Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
The bed was wrong.
Rhaezon's hand swept across the sheets before his eyes opened.
Cold cotton. The shape of her body impressed into the mattress, but the warmth was gone — not just cooling, gone.
Minutes, not seconds. His body registered the absence before his mind assembled the reason, and he was already swinging his legs to the floor when the night outside the window changed pitch.
Something was in the air. A frequency below hearing. A vibration that preceded—
The wall disintegrated.
The explosion punched through the outer stone and turned the bedroom into shrapnel.
He hit the floor on his stomach, arms over his head, and the bed — the bed where they had been lying together less than an hour ago — lifted and slammed into the far wall in a shower of wood and fabric.
A section of ceiling came down. Dust and heat rolled over him in a wave that tasted of char and something chemical, something manufactured. Not natural fire. Ordnance.
He was on his feet before the debris settled.
The outer wall gaped open to the night sky, a ragged wound in stone that had stood for centuries.
Through it he could see the plateau burning — secondary fires blooming along the eastern perimeter, the shapes of the outbuildings lit orange against the dark.
If they had been in bed. Both of them. If she had not slipped out, if he had not reached for an empty pillow—
He killed the thought. Killed it completely. He could not afford it.
The corridor was smoke and noise. The estate's alarm system shrieked — a layered harmonic Davn had installed years ago, piercing enough to wake the dead and currently redundant given that the dead would have been woken by the explosions. Blaster fire crackled somewhere below.
Davn materialized from the smoke. Armed. Dressed. Already moving with the fluid economy of a man who had slept in his boots — which, knowing Davn, he had. His face was ash-streaked, his white skin and dark stripes ghosted grey. A blaster in each hand.
"Where is she?"
The question ripped out of Rhaezon's throat before he'd finished forming it.
Davn's expression shifted. Barely. The barest tightening around his eyes. "She's not with you?"
"The kitchen," they said together.
They moved. Down the main stairwell — chunks of the balustrade missing, the stone cracked in long diagonal lines that mapped the structural damage.
Another explosion shook the building, distant, the north wing or beyond it.
Rhaezon's scales surfaced. His eyes went full amber.
The broken wing scraped the wall as he took the stairs three at a time, and the pain was distant, irrelevant, filed under a category his body had labeled later.
A Kleotrian soldier came around the corner at the second landing. Davn put two bolts in his chest before Rhaezon processed the orange-and-black striped face. The soldier dropped. Davn stepped over him without breaking stride.
"Kleotrian military," Davn said. Flat. Factual. Filing it in real time. "Dáinn's."
Another corner. Two more soldiers. Rhaezon hit the first one with his full weight and felt armor buckle under his fist. The second raised a blaster, and Davn shot him through the hand. The weapon clattered. Rhaezon put the first soldier into the wall hard enough to crack plaster and left him there.
The kitchen corridor was thick with dust. The ceiling had partially come down — ancient wooden beams hanging at angles, stone rubble narrowing the passage. Rhaezon shoved through it. A beam across the doorway. He gripped it and wrenched; the wood splintered in his hands, and he was through.
November was on the kitchen floor.
His heart stopped. A complete cessation that lasted one beat, two, before it slammed back into operation at a rate that made his vision pulse.
She was sitting up. Conscious. Blood on her shoulder, glass in her palms, stone dust in her hair.
She looked up when he came through the doorway and her face — cut, dusty, absolutely steady — met his.
"I'm all right. Let's go."
Three seconds. He gave himself three seconds.
His hands cupped her face. He turned it left, right.
Checked her pupils in the emergency lighting.
The cut on her shoulder was surface. The glass in her palms was shallow.
The scale necklace glowed white-hot against her chest. His hands were shaking badly enough that she covered them with hers.
"Rhaezon. I'm all right."
He scooped her off the floor. Her feet were bare — she'd come down for tea in his shirt and nothing else. The kitchen floor was a minefield of shattered stone and glass. She did not argue about being carried. She wrapped her arms around his neck and he moved.
The main hall was impassable. A section of the second floor had come through the ceiling and turned the central corridor into a cascade of rubble.
Blaster fire echoed from the west wing — the staff quarters.
Rhaezon's jaw clenched. Mathen. Faelor. The stablemaster.
He could not help them and carry November at the same time.
The calculus of that choice would haunt him, but he made it instantly and without revision.
"The tunnels," he said over his shoulder to Davn.
They cut left through the parlor — decor scattered across the floor, the rug kicked sideways, and a deep stone window embrasure cracked but holding.
They went through the parlor's service door, down a flight of stone stairs to the lower corridor.
The hidden doorway was where it had always been — a section of wall that responded to Drakon warmth.
Rhaezon pressed his palm flat against it and the mechanism engaged. The stone slid back.
"Get through the tunnels," Davn said. He'd stopped at the corridor junction, positioning himself where the approach was widest. "I'll cover you."
"Davn—"
"Go." Davn had done the math. He was not interested in a second opinion.
Boots sounded on the stone stairway. Multiple. Coming fast.
Davn stepped into the junction and opened fire with both blasters.
The sound was enormous in the enclosed space.
Rhaezon pulled November through the hidden doorway and into the darkness beyond.
The tunnel was narrow — ancient stone, hand-carved, older than the estate above it.
Emergency lighting flickered on in strips along the floor, casting everything in pale blue.
He set November down. She steadied herself against the wall. Behind them, the sound of Davn's blasters was continuous.
Then a different sound: impact. A grunt. Silence.
Rhaezon turned back toward the opening.
"Don't—" Davn's voice, strained, from the other side: "Keep going. I'll hold them."
"You're hit."
"I said keep going."
The blaster fire resumed. Slower. One weapon instead of two.
Rhaezon stood at the threshold with every fiber of his body screaming at him to go back for the man who had freed him from chains a decade ago, the man who sat at his table and slept under his roof and had never once asked for anything in return.
November's hand tightened on his arm. She did not tell him to go or stay. She left the choice with him and her fingers on his skin were warm and his friend was bleeding and his mate was barefoot in a tunnel and he could not save everyone.
He turned away from the opening.
They ran.
The tunnel sloped downward, curving beneath the estate's foundations toward the plateau's edge. He knew every step of it. The route would bring them out near the lower pastures, a quarter mile from the stables. From there—
He rounded the bend and stopped.
The ceiling had come down.
Not partially. Completely. A wall of stone and packed earth filled the tunnel from floor to the jagged remnants of its roof. The explosions above had done their work thoroughly. No gap. No way through.
November looked at the collapse. Looked at him. Did not waste time on the obvious.
"What else?"
He was already calculating. "Side door. East corridor, ground level. Stables."
"Stables," she repeated. She understood.
He led the way, and they reversed. Back up the slope, back through the tunnel, past the hidden doorway — the corridor beyond was empty now, blaster scoring on the walls, no sign of Davn — and up the flight of stairs.
He carried her again through the parlor and then left instead of right, toward the east corridor and the service exit the kitchen staff used for deliveries.
The door was intact. He set November down and checked the exterior through the narrow window.
The stable yard was lit by the burning north wing, shadows jumping, but the stable building itself was dark and standing.
He could hear the kethral — their panicked vocalizations, the heavy percussion of hooves against stall doors. Alive. Scared. Rideable.
He opened the door. Cold plateau air hit his lungs and cleared the smoke from his head. They ran.
The stable was chaos. Kethral stamping and screaming in their stalls, eyes rolling white. The young one that had broken through the fence had already kicked through its door and vanished into the dark. Two of the older animals were pressed against the back walls of their stalls in rigid terror.
Rhaezon went for Aethon — his own mount, the steadiest animal on the estate. November went straight to Shade.
He stopped. "November—"
She was already in the stall, hands on the kethral's neck, her voice low and continuous.
The animal was shaking. Its ears pinned flat.
It bared its teeth when she approached, but she did not stop.
She put her forehead against its broad jaw and spoke to it the way she spoke to all frightened creatures — full sentences, steady cadence, absolute calm.
Shade stopped shaking. One ear came forward.
"We'll move faster on two," she said without turning around. "I'll follow. You lead."