“No.”
Elsa’s voice was sharp enough to make both males freeze. She pulled back from Sylas, her jaw set despite the exhaustion dragging at her features.
“I’m not going back in one of those things.” Her breath came faster, and through the bond Sylas felt a spike of something that wasn’t quite fear—deeper than that, more visceral. “I woke up in one of those glowing bubbles not knowing where I was, not knowing if I was dead or dreaming or—” She shook her head, hard. “I’m claustrophobic. I can’t. I won’t.”
Yarx’s ears flattened. “The Tear Dome is the most efficient method of—”
“Give me a medgun.” Sylas didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t need to. The command cut through the healer’s protest like a swipe of his talons. “I’ll tend to her myself. In my den.”
“My king, the medgun requires training to—”
“I’ve used one before.” Sylas bared his teeth—not quite a threat, but close. “She’s not going in a dome. She’s not staying in the infirmary where anyone could reach her. She’s coming with me.”
Yarx tilted his head, exposing the vulnerable line of his throat. The ancient gesture of submission, of trust, of acknowledging the Alpha’s authority without question.
“It will be done, my king.”
Sylas crossed to the medical station and took a medgun from the rack—a sleek silver device that hummed with Lux Tear energy when he activated it. Yarx watched but didn’t protest, his earlier objections swallowed by the weight of his king’s command.
Then Sylas returned to Elsa and gathered her against his chest once more. She went willingly, her arms wrapping around his neck, her face pressing into the blood-matted fur of his shoulder like she didn’t care about the violence still clinging to him.
“Hold on,” he murmured against her hair.
His wristband flared blue—the Lux Tear at its center blazing with power—and the world folded around them.
When it unfolded again, they were in his den.
Home. Safety. The one place in all his fortress where he could finally, finally let the feral thing inside him rest.
With her.
31
Sylas
The silence hit first.
Not the absence of sound—his den hummed with the low pulse of Lux Tear energy woven through the walls, the distant whisper of wind against volcanic stone, the soft crackle of embers in the fire pit that never quite died. But silence from the rest of it. No alarms. No guards demanding answers. No council members circling like carrion birds, waiting to pick apart his decisions.
Just this. Just her.
Sylas stood in the center of his chambers, Elsa still cradled against his chest, and let his nervous system remember what it felt like to stop bracing for the next attack. The feral edge that had driven him through the tunnels, through Vask’s skull, through Krix’s throat, through fourteen conspirators who would never breathe again—it retreated. Slowly. Reluctantly. Like a beast being coaxed back into its cage by the scent of something it wanted more than violence.
Frosted Tears. Blood. The salt of exhaustion on human skin.
Her.
The bond pulsed between them—no longer the frayed, desperate thing it had been during those three days of chemical separation, but something steadier. Warmer. He could feel her exhaustion bleeding through, the ache of healing bruises, the way her body had stopped fighting and simply...surrendered. Not to captivity. Not to fear.
To him.
“You’re covered in blood,” she murmured against his shoulder, her voice rough with fatigue. “Most of it isn’t yours.”
“No.” He didn’t apologize. Couldn’t. The blood on his fur belonged to those who had touched her, threatened her, kept her in the dark while they calculated how to use her as a weapon against him. He would wear it like a badge until it washed away. “Does it disturb you?”
A pause. Through the bond, he felt her turning the question over, examining it from angles he couldn’t predict.
“It should,” she said finally. “I keep waiting for it to. But all I can think is...” Her fingers curled tighter into his fur, and her next words came out barely above a whisper. “They hurt Rowan and Milo. They were going to hurt Ari and Mia. They would have hurt me more, if you hadn’t—”