"Yes?"
"Thank you. For not running."
The line went dead.
Chapter fifteen
Delay of Game - Intentionally stopping play, such as clearing the puck out of play.
Taranis
I watched him move through my apartment as if it were his own—filling the kettle, pulling mugs from the cabinet he’d already learned by heart, setting them on the counter with a quiet efficiency that made my chest ache.
He wasn’t unraveling. That was the problem. Any reasonable person—any sane, self-preserving human being who’d just watched their boyfriend explode into a dragon on a lonely mountain road—should have been halfway to panic by now. Shaking. Crying. Packing a bag and running as far away as possible.
Instead, Cinder was making tea.
It was comfortable, I supposed. More than comfortable, maybe, in the way that spaces became when someone had lived in them long enough. The leather couch was broken in on the left side, shaped to the particular slouch of a six-foot-two goaltender who read too much and slept too little. The bookshelves—three of them, because one had never been enough—were crammed past capacity, paperbacks doubled up behind hardcovers, dog-eared in ways that would've made a librarian weep. Shackleton sat next to Beryl Markham sat next to a battered copy ofEndurancethat I'd owned since I was nineteen. There was a whole shelf of Arctic and Antarctic exploration narratives, because apparently my subconscious had never been subtle about anything.
The kitchen was clean but lived-in. A French press on the counter, permanently stained. A wooden cutting board with knife marks so deep they looked like topographic lines. A cast-iron skillet that had been seasoned by three decades of use and would outlast me, the apartment, and probably civilization itself.
I sat on the couch where he’d left me, hands clasped between my knees, and watched him in motion. He was on autopilot, the same calm that let him face crises at work without breaking a sweat. Now it was keeping his hands steady and his voice even while his mind put off the inevitable reckoning.
Shock, I thought. When it finally hit—when the full weight of what he’d witnessed sank in—he’d look at me and see what I really was. A monster. Something that froze roads and shattered windows and nearly killed the one person I loved. Like my father.
The kettle clicked off. Cinder poured, the sound startlingly normal. He carried two steaming mugs to the couch, handed me one, and settled beside me with his legs tucked beneath him.
“You’re catastrophizing,” he said.
I blinked. “What?”
“It was a favorite word of my first clinical supervisor. You’ve been sitting there for six minutes with the expression of someone convinced I’m about to bolt.” He lifted his mug, eyes calm over the rim. “I can practically hear you listing reasons why I should leave.”
“I’m not—”
“Yes, you are. Your jaw’s clenched, you haven’t touched the tea, and you keep staring at me like you’re memorizing my face in case it’s the last time.” He set his mug down with a soft click. “I’m not leaving.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“Cinder, you’re in shock—”
“I’m not.” His tone was gentle but unyielding, like correcting a stubborn fact. “I’m sitting here, drinking tea, having this conversation while you’re a dragon. And I’m fine.”
“You can’t be fine.”
He nodded at himself. “Here I am. Fine.”
My dragon shifted beneath my ribs, anxious and hungry for the same reassurance I refused to accept.
“You saw me,” I said, voice rougher than I meant. “The wings, the claws, the roar. I froze a road half a mile long—”
“Yes,” he interrupted softly. “But you warned me first. You told me to get out. Even when you lost control, you made sure I was safe.”
I looked away.
“That’s not a monster,” Cinder said. “That’s someone terrified of what he is, doing the one thing he could—protecting me.”