I followed seconds later, the cold surging once as I lost myself, frost crackling across the nearest window before retreating just as fast. My dragon keened, triumphant and tender and desperately, achingly grateful, and I buried my face in Cinder's neck and shook apart.
We lay there afterward in a mess of sweat and frost and the mingled evidence of what we'd done, breathing hard, neither of us willing to move. His hand traced lazy circles on my back, fingers mapping the ridges of my spine where, in another form, scales would be.
"Your temperature rose," he murmured after a while, his voice thick with satisfied exhaustion.
I huffed a laugh against his throat. "You're taking my vitals? Now?"
"Occupational hazard." But his fingers pressed against the pulse point at my wrist, gentle and automatic. "I’m guessing you're at ninety-one."
"Is that good?"
"It's remarkable," he teased, then shifted beneath me, angling his head to look at my face. His eyes were soft, hazy, the clinical sharpness temporarily replaced by something unguarded and luminous. "It's you. Letting yourself feel safe."
"I do feel safe," I said, and the admission cost me something—some final, stubborn wall I'd kept reinforced for thirty years. "With you. I feel safe."
His expression crumpled just slightly—not sadness, but the kind of emotion that was too big for a face to hold gracefully. He pressed his lips to my forehead, lingering, and whispered, "Good. Because you are."
We cleaned up with a shared washcloth and minimal coordination, and I caught him grinning at the mirror when he saw the faint red marks my cold fingers had left on his hips—not frostbite, not damage, just the ghost of contact that would fade by morning.
"Battle scars," he said, running a finger over one.
"I'm sorry—"
"If you apologize for touching me one more time, I'm going to prescribe you something unpleasant." He turned, hooked a finger through the waistband of the sweatpants I'd just pulled on, and tugged me close. "These are good marks, Taz. They mean you were here. They mean you didn't hold back."
My throat worked. I pulled him against me and held on, his back fitted against my chest like we'd been sleeping this way for years. The apartment was quiet around us, the city mutedbeyond the windows, and for once the silence didn't feel like loneliness. It felt like shelter.
"Tomorrow," he said, already drifting, his words going soft at the edges. "Ignatius. Ten o'clock."
"Yeah."
"Are you worried?"
"About Ignatius? No." I pressed my lips to the nape of his neck. "About Gavin."
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Ignatius said he'd handle it."
"I know what he said."
"And you don't trust that?"
I thought about it—about the steel in Ignatius's voice, the weight of centuries behind his words, the absolute certainty with which he'd said it stays handled. "I trust him. I just—" My arm tightened around Cinder's waist. "If Gavin comes near you again—"
"Then we deal with it. Together." He laced his fingers through mine where they rested against his stomach. "Not you alone. Not me alone. Together."
My dragon settled at that, curling down into something warm and watchful. Not dormant—never quite dormant—but content in a way I hadn't felt in decades. Maybe ever.
"Together," I echoed.
His breathing evened out within minutes, his body going heavy and slack against mine. I lay awake a little longer, listening to the rhythm of him, feeling his warmth seep into my frozen bones the way spring crept into mountain valleys—slow, inevitable, transforming everything it touched.
Tomorrow we'd face Ignatius and whatever truths came with him. Tomorrow we'd deal with Gavin, with the police report we couldn't file, with the wreckage of a truck and a road that bore evidence of something the world wasn't ready to know.Tomorrow the questions would start, and the answers would reshape both our lives in ways I couldn't predict.
But tonight, in the dark of my apartment, with his heartbeat steady under my palm and his warmth anchoring me to something that felt, for the first time, like a future—
Tonight was enough.
Chapter sixteen