He led me through corridors I didn’t recognise, past tapestries and archways that spoke of wealth and power. The destruction from my nightmare was evident here too, scorch marks traced along the walls like accusations, servants hurrying to assess the damage with wide, frightened eyes.

  The chamber he brought me to was unfamiliar. Large and beautiful in that casual way that screamed aristocracy. Silk hangings in deep burgundy, a fireplace carved from black marble, windows that looked out over moonlit gardens. The bed was massive, draped in midnight blue velvet that seemed to drink the lamplight.

  This wasn’t a guest room. This was personal space, lived-in space.

  His space.

  “Varyth—”

  “The guest quarters in your wing are uninhabitable,” he said simply, steering me toward the bed with hands that brooked no argument. “Everything within fifty feet of your room will need to be rebuilt.”

  I let him settle me on the edge of the mattress, my body sinking into silk and down like it was hungry for comfort. The tremors were getting worse now, violent shudders that made my teeth chatter despite the warmth of the room.

  Varyth knelt in front of me, studying my face with uncomfortable intensity. There was worry there, genuine concern that he wasn’t bothering to hide behind his usual mask of indifference.

  “The power drain will pass,” he said, the words gentle. “But you need sleep. Real sleep, not the kind where you jolt awake every hour expecting attack.”

  The simple fact that he was kneeling before me—this insufferably proud High Lord making himself smaller—made my throat tighten.

  “What happened?” I asked, rough as gravel. “How did I end up...” I gestured vaguely back toward my room, the one that now looked like a bomb made of shadow and fury had detonated inside it. “The last thing I remember is Kaelen telling me to stop.”

  Varyth went very still. That particular kind of stillness that predators get right before they strike, every muscle locked.

  “Kaelen?” The name came out flat, neutral in a way that screamed significance.

  “The dragon.” I blinked at him, confusion cutting through my exhaustion. “The green one. The one who caught me when I jumped off Thessarian’s back.”

  “I know which dragon.” Varyth’s voice had gone very quiet. “The question is how you know its name.”

  “He told me.” The words came out slow, my brain working through molasses. Why did that matter? “We talked during the fight. Well, he talked. I mostly just held on and tried not to die.”

  Varyth’s hands tightened where they rested on his knees, his knuckles going white. “You could hear it speaking?”

  “Yes?” I frowned at him, at the tension suddenly radiating off him in waves. “What does that mean?”

  “It means—” He stopped himself, dragged a hand through his dark hair in a gesture of pure frustration. “Tell me exactly what happened. From the beginning.”

  So I did. Told him about jumping from Thessarian’s back, about Kaelen catching me mid-fall with that liquid grace. About the shadow dragons pursuing us, about unleashing my fire while he flew. About the conversation that had seemed so natural in the moment, dry humour, his encouragement, the way he’d told me to stop before I tore myself apart.

  About not listening.

  About pushing past every warning sign my body screamed at me until the magic itself turned against me, until pain became the only reality and the world dissolved into grey static.

  About falling.

  About Kaelen’s claw closing around me like a cage of emerald and impossible gentleness, his words the last tether keeping me from drowning entirely.

  By the time I finished, Varyth was standing at the window with his back to me, his shoulders rigid with fury.

  “You pushed yourself that hard?” His tone was dangerously soft. “Past pain, past warning, past the point where your own body was screaming at you to stop?”

  “There were six shadow dragons,” I said defensively, even as exhaustion pulled at my eyelids. “What was I supposed to do, just let them kill us?”

  “You were supposed to listen when the dragon told you to stop.” He turned to face me, and the anger burning across his features was incandescent. “Do you have any idea what that kind of power drain can do? You didn’t just burn yourself out, Isara. You nearly tore yourself apart.”

  The words landed like blows, but I was too tired to flinch properly. Too wrung out to feel anything except the bone-deep exhaustion threatening to pull me under.

  “Next time,” Varyth continued, his voice turning sharp and commanding. “When your dragon tells you to stop, you fucking stop. Understood?”

  My dragon.

  The words registered slowly, filtering through layers of fatigue. Not ‘the dragon.’ Not ‘Kaelen.’ Your dragon.

  “My dragon?” I repeated, blinking at him through vision that had started to blur at the edges.

  “Yours.” Something complicated flickered across his features, exasperation and resignation and maybe a little amusement. “But you need to ask your dragon about that. Not my place to discuss.”

  I wanted to press. Wanted to demand answers about what the fuck that meant, about why a dragon who’d met me all of five minutes ago would be mine in any capacity. But my tongue felt thick in my mouth, and the bed beneath me had started to feel less like furniture and more like a gravitational pull I couldn’t escape.

  “When I wake up,” I managed, the words slurring slightly, “I have questions. So many questions.”

  Varyth’s lips quirked, close enough to a smile to count. “I would expect nothing less.” He crossed to the bed in two strides, his hand coming up to press against my shoulder—gentle but inexorable, guiding me down into the pillows. “Now rest. Before you collapse on me entirely and I have to explain to your dragon why I let his rider pass out from exhaustion.”

  He moved toward an armchair positioned near the fireplace. The leather creaked as he settled into it.

  “You’re staying?” I asked, hating how small I sounded.

  “Someone needs to make sure you don’t burn down what’s left of my castle in your sleep.”

  It should have been insulting. Should have made me bristle with indignation. Instead, it was... comforting. The idea that someone would keep watch, that I wouldn’t have to face the nightmares alone.

  I pulled back the covers and slipped beneath them. The silk was cool against my skin, soft enough to make me want to sink into it and never surface. But every time I closed my eyes, I saw Mireth’s terrified face. Heard Eryx’s heartbroken wails.

  The tremors wouldn’t stop. They wracked my body in waves, making the bed shake beneath me as I fought to find some kind of calm. Sleep felt impossible, like trying to relax while standing on a precipice.

  The nightmare had felt so real. The soldiers, the fear on my children’s faces, the helplessness that had nearly drowned me. Even knowing it wasn’t true, I couldn’t shake the sensation that somewhere in the dark, something was coming for them.

  I drew my knees up to my chest, trying to make myself smaller, trying to contain the power that thrummed beneath my skin like a second heartbeat. But it was like trying to hold back the ocean with cupped hands, futile and exhausting and ultimately pointless.

  Footsteps crossed the room toward me.

  The mattress dipped beside me, the bed sighing under additional weight. I felt the warmth of another body settling against my back, not quite touching but close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from his skin.

  “Your pulse is loud enough to wake the dead,” Varyth murmured.

  “I can’t make it stop,” I admitted, my voice muffled by the pillow. “Every time I close my eyes, I see them taking my children. And I can’t—I can’t move, can’t fight, can’t do anything to save them.”

  The bed shifted as Varyth moved closer, and then his arm came around me. Careful, hesitant, like he was afraid I might shatter at the contact. When I didn’t pull away, didn’t protest, he tugged me more firmly against him—a solid anchor against the storm raging inside my skull.

  I could smell him now, sandalwood and dew and power. It should have made me tense, should have triggered every survival instinct I possessed.

  Instead, the tremors eased.

  “The dreams will pass,” he said, his breath warm against my hair. “Your magic is still settling, learning the boundaries of what you can and cannot do. Nightmares are... common, during the transition. Especially after pushing yourself like that.”

  “How long?”

  “For the dreams? A few weeks, perhaps longer. For the magic itself...” I felt him shrug, the movement barely perceptible. “That’s harder to predict. Shadow fire is ancient power, Isara. It doesn’t follow the same rules as other gifts.”

  The tremors were slowing now, my body finally beginning to relax despite the chaos in my mind. Whether it was his presence or simple exhaustion, something was winning the war against my frayed nerves.

  “The dragon,” I said, my words slurring slightly as sleep finally began to pull at me. “You promised.”

  “Tomorrow,” Varyth replied, dragging a hand down my spine. “Sleep now. I’ll keep watch.”

  Without quite meaning to, I turned in his arms, my face finding the warm hollow of his throat. His hold tightened slightly, one hand coming up to rest against the back of my head as I burrowed deeper into his chest. The steady rhythm of his heartbeat was hypnotic, drowning out the echoes of nightmare screams that had been haunting me.

  For the first time in months, I slept without dreams.

  20

  Arms were around me. For a blissful moment, still caught between sleep and waking, my mind conjured Navaire.

  The familiar weight of an arm across my waist, the steady rise and fall of a chest beneath my cheek, the intimate tangle of limbs that came from sharing a bed for years.

  Then consciousness crashed over me.

  The chest beneath my face was broader than Navaire’s had been, the heartbeat different—slower, more controlled. The scent was wrong too, missing the earthy warmth that had been uniquely his. And the arm wrapped around me was pale where Navaire’s had been dark, the fingers long and elegant instead of calloused from smith work.

  Varyth.

  I was in Varyth’s bed. In his arms. My face pressed against his throat like I belonged there, one of my legs tangled between his, my hand splayed across his chest where I could feel the steady beat of his heart.

  I tried to move, tried to pull away before the wrongness of it could sink any deeper, but Varyth’s arm tightened around me. Instinctive.

  Horror ripped through me like a blade finding all the tender places I’d been trying to protect.

  No. No no no⁠—

  I scrambled back so violently that I didn’t register the edge of the mattress until I was already falling. My hip hit the floor with a crack that sent pain lancing up my spine, but I barely felt it. All I could process was the need to get away, to put distance between myself and the bed that smelled like someone who wasn’t Navaire.

  “Isara?”

  Varyth was there instantly, moving with that unnatural speed that made him more predator than man. He knelt beside me, one hand reaching out, eyes wide with something that looked dangerously close to panic.

  “Don’t touch me.” The words came out savage, raw. I pressed myself back against the wall, my chest heaving like I’d just run a marathon. “Please.”

  He froze. His hand hung in the air between us for a heartbeat before he lowered it slowly. Like he was trying not to spook a wounded animal.

  Which was probably accurate.

  “Alright.” His voice was soft, stripped of everything except quiet concern. “I’m not touching you. See? Hands to myself.”

  But I could still feel it, the phantom warmth of his body against mine, the way I’d burrowed into him like he was safety incarnate. The way some deep, animal part of me had recognised his heartbeat and decided it was good enough to sleep through the night without nightmares.

  “I shouldn’t—” The bile rising in my throat tasted like betrayal. “I shouldn’t have⁠—”

  I shouldn’t have felt safe. I shouldn’t have slept so soundly. I shouldn’t have forgotten, even for a moment, that the body I was meant to wake up against is ash and memory.

  My skin felt like it was on fire, shame burning through my veins hotter than any shadow flame. What kind of person was I? What kind of wife?

  Widow, a cruel voice in my head corrected. You’re a widow. Navaire is dead.

  But that didn’t make this better. If anything, it made it worse.

  The guilt hit me so hard I doubled over, my hands pressed to my stomach as if I could somehow contain the sick twist of betrayal that was eating me alive. How could I have done this? How could I have let myself find comfort in another man’s touch when Navaire was barely cold in the ground?

  Except he wasn’t in the ground at all, was he? There had been no body to bury, no grave to visit. Just the memory of blood on stone and the way his eyes had gone dark and empty while I screamed his name.

  “I’m sorry,” I choked out, the words scraping against my throat like broken glass. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—I never should have⁠—”

  “Breathe.” Varyth’s command cut through my spiral. “Isara, breathe.”

  I tried to obey, dragging air into my lungs in ragged gasps that did nothing to ease the tightness in my chest. My hands were shaking, my vision blurring at the edges as panic carved through me.

  I’d never shared a bed with anyone but Navaire. Never woken in another man’s arms, never felt the warmth of unfamiliar skin against mine.

  This felt like a violation of something sacred. Like I’d taken the memory of what Navaire and I had shared and trampled it beneath my feet.

  “I can’t—” My voice broke completely. “I can’t do this.”

  Varyth didn’t try to touch me. Didn’t reach for me or offer empty comfort.

  “I loved him,” I whispered, the confession torn from somewhere deep. “I loved him so much it felt like dying when they took him from me. And I—how could I⁠—”

  “You were having nightmares,” Varyth said quietly. “You were terrified and exhausted and your magic was eating you alive from the inside out. You needed comfort, and I provided it. Nothing more.”

  But it felt like more. It felt like betrayal and want and a dozen other things I didn’t have names for. It felt like the first fracture in the armour I’d built around Navaire’s memory, and I couldn’t bear it.

  “I should go,” I said, already moving toward the edge of the bed. “Check on my children, find somewhere else to⁠—”

  “Your children are safe.” Varyth interrupted, his tone brooking no argument. “It’s early. They’re likely still sleeping.”

  “This can’t happen again,” I said, finally finding the courage to look at him directly. “Whatever this was—comfort, necessity, temporary insanity—it can’t happen again.”

  Something flickered across his features, too quick for me to interpret. “If that’s what you want.”

  “It’s what needs to happen.” I stood on unsteady legs, smoothing down my rumpled clothes with hands that trembled. “I’m not—I can’t⁠—”

  “I understand,” Varyth said gently.

  But did he? Could anyone understand the weight of loving someone so completely that their absence felt like a missing limb? Could anyone comprehend the guilt that came with finding even a moment’s peace in the arms of another?

  I didn’t think so. But I nodded anyway, because it was easier than trying to explain the war raging in my chest.

  “Thank you,” I said stiffly, the words formal and distant. “For last night. For keeping the nightmares away. But I⁠—”

  “You don’t owe me gratitude, Isara.” The words were quiet, resigned. “You needed help, and I provided it. That’s all.”

  That’s all. Such simple words for something that felt anything but simple.

  I moved toward the door on legs that felt like water, desperate to escape before I said something I couldn’t take back.

  Before I confessed that the guilt eating me alive wasn’t just about betraying his memory, it was about how right it had felt to wake in Varyth’s arms.

  I fled Varyth’s chambers, moving through corridors that bore the scorch marks of my nighttime rampage. Servants pressed themselves against walls as I passed, staring with a mixture of fear and curiosity that made my skin crawl.

  The guilt followed me like a shadow, whispering accusations with every step. How could you? How could you forget him so easily? How could you find comfort in another’s arms when his body isn’t even cold?

  Except it had been over a year since Navaire died. A year of running, hiding, surviving. A year of nights spent clutching his memory like a lifeline while the world tried to tear everything else away.

  But it felt like yesterday. It felt like betrayal.

  21

  Knocks echoed down the corridor before the door finally swung open, revealing Eilrys in the frame.

  Eilrys took one look at me and her expression shifted, from casual greeting to sharp concern in the space of a heartbeat.

  “Gods below, Isara.” She pulled the door wider, stepping aside to let me in. “You look like death warmed over and served on a funeral pyre.”

  I probably did. My hair was a tangled mess, my clothes rumpled from sleeping in them, and I could feel the phantom warmth of Varyth’s chest against my cheek like a brand. The guilt must have been written all over my face because Eilrys’ eyes narrowed, that too-perceptive gaze cataloguing every detail.

  “I’m fine,” I lied, crossing the threshold into the suite.

  The space was larger than I’d expected. All warm woods and deep greens, with windows that overlooked the northern gardens. It felt lived-in in a way most quarters didn’t, scattered with books and weapons and the casual disorder of people who’d actually made themselves at home.

  Darian was reclined on a burgundy sofa near the fireplace, his torso wrapped in clean white bandages that stood out stark against his skin. He looked better than he had yesterday, the grey tinge of blood loss replaced by something closer to his normal colouring. But there was a tightness around his eyes that spoke of lingering pain.