Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
AERO
Aero couldn’t sleep.
He’d tried. For hours, he’d lain in his too-short bed in his too-quiet cabin, staring at the ceiling and willing his body to rest. The forest outside was silent—no wind, no animals, nothing to distract from the chaos inside his own skull.
His dragon wouldn’t settle. The beast clawed at his control, demanding things he’d denied it for centuries.
The dragon’s demands had circled the same two imperatives all night. Claim. Protect. Two words that laid bare everything he’d spent centuries refusing to want.
The dragon’s demands had been building for weeks. Since the moment he’d first caught Cassia Gale’s scent in the council chambers—ozone and sea salt and something sweeter beneath. Since his beast had roared a recognition he’d tried to classify as a surge anomaly and failed.
Now his own behavior had become the data. And the data was damning.
The way his every carefully constructed framework dissolved the moment she walked into a room—that was the datum he couldn’t explain away.
Delos’s words echoed through his skull: You finally met your mate, and your brain is short-circuiting because you’ve spent eight hundred years pretending you don’t have feelings.
Aero threw back the covers and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The clock on the nightstand read 3:47 a.m.—two hours before his internal alarm would sound. Two hours of restless waiting stretched ahead of him.
He padded to the window and stared out at the forest. The cabin at the edge of Haven Shores had been meant to provide privacy. Isolation. A refuge for an antisocial elder who preferred data to company.
Now the isolation felt like a cage.
His dragon strained at its leash.
She wasn’t unprotected. She was a powerful witch with atmospheric wards on her foundation and a familiar who would raise hell if anything threatened her. She didn’t need him standing guard.
He turned from the window and caught sight of the photograph on his dresser. The only personal item he’d brought to Haven Shores. The only personal item he carried anywhere.
His parents. Storm dragons, both of them, captured in a rare moment of stillness. His mother’s hair was wild around her shoulders, streaked with the same gray that touched his own temples. His father’s arm around her waist, protective and possessive in a way Aero had never understood.
Until now.
They’d been killed when he was barely two hundred. Hunters seeking dragon components for magical artifacts. He’d been too young to fight, too weak to save them. He’d hidden in the mountains and watched the smoke rise from their bodies and sworn he would never be that vulnerable again.
That vulnerability had been their undoing. His father had stayed to fight instead of fleeing because his mother couldn’t fly fast enough. His mother had returned to the battle instead of escaping because she couldn’t leave her mate behind. Love had made them slow, made them stupid, made them dead.
Eight hundred years of keeping that promise. Eight hundred years of feeling nothing, wanting nothing, needing no one.
And now a storm witch with wild curls and sea-glass eyes had shattered it all in less than a month.
5:47 a.m.
Aero’s eyes snapped open. He’d dozed eventually, slumped in the chair by the window, and now the gray light of pre-dawn crept through the glass.
His dragon was already awake. Already demanding.
Go to her.
He made coffee. Black. Hot enough to burn. A ritual that had anchored his mornings for three centuries. The normalcy should have been grounding.
It wasn’t.
Last night kept replaying in his mind. The wave attack. The way their magic had combined—his lightning, her wind, the devastating precision of their coordinated assault. The feeling of her body pressed against his as they shattered the water’s assault.
The way she’d leaned into him afterward, exhausted and trusting. The way he’d held her and never wanted to let go.
Our magic knows. Our beast knows. Why do you keep denying what’s obvious?
Because obvious wasn’t the same as safe. Because wanting something this badly meant losing it would destroy him. Because he’d built his entire existence around never being this vulnerable, and the foundations were cracking with every moment he spent in her presence.
Coward, his dragon sneered. You’ve faced down armies. Survived hunters. Outlived civilizations. And you’re afraid of a witch?
Not afraid of her. Afraid of what she represented. Afraid of the gaping vulnerability that caring about someone created. Afraid of becoming his parents—so devoted to each other that they’d forgotten how to survive.
He drained his coffee and reached for his jacket.
The investigation. He would focus on the investigation. They’d identified the energy signature last night—ocean-based magic, almost certainly siren. Nerissa was the obvious suspect. He needed to discuss strategy with Cassia, coordinate their research approach, maintain professional—
You’re not going there for the investigation and you know it.
Aero’s molars ached from clenching. His dragon was right. He was going to her cottage because he couldn’t stay away. He walked out of his cabin and into the pale morning light.
The path to Cassia’s cottage wound through the edge of the forest and along the cliffs overlooking the harbor. Dawn painted the sky in shades of gold and rose, and the ocean below reflected it in fragments of color. It should have been beautiful. He should have noticed.
All he could think about was her.
The way she’d looked at him last night. The way her magic had felt tangled with his—not chaotic, not overwhelming, but right.
Stop being dramatic. You’re a dragon elder. You don’t get to be dramatic.
His dragon rumbled disagreement.