor was already at Serena’s side. His mismatched eyes, the green one burning bright as foxfire, the gold one hot as a coin held over a flame, swept over her back, cataloguing the three entry points, the spread pattern, the depth. His expression tightened.

"The corruption has reached her bloodstream." His clinical veneer held, but only just. "I need to extract the spikes and purge the dark magic simultaneously, or we lose her."

The word "lose" landed on every man in that cavern like a hammer blow.

Gav wrapped his hand with the last strip of usable fabric he had. His fingers were steady, but his face was carved from stone.

"I’ll take the spikes. You handle the corruption."

Maelor positioned his palms over the first wound. Emerald light flickered to life, casting their faces in sharp green shadow that danced across the surface of the lake.

"On my mark. First spike. The one through her side."

Gav gripped it. The fabric between his skin and the dark-forged material was thin, nearly spent, and he could feel the cold radiating through the barrier, unnatural and alive.

"Now."

Gav pulled. Maelor’s hands erupted with emerald magic the instant the spike began to move, flooding the wound channel before the air could reach it, chasing the corruption through muscle and tissue and blood.

Serena’s body bowed off the stone. A sound tore from her, high and broken, the kind of scream that lodged itself inside Fin’s skull and would live there rent-free for years. Her hand crushed his hard enough to grind bone, and every hidden flame mark on every man who had sworn a blood oath to protect her flared so hot they hissed through their teeth in unison.

Blood, dark and thick, surged from the wound. Maelor held the magic steady, emerald light plunging deeper, ripping the black threads free. Dark smoke poured from the opening in writhing skeins, dissolving in the air with a whisper that sounded almost like laughter.

Behind them, Dex’s body convulsed. Her pain was tearing through their matebond and detonating inside his chest with every pulse. His fist cracked against the stone, and the sound he made was guttural, primal, the agony of a mate who could feel her being torn apart and was powerless to stop it.

Hyran pressed harder against him, gold magic flooding Dex’s system in an attempt to dull what the matebond was delivering. It barely touched the edges.

"Second spike," Maelor called. "Lower back."

Gav repositioned. His hands were shaking. He strangled the tremor into stillness and gripped the spike.

"Go."