Chapter 19 #3
Phoenix’s face flashed behind my eyes—not the wary, guarded look he’d worn when we met, but the moment he’d fallen asleep on my chest, mouth parted, hand fisted in my t-shirt like he didn’t dare let go.
My father kept talking, oblivious to the dragon waking.
“Once this is complete,” he said, “you’ll see how ridiculous this all is.
You’ll wonder what you ever saw in a gutter rat like him.
The binding will mute these…attachments.
” He made a contemptuous little flick of his fingers.
“You’ll thank me, eventually. Especially when he’s somewhere far away, unable to drag you down.
” He looked me in the eyes. "And of course if you pursue this, I will make him go away permanently. "
Something in my chest snapped.
Not bone. Not muscle. Something deeper. A line of the old lattice, pulled too tight for too long, finally breaking. The dragon roared.
Or maybe that was me.
Heat punched outward from my sternum in all directions.
The sigils Hartshorne had painted blazed white-hot, then black as if charred from the inside.
The metal band at my throat seared, then cracked with a sharp, ringing sound.
“Shit,” Hartshorne hissed, dropping the brush.
“I told you to keep him calm.” The heart monitor went berserk.
Every beep blurred into a frantic, continuous tone.
My father took a step back, for once not in control. “What are you doing?” he snapped at the doctor. “Stop it!”
“I can’t just—this isn’t a switch I flip,” Hartshorne snarled, yanking open another drawer, grabbing for a syringe. “He’s pushing back. The construct’s destabilizing—”
I understood his panic. You were not supposed to push back. You were supposed to lie there and take it. Be good. Be quiet. Let other people decide what you were allowed to feel. The dragon didn’t know how to do that. Not anymore.
It lunged.
Fire surged through every nerve, but it wasn’t like the old uncontrolled rush. It was…focused. A blade instead of a bomb. Every time my father said Phoenix’s name with that contempt, it flared hotter.
Hartshorne lunged toward me with the syringe. “Hold him—”
The air around his hand shimmered. The sedative in my veins boiled. The syringe exploded, plastic shattering, liquid hissing into vapor.
Hartshorne swore and jerked back, shaking his hand where red welts were already rising.
The overhead light popped with a sharp crack, showering sparks.
The room plunged into dim emergency glow.
Somewhere outside the door, an alarm began to howl, low and insistent.
My father stared at me, horror carving lines into the smooth mask of his face.
“Cole,” he said sharply. “Stop this. Now.”
I tried to speak. What came out wasn’t words. It was a gust of steam, hot enough to fog the glass of the framed certification on the wall.
The dragon pushed harder, ramming itself against the remnants of the old binding. Something tore. For a heartbeat, my vision went double: the room overlaid with another place, another time—a childhood hallway, wallpaper peeling, flames licking along the ceiling as I screamed.
No.
Not this time. I grabbed onto the only solid thing in the maelstrom—Phoenix’s scent in my memory, smoky and sharp, the way he said my name like it mattered.
The heat sharpened. The metal bands around my wrists glowed, then bent, warping outward.
The sigils etched into them flared and then ran like molten wax.
Hartshorne staggered back another step. “He shouldn’t be able to do this,” he cried. Panic had leached the professional calm from his voice. “Not with the first binding still intact—”
“It’s not intact,” I rasped, voice shredded.
The floor under the bed creaked. My father glanced down. "Sedate him," he yelled.
The polished vinyl was buckling slightly, as if something beneath it had expanded. “Another sedative might stop his heart,” Hartshorne shot back. Sweat stood out on his forehead. “The lattice is in flux—I told you we needed more time to map it—”
“I pay you to fix him, not make excuses,” Wells snarled.
“Then stop provoking him,” Hartshorne snapped.
Wells opened his mouth, furious, and that was when he made the final mistake.
“If you don’t calm down this instant,” he said, pointing a shaking finger at me like I was eight years old again, “I will personally make sure that boy of yours disappears. Do you understand? I will bury him so deep even you won’t remember his name. ”
The dragon reared up, enormous inside the too-small cage of my bones.
Mine, it roared. Mate. Not yours. Not yours.
Heat tore through me like someone had ripped my chest open and poured lava into the cavity.
The remaining sigils on my skin blistered, then peeled, flaking away as ash that vanished before it hit the sheets.
The band at my throat snapped completely and flew across the room, hitting the wall with a denting crack.
The bed frame groaned. Metal warped. The IV stand toppled, clattering to the floor, lines tearing free from my arm. Blood spattered the sheet in bright drops, instantly hissing into steam.
My father stumbled back, for once honestly afraid. “Cole!”
Hartshorne threw an arm up to shield his face, stumbling toward the door. “We need containment wards,” he shouted. “Now. Before—”
The door flew inward.
Not opening. Buckling.
The reinforced wood bowed like cheap plastic, then shattered inwards in a burst of splinters and warped metal. The corridor beyond filled with smoke—not choking, not black fire-smoke, but a thin, shimmering haze that smelled like ozone and dragon-scent and…something else.
Two figures stood in the wrecked doorway.
Ignatius first—broad shoulders, suit jacket singed at the edges, eyes burning a deep, furious gold. His jaw was set in a way I’d never seen before, a promise of ruin aimed squarely at my father. And behind him, half a step to the side, chest heaving, hair a wild mess, eyes wide and blazing—
“Cole,” Phoenix whispered.
My dragon stilled. The heat didn’t vanish; it rerouted, slamming sideways toward him, curling around his scent like it had been looking for him the whole time. My vision tunneled. The edges of the room blurred until all I could see was Phoenix.
“Hey,” he said, voice shaking but steady enough to cross the distance between us. “Hey, sweetheart. You with me?”
Sweetheart. He called me that like it meant mine.
My father recovered first. Of course he did.
“You have no right—” he began, stepping in front of the bed like he could physically block their view, like he still owned the ground he was standing on.
Ignatius didn’t even look at him. He brushed past, one big hand landing hard on my father’s shoulder and shoving him sideways into the wall with enough force to knock the breath from him. “Touch him again and I will end you,” he said calmly, like he was commenting on the weather.
Phoenix was already moving. He stumbled once—the floor underfoot softening, refreezing, reacting to my wild temperature spikes—but he didn’t stop until he was right there, at the side of the bed, fingers hovering over my arm like he wanted to grab me and didn’t know where it was safe.
“Don’t,” I croaked. “Too hot.”
“I don’t care,” he said, which was a lie because his eyes were watering from the heat, but he lunged, wrapping his body around mine.
The dragon exhaled. The world tilted again, but this time it wasn’t ripping apart; it was…
reorienting. Like everything inside me had been spinning off its axis and suddenly clicked into place around a new center.
Him.
The alarms still screamed. Hartshorne babbled something about unstable constructs and catastrophic failure. My father tried to push off the wall, face twisted with fury and something uglier—fear of losing his investment, his control.
Ignatius stepped between him and the bed, shoulders squared, eyes still lit with that inhuman glow.
But all of that was background.
Phoenix held on, hard enough for me to feel it through the numbing, searing rush of magic. “You’re okay,” he promised. “I’ve got you. We’re getting you out of here.” I wanted to tell him he shouldn’t be here. That my father would hurt him. That the dragon might hurt him.
Instead, what came out was a raw, broken whisper. “He said he’d make you disappear.”
Phoenix’s jaw flexed. He flicked a glance at Wells that could have stripped paint. “He’s welcome to try,” he said softly. “But he’s going to have to get through a lot of very angry dragons first.”
Ignatius’s mouth twitched, humorless. “Starting with me.”
The dragon inside me curled around those words like a promise.
Mine. Safe. Not alone. The heat finally stopped climbing.
It didn’t go away—the room was still shimmering, monitors still warping at the edges—but it stopped trying to burn through everything around me.
It flowed instead toward Phoenix’s hand, toward the sight of him, the sound of his voice.
I let out a long, shuddering breath.
The bindings on my soul lay in cracked pieces. The old lattice was broken. The new cage Hartshorne had tried to build lay scorched and ruined.
I didn’t know what that meant, not really. For my control. For my future. But as Phoenix’s fingers tightened around mine and Ignatius squared off against my father and Hartshorne, and the dragon finally, finally lay down quietly with its head in my chest.
For the first time since I’d opened my eyes on that too-white ceiling, I didn’t feel alone.
And that, more than anything else, terrified my father. I could see it in his eyes as he stared at the three of us—me broken and burning, Phoenix at my side, Ignatius at my front like a shield.
He’d lost.
He just didn’t know yet what I’d do with that.