Chapter 45
FORTY-FIVE
CASSIA
The siren ascended on a pillar of churning water, her iridescent eyes blazing with the kind of obsession that had curdled into poison over three decades.
“You should be mourning,” Nerissa’s voice carried impossibly clear across the harbor, cutting through the evening air like a blade. “Your little witch looked so fragile when she fell. Did she survive?”
Cassia gripped the porch railing, forcing herself upright despite the pain flaring in her ribs. She wanted to shout back—wanted to hurl lightning and fury and prove she wasn’t fragile at all—but her magic felt distant, muted by exhaustion and healing. She had nothing to fight with.
Aero didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
His dragon tore free.
Cassia had seen him shift before—the research flights, the night he’d taken her into the sky. Those transformations had been controlled, graceful, his human form flowing into dragon with practiced ease.
This was something else entirely.
The shift exploded out of him in a wave of raw power.
His wings unfurled against the fading sunset, vast enough to block out the sky, lightning crackling along every joint.
When he roared, the sound shook the foundations of buildings and sent what few people remained near the harbor fleeing for cover.
He was terrifying. He was beautiful. He was fighting for her.
The thought made her chest ache in ways that had nothing to do with healing bones.
He launched, lightning crackling in his wake, the clouds overhead responding to his passage, darkening from rose and gold to threatening gray.
Nerissa watched him come with a smile that held no sanity.
“There you are,” she called. “Finally showing your true form. Does she know what you really are, dragon? Does she understand what she’s chosen?”
Aero’s only response was a blast of lightning that turned the water around Nerissa’s pillar to steam.
The battle began.
Cassia had never seen anything like it.
Fire and lightning against water and ice.
Ancient power meeting ancient power in a display that turned the harbor into a war zone.
Steam rose in massive clouds where Aero’s attacks hit the water.
Ice formed and shattered as Nerissa hurled spears and walls and serpents made of frozen ocean at the dragon circling above her.
He was faster than she’d imagined—eight hundred years of aerial combat distilled into pure instinct, his massive body twisting and diving and climbing with a speed that shouldn’t have been possible for something his size.
And his attacks—gods, his attacks. Lightning didn’t just strike from the clouds.
It poured from him, crackling along his scales before lancing toward Nerissa in devastating arcs.
Fire followed, dragon breath that superheated the air and sent plumes of steam rising high enough to be visible for miles.
The harbor boiled. The sky shattered with thunder. Haven Shores trembled.
People were gathering—she could see them at the edge of her vision, clustering in groups at safe distances.
Theo’s pack formed a protective perimeter around the evacuation routes, their shifted forms ready to intervene if the battle spilled toward civilians.
Leo’s lions stood guard near the marina, golden coats gleaming in the fading light.
And overhead, another dragon circled—smaller, golden-red where Aero was storm-gray.
Delos. Mostly healed but not fully, his wing membrane still showing the faint lines of scarring.
He wasn’t engaging directly, but every time Nerissa tried to retreat toward the open ocean, he dove to cut off her escape, driving her back toward Aero’s devastating assault.
The two dragons worked in wordless coordination—not telepathy, but something deeper. Trust, maybe. The kind of partnership that came from years of fighting side by side.
Beck and Rosemary were coordinating the civilian response near the marina, their voices calm and efficient over the chaos.
“Cassia.” Junie appeared at her side, Avine right behind her. “You shouldn’t be standing.”
“I shouldn’t be a lot of things.” She couldn’t look away from the battle. “I should be out there.”
“You’d die,” Avine said quietly. “Your magic is still recovering. You don’t have the strength.”
“I know.” The words tasted like ash. “I hate it.”
A massive ice serpent lunged at Aero from below—Nerissa had been building it beneath the surface while he focused on her direct attacks. It caught his wing, fangs of frozen water scoring across membrane, and he roared in pain and fury.
Cassia’s heart stopped.
But Aero twisted mid-air, lightning exploding from every scale, and the serpent shattered into a thousand pieces of ice that rained down on the harbor like frozen tears. He dove toward Nerissa with renewed fury, and Cassia started breathing again.
“He’s winning,” Junie said, her chaos-magic crackling along her fingertips as she added her power to the wards the other witches were maintaining. “She can’t touch him.”
“She hurt him.”
“A scratch. He’s too fast, too strong. She’s old and powerful, but she’s not—” Junie gestured at the dragon currently tearing through a wall of ice like it was tissue paper. “She’s not that.”
Nerissa seemed to realize it too. Her attacks grew more desperate, less coordinated. She flung water and ice in wild patterns, no longer trying to defeat Aero but simply to survive his assault. Her beautiful face twisted with rage and fear and something that looked horrifyingly like grief.
“You could have had this!” she screamed, hurling a spear of ice that shattered against Aero’s scales without leaving a mark. “I would have given you everything! I loved you!”
Cassia’s stomach turned. She’d known the basics—the rejection thirty years ago, the obsession that had followed. But hearing it, watching Nerissa’s sanity crumble in real time, was different.
This was what happened when love curdled into possession. When wanting became entitlement. When “no” became an unforgivable wound instead of an answer to accept.
Aero’s dragon roared—a sound that shook the foundations of every building within a mile, that contained eight centuries of solitary existence and the burning fury of nearly losing his mate. He dove toward Nerissa with claws extended, lightning crackling between his teeth.
She raised a wall of water—her last defense, everything she had left. He tore through it like it was nothing.
In seconds, he had her pinned to the rocks at the harbor’s edge. His massive claws held her fast, pressing her into the stone. His jaws hovered inches from her throat.
The battle was over.