"Taz."
Not screaming. Not running. Not the sound of someone fleeing from a monster.
Just my name, spoken with the same steady calm he'd used in the hotel lobby when the cold was spiraling and the reporters were closing in.
I turned my massive head, frost cascading from my jaw, and found Cinder standing fifteen feet away.
He was shaking. His coat was dusted with ice crystals, his breath coming in rapid clouds, his face so pale he looked carved from the same frost that coated everything around us. His eyes were enormous—wide with shock, with awe, with something I couldn't read and was terrified to name.
But he hadn't run.
He was standing in the middle of a frozen road, looking up at a creature that could kill him with a breath, and he hadn't moved.
"Taz," he said again, and his voice shook, but he steadied it with visible effort. The nurse. The professional. The man who walked toward emergencies when everyone else ran. "I can see you in there. I know you're in there."
A sound escaped me—low, rumbling, vibrating through the frozen ground. Not a growl. Something closer to a whimper, if a creature made of ice and scales and ancient power could whimper.
He took a step forward.
My dragon recoiled, terrified of proximity, of what might happen if he got too close. Ice surged outward in a defensive ring, frost climbing the air itself, and Cinder stopped. But he didn't retreat.
"Your temperature," he said, and a choked laugh broke through the words. "This is why. This is—God, Taz, this is what you've been hiding."
I lowered my head. Slowly. Carefully. The way you'd approach something fragile—except I was the dangerous one, and he was the fragile thing, and every cell in my ancient body screamed at me not to get close, not to risk it, not to be my father.
But Cinder stepped forward again. And again. Closing the distance I was too afraid to cross.
His hand lifted.
I saw it trembling. Saw the way his fingers spread—not grasping, not flinching, just open. Reaching. The way he'd reached for me in the dark of my apartment, in the cold of hotel rooms, in every moment when the rational thing would have been to pull away.
I lowered my head because it seemed inevitable, and his palm made contact with my snout.
The cold should have burned him. At this temperature, at this level of uncontrolled output, his skin should have blistered on contact—frostbite in seconds, tissue damage in minutes. I knew this the way I knew every terrible thing my body was capable of. I'd spent weeks cataloging the ways I could destroy.
But his hand didn't burn.
It pressed flat against my scales, warm and steady, and the cold... bent. Redirected. Flowed around his fingers like water parting around a stone, finding a path that didn't include him. My dragon recognized him before my panicked mind could catch up—recognized the warmth, the heartbeat, the scent of eucalyptus and skin and something underneath that was justhim—and the ice retreated from the point of contact like it had been given an order.
Mate, my dragon keened.Safe. Ours. Won't hurt. Can't hurt.
"There you are," Cinder whispered, and his voice broke on the second word. Tears were streaming down his face, freezing into tiny crystals on his cheeks before they could fall. "There you are, Taz."
I made that sound again—the low, keening rumble that vibrated through the frozen road—and pressed my snout gently into his palm. His other hand came up, both of them now cradling my jaw, and the warmth radiated inward like sunlight through ice, not melting me but softening something that had been rigid and terrified for decades.
"You're a dragon," he said, and the way he said it—not accusatory, not horrified, justfactual, the way he'd state a diagnosis—made something inside me fracture. "An ice dragon, I'm assuming. That's why your temperature drops. That's why the cold follows you. That's why—" His breath hitched. "That's why. Because what I was seeing wasn't a medical anomaly. It wasyou."
I couldn't answer. Not like this. Not in this form, where my voice was nothing but wind and frost and the deep, subsonic vibration of a creature too large for words. But I lowered my head further, pressing my forehead against his chest the way Cole's dragon had pressed against Phoenix, and I felt his arms come up—both of them, stretching as far as they could reach around the massive curve of my jaw—and hold on.
He was shaking. Violently now, whether from cold or shock or both. But he didn't let go.
"I'm not afraid of you," he said, and the words came out fierce—almost angry—like he was daring the universe to challenge him. "Do you hear me? I'm not afraid. You're not going to hurt me."
How do you know?I wanted to ask.How can you possibly know that?
But he answered as if he'd heard me, which was strange, even as he kept his hands on me. "Because you've been fighting this your whole life. Every game, every cold snap, every time your temperature crashed and you held it together anyway—you've been protecting everyone around you from something they didn't even know how to manage." His fingers dug into the scales behind my jaw, finding the place where the armor was thinnest, where sensation lived closest to the surface. "That's not a monster, Taz. That's the bravest person I've ever met."
The rage trickled out of me. Not all at once—the threat was still out there, still a danger, still someone I wanted to hunt through frozen skies until he understood what it meant to touch something that belonged to a dragon. But the killing edge of it receded, pulled back by the anchor of Cinder's hands and the steady, impossible fact that he was still here.