I opened my mouth. He squeezed my hand.
"Second: Gavin set up that account during a period of your life when your autonomy was systematically stripped away. You didn't choose to be careless. You were surviving someone who controlled every aspect of your existence, including your digital infrastructure. The fact that you changed the password at all after leaving him tells me you were already fighting to reclaim your independence under circumstances most people can't imagine."
My eyes burned. I blinked rapidly, refusing to let the tears fall while he was making a clinical argument. It felt like it would undermine the data.
"Third," he continued, and his voice dropped lower, rougher, "Ignatius has resources you and I can't fathom. He has people who specialize in making digital footprints disappear. Whatever Gavin downloaded, whatever he's forwarded, Doryu and his team will trace it and contain it. This is not a problem you solve alone, because it was never yours alone to begin with."
"Taz—"
"And fourth." His grip tightened, and when I looked at his face, the expression there was so raw it stole the breath from my lungs. "You didn't expose me. You didn't betray me. You wrote observations about a patient whose vitals didn't make sense, because that's what a good nurse does. You didn't know what I was. You couldn't have known. And even if you had—even if you'd documented every scale and every wing and every degree of impossible cold—I would not blame you. Because you were doing your job. And doing it brilliantly."
The tears came then. Not the quiet, dignified kind I could blink away and pretend hadn't happened. These were messy and sudden and absolutely humiliating, spilling down my cheeksbefore I could get a hand up to stop them. I turned my face away, jaw clenched, furious at myself for falling apart in front of him again—twice in two days, when I'd gone years without crying in front of anyone.
Taz didn't comment on it. He just stayed crouched beside my chair, holding my hand, his thumb tracing slow circles against my knuckles while I shook apart. The cold from his skin seeped into mine, and instead of flinching, I leaned into it—let it ground me the way an ice pack grounds a burn, the shock of it pulling me back into my body when my mind wanted to spiral somewhere I couldn't follow.
"I'm sorry," I whispered when the worst of it passed, my voice wrecked and thick.
"For what?"
"For—" I gestured vaguely at my own face, at the tears, at the general catastrophe of my composure. "This. All of it."
"Don't apologize for being human." He said it simply, without irony, and the fact that a dragon was telling me this struck something so absurd in my chest that I almost laughed. Almost. What came out instead was a hiccupping, waterlogged sound that could have been either.
"I want to ask you something," he said hesitantly.
I waited.
"Why didn't you ever think I was taking those drugs you mentioned?"
And I stared at him, stunned. I opened my mouth and closed it. Why hadn't I? Then I smiled. "Because it never occurred to me. Even when I didn't trust myself, I must have trusted you."
It was one of those defining moments in a relationship. The moment you knew. More than love. The moment when you put yourself in someone else's care because you knew they would keep you safe.
He stood slowly, his knees creaking—twenty years of goaltending did things to joints that even draconic physiology couldn't fully compensate for, apparently—and tugged gently on my hand. "Come on."
"Where?"
"Bed."
I looked at the untouched eggs on my plate that I wasn't going to eat, at the water glass sweating a ring onto the table, at the rain still tracing its patient calligraphy down the windows. "It's three in the afternoon."
"I'm aware."
"We have—but—I should…"
"Cinder." He cupped the side of my face with his free hand, his palm cold against my flushed, tear-streaked skin. "We've done everything. Right now, you need to stop."
"I can't just stop—"
"You can. Because I'm asking you to. And because if you don't, you're going to run yourself into a wall, and I'd rather catch you before that happens than scrape you off the floor after."
The clinical part of my brain—the part that was always running, always assessing, always three steps ahead of the current crisis—tried to mount an argument. There were calls to make. Protocols to follow. A breach to contain. Every minute we delayed was a minute Gavin had to distribute data I couldn't retrieve.
But the rest of me—the part that had been running on adrenaline and guilt and sheer stubbornness since yesterday afternoon—was so tired it felt like weakness. Like my bones had decided they were done bearing weight and were simply going to stop, whether I approved or not.
"Okay," I said. The word came out small. Defeated in a way I hated but couldn't fight.
He led me down the short hallway to his bedroom. The bed was still unmade from this morning—sheets tangled, pillows dented with the shapes of us, the faint impression of two bodies that had spent the night learning how to fit together. He pulled back the covers without ceremony and waited.