Chapter 18 #2
"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 cheeks before 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.
I kicked off my shoes. Climbed in wearing everything else—jeans, shirt, the borrowed sweater I'd claimed that smelled like his laundry detergent—because the thought of undressing required energy I no longer possessed.
The sheets were cool from the empty hours, and I curled onto my side facing the wall, pulling my knees up, making myself compact.
The mattress dipped behind me. Then his arm came around my waist—not tentative this time, not the careful negotiation of boundaries we'd been navigating for weeks.
Just solid. Certain. His chest against my back, his chin tucked against my shoulder, his cold seeping through the layers between us in a way that should have made me shiver and instead made something inside me go quiet.
"I can hear you thinking," he murmured against the back of my neck.
"I'm always thinking."
"I know. Try to stop."
"That's not how brains work."
"Humor me."
I closed my eyes. The thoughts didn't stop—they rarely did, not for me, not since childhood when my brain had decided that constant vigilance was the price of survival—but they softened.
Blurred at the edges. The list of failures and vulnerabilities and worst-case scenarios that had been scrolling through my head like a ticker tape began to slow, each item losing its sharp edges as the cold at my back seeped deeper.
And at some point—the thing we weren't talking about.
The enormous thing that Ignatius had said.
That Taz's biology had been out of whack since I arrived.
I wanted to ask, but I was frightened this would be one thing I couldn't handle at this moment.
His breathing was slow and even against my neck, each exhale a thin ribbon of cold that traced the ridge of my spine and dissolved into the warmth of the pillow.
Not quite human breathing—I knew that now, could catalog the difference the way I cataloged everything, the slightly longer intervals between inhales, the deeper expansion of his lungs, the way his heart rate settled into a rhythm that would have sent any cardiologist reaching for the crash cart.
Forty-two beats per minute. Maybe fewer. I could feel it through his chest, pressed against my back like a metronome set to a tempo the rest of the world didn't recognize.
I should have been terrified. Not of him—that ship had sailed spectacularly when I'd put my hands on a dragon's snout and felt the cold bend around me like a current—but of everything else.
The breach. Gavin. The data sitting somewhere out there in the digital ether, a ticking bomb with my fingerprints all over it.
Every clinical instinct I had screamed that I should be upright, on the phone, running damage control with the same relentless efficiency I brought to a code blue.
Instead, I lay in the arms of an ice dragon and felt my body surrender to exhaustion one system at a time.
My shoulders went first—the chronic tension I'd carried so long it had become structural, a permanent brace against whatever was coming next.
It released in a slow, almost painful unwinding, muscles I'd forgotten I was clenching finally letting go.
Then my jaw, which I'd been holding tight enough to crack a molar.
Then my hands, which uncurled from the fists I hadn't realized I was making, fingers going slack against the mattress.
Taz's arm tightened fractionally around my waist. Not pulling. Just adjusting. Like he could feel me coming apart and wanted to make sure all the pieces stayed in the same place.
"You're still thinking," he murmured.
"I'm thinking quieter."
"Progress."
His thumb found the strip of skin between my shirt and my jeans—an accidental gap, or maybe not accidental at all—and traced a slow line back and forth.
The cold of it was exquisite. Not sharp, not painful, just a clean, bright sensation that cut through the fog of exhaustion and guilt and gave me something immediate to focus on.
A single point of contact. A single truth.
He was here. I was here. The rest could wait.
"When I was in nursing school," I said, and I didn't know why I was saying it except that the dark and the quiet and the steady cold at my back made it feel like a confessional, "they taught us about triage.
How to look at a room full of people in crisis and decide who needed help first. Who could wait. Who couldn't be saved."
His thumb paused. Then resumed.
"I was good at it. I was always good at it.
The instructors said I had an unusual capacity for detachment—they meant it as a compliment, but it always felt like a diagnosis.
Like they were saying, 'You're good at this because something in you is already broken.
You've already learned how to look at suffering and not drown in it. '"
Taz didn't say anything. He didn't need to.
His breathing stayed steady against my neck, and his thumb kept moving—back and forth, back and forth—and the rhythm of it became a kind of permission.
To keep talking. To say the things I'd never said to anyone because no one had ever held still long enough to hear them.
"The thing they don't teach you," I continued, my voice dropping to something barely above a whisper, "is that the detachment isn't real.
It's performance. You stand at the bedside and you speak in calm, measured tones and you make decisions that save lives, and the whole time there's a version of you somewhere behind your sternum that's screaming.
That sees every patient as someone's person.
Someone's whole world. And you triage them anyway, because that's the job, and if you stop to feel it, people die.
" I felt his arm tighten around me—not a response to the words, exactly, but to the silence that came after them. The silence where the screaming lived.
"You're not broken," he said. His voice was low and rough and certain, the way he said everything that mattered.
"You're the opposite of broken. You built yourself into someone who could hold other people's worst moments without flinching, and you did it alone, and the cost of that is something no one ever bothered to count. "
My breath shuddered out of me. I pressed my face into the pillow, and his cold mouth found the knob of my spine just above my collar, and the kiss he left there was so careful it undid me more completely than anything desperate could have.
"I'm counting now," he whispered against my skin.
I didn't answer. I couldn't. But I reached down and laced my fingers through his where they rested against my stomach, and I held on the way I'd held on to every patient, every chart, every impossible night shift—with everything I had left.
His cold seeped into my knuckles. My warmth seeped into his.
And somewhere between one breath and the next, I was asleep.