Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
Too Many Men - A penalty for having more than the allowed number of players on the ice.
Taz
I woke to the sound of rain.
Not the aggressive, hammering kind that rattled windows and sent people scrambling for umbrellas—this was the slow, steady kind that turned Denver into something softer.
Gray light filtered through the curtains, and for a disoriented moment, I couldn't figure out why the bed felt different.
Why the sheets smelled like eucalyptus instead of nothing.
Then the weight against my chest shifted, and everything came back.
Cinder was still asleep. He was sprawled across me like a human blanket, one arm flung over my ribs, his cheek pressed to the hollow beneath my collarbone. His breathing was slow and even, his body radiating the kind of warmth that made my dragon curl up and refuse to move.
I lay perfectly still, afraid that even breathing too deeply would wake him.
This was new. Not the physical proximity—we'd shared a bed before, in hotels and in the aftermath of crises—but the quality of it. The ease. Last night something had shifted between us, some final barrier dissolving, and the space it left behind felt vast and terrifying and exactly right.
I watched the rain trace patterns down the window and let myself feel it.
The word I couldn't say. The one that sat behind my teeth every time he looked at me, every time his warm hands found my cold skin and didn't flinch.
It wasn't the human word—not mate, though that was there too, humming constantly now like a frequency I couldn't turn off.
This was the dragon word. The one that should have been easier to say but somehow wasn't, because I'd never said it to anyone, and the thought of saying it to him and watching his face change—
The memory came without warning.
Not of battle. Not of the rink. Not of blood or frost.
Of a kitchen table.
Of hands far older and softer than my own wrapping around a chipped ceramic mug.
Emile had told me the story on a night when I was barely fifteen and already too controlled for a boy my age.
“You think you don’t feel things,” Emile had said, watching me with those patient brown eyes. “But you do. You just bury them in ice.”
I hadn’t answered. We talked hockey. We talked everyday life. We never talked dragons.
“That’s the trouble with your kind,” Emile continued gently. “You mistake endurance for solitude.” We’d been quiet for a while.
“There’s an old Icelandic word,” Emile had said. “ástmaki.” He’d pronounced it carefully. “AUST-mah-kee.”
I’d frowned. “What does it mean?”
“Love-mate,” Emile replied. “But not in the way humans use it. Not temporary. Not convenient.” He’d leaned back in his chair, smiling faintly. “The old stories say an ice dragon’s heart is wrapped in living frost. Untouchable. Until the ástmaki comes.”
In typical but rare-for-me teenage fashion, I’d rolled my eyes at that. “I don’t need someone to thaw me.”
Emile had laughed softly. “It isn’t about thawing, Taranis. It’s about balance. The one heartbeat that steadies yours when the storm inside you rises.”
I remembered staring into the fire, irritated by the idea.
Weakness.
Dependence.
Danger.
“What happens,” I’d asked finally, “if the dragon never finds one?”
Emile’s answer had been quiet. “Then he survives. But he does not live.”
ástmaki.
Cinder inhaled slowly, his breath warm against my shoulder. Vulnerable. Human. Mortal. And I understood something else from the legend Emile had told me. The frost did not vanish when you found your ástmaki. It changed purpose.
Cinder made a soft sound in his sleep—not a word, just a murmur, something content and unconscious—and burrowed closer. His fingers curled against my side, finding the spaces between my ribs like they were designed to fit there.
I loved him.
The thought arrived without fanfare, without the dramatic crash of revelation I'd been bracing for. It was just there. Quiet. Obvious. Like it had been true for weeks and my brain had finally stopped arguing with my chest about it.
I loved him, and the knowledge of it was so enormous I couldn't breathe around it.
I pressed my lips to the top of his head, wanting this every morning for the rest of my very long life.
The thought sobered me. Because my life was very long—centuries, potentially, if nothing killed me first—and his wasn't—not at the moment, anyway. Even I knew that would change if he accepted me.
Cinder stirred around nine, surfacing slowly—not the sharp, immediate wakefulness of someone trained to respond to alarms, but a gradual return, like a diver ascending from deep water.
His lashes fluttered. His fingers tightened on my ribs.
Then his eyes opened, unfocused and soft, and found my face.
"Hi," he said, voice rough with sleep.
"Hi."
"What time is it?"
"Just after nine."
He groaned, pressing his face back into my chest. "We're supposed to be at Ignatius's at ten."
"We are."
"That requires moving."
"It does."
"I'm lodging a formal complaint."
I smiled into his hair. "Noted."
He didn't move for another three minutes. Neither did I. The rain kept falling, and my apartment existed in that suspended, gray-morning state where nothing outside the walls felt entirely real.
When he finally rolled off me, he did it with the reluctance of someone peeling off a warm shirt.
He sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes, his bare back turned toward me.
I watched the shift of his shoulder blades, the freckles scattered across his pale skin, the old scar on his side that he'd never explained and I'd never asked about because I understood, better than most, the weight of stories you weren't ready to tell.
"Shower?" he asked without turning around.
"Go ahead. I'll make coffee."
He paused, and I could see the debate playing out in the set of his shoulders—the part of him that wanted to invite me in versus the part that was still weighing how much time we had.
He padded toward the bathroom.
I exhaled slowly once the door closed. My dragon rumbled—low, satisfied, possessive in a way that should have embarrassed me but didn't. The coffee was ready by the time he emerged, dressed in jeans and a gray sweater I immediately loved.
He sipped the coffee, watching me over the rim the way he'd watched me last night—steady, certain, seeing everything I tried to hide. "You're doing it again."
"Doing what?"
"Looking at me like you want to say something and then deciding not to."
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Took a very deliberate sip of my own coffee.
"There it is," he said mildly. "The great goaltender, stopped by his own feelings. Someone alert the press."
"Please don't alert the press about anything, ever again."
He laughed—that real laugh, the one I'd started collecting like rare coins—and the sound of it loosened something behind my sternum that had been wound tight since I woke up.
I wanted to tell him. Right there, in my small kitchen, with the rain on the windows and coffee steam between us and his body still warm from my shower.
I wanted to say I love you the way he deserved to hear it—not in crisis, not in the aftermath of a shift or a chase or a breakdown, but in the ordinary quiet of a morning that belonged to us.
But the words tangled in my throat, caught on years of silence, of secrets, and the bone-deep fear that speaking them would make them fragile.
That naming the thing would give the universe permission to take it away.
So I didn't say it. I finished my coffee, washed both mugs, and drove us across the city in a rental I'd arranged that morning because my truck was currently with no windows and frost damage that would make any mechanic question their career choices.
Cinder sat in the passenger seat with his hand on my thigh again—that quiet, grounding contact that was becoming as essential to my functioning as oxygen.
He didn't push. Didn't fill the silence with chatter or probe for the words I was choking on.
He just sat there, warm and present, his thumb tracing absent circles against the seam of my jeans while the rain streaked the windshield.
Ignatius's house announced itself the way it always did—stone and iron and the quiet authority of old money that had learned to be discreet. The gate was open, which meant he'd been watching for us. Of course he had. Ignatius watched everything.
I parked behind Doryu's sleek black sedan and killed the engine. Neither of us moved for a moment.
"How much does he know?" Cinder asked. "About us specifically."
"He knows I shifted in front of you. You heard. He knows about Gavin. Beyond that—" I shrugged. "He'll know the rest the moment he looks at us. Ignatius reads people the way you read vital signs."
"That's reassuring."
"It's terrifying. But he's on our side."
Cinder studied the house through the rain-blurred windshield—the dark stone, the sharp lines, the porch light still glowing faintly even in the gray morning light. "He's a dragon too."
It wasn't a question. I glanced at him.
"Yeah," I said. "He's a dragon. Old. Powerful. And very protective of the people he considers his."
"Am I one of those people?"
"Yes. Whether you want to be or not."
The corner of his mouth curved. "I suppose there are worse fates than being protected by ancient dragons."
"Wait until you meet Doryu. He’s normal. Well,” I clarified, “human anyway." He actually laughed at that, and the sound carried us out of the car and up the stone steps to the front door, which opened before I could knock.
Doryu stood in the entryway, casually in jeans. His gaze swept over both of us with the ease of a man accustomed to assessing situations in seconds.
"You look terrible," he told me, not unkindly. Then his eyes shifted to Cinder, and something in his expression softened. "You must be the one who didn't run."
Cinder blinked. "Word travels fast."