10 Avaline #3
Reed pressed his brow tighter against my temple, his eyes sweeping the hardened line of my jaw, seeing the unbending resolve of the woman who had survived hell without breaking. The terror in him didn’t vanish, but it forged into iron resolve.
“All three,” Reed said, his voice dropping into low bedrock authority that filled the room. “They have to blow at the exact same second.”
“Simultaneously,” I agreed, turning my gaze back to Brann at the foot of the bed. “I can give you exact locations and ward keys for all three.”
Brann stared at me, his mouth parting in stunned disbelief. “The three booster sites... you have the exact locations? And the ward keys?”
“I’ve known them for years,” I said. “But if one goes off early, the others lock down. Destroy all three physical reservoirs, and the magic collapses. But more importantly—the poison river in the Dreamscape will drain at the exact same second.”
Nadia stepped closer, her clinical mask replaced by stunned reverence. “You’re going back under while the charges blow?”
“Yes,” I said simply, and then I told them everything I knew.
Brann keyed his radio. I heard the click of it, the little burst of static, and then his voice went crisp and fast and operational, a different man entirely.
“All squads, gear for a demo run, three targets, hard timeline, brief in five.” He looked back at me and inclined his head. Not the careful tilt you give the fragile. The short hard bow one soldier gives another.
“Ma’am,” he said, and was gone into the shaking dark of the hall, Nadia and Maren a half-stride behind him, issuing their own commands to their people.
Then it was only us.
The room went quiet under the dust, and the last of what I’d been running on drained out of me all at once, the way water leaves a cracked vessel—not slowly, not with warning, just gone.
The black edges of the coma came creeping back in at the corners of my sight.
My body was a spent thing, a used-up cold engine, and it wanted the dark, and for the first time in twenty years the dark and I wanted the same thing, because the dark was where the bridge was.
I turned my face into the burning line of his jaw.
His arms came around me full and complete, both of them, the ruined forearms crossed over my heart, his legs threaded back through mine, his whole furnace body wrapped around the frozen wreck of me with nothing asked and nothing withheld.
He pressed his brow to my temple, searing bone to cold bone, and I felt the shudder that went through him—not the channeling, not the fire.
The other thing. The dread of the man who had already lost me once to a bright event in the dark.
The heavy weight of his thighs tangling with mine and the hard evidence of his arousal pressed against my hip was an agonizing, delicious promise of what waited for us on the other side of this.
“You heard the doctor,” he said against my skin. Low. Wrecked. “The backwash.”
“I heard her.”
“I’ll be holding the bridge when it comes.” His grip tightened. “If the water comes back up wrong, Avaline, I don’t—” His voice broke and he let it. “Tell me not to let go of you and I’ll let the whole bridge fall.”
And there it is. The still water went soft at the edges, the way it only ever did for him. He’d drop the road for one thousand souls to keep the one. He means it. That is exactly why the choice can’t be his.
“No,” I whispered. “You build and hold the bridge.”
“Avaline—”
“You hold the bridge, and you trust me to hold myself.” I found the strength for one more thing, one last curl of fingers hooking into the heat of his arm, drawing him into me, taking the warmth I would need for the crossing straight off his skin and down into my spine.
“You told me on that ledge you wouldn’t build me another cage out of love and call it protection.
Don’t start now, mate.” I pressed my icy cheek harder to the stubble of his jaw, and I felt him go still, felt the vow hold. “Hold your line. I’ll cross it.”
The fierce, protective heat rolling off him made my nipples harden into tight peaks against the chill. A sharp, exquisite hunger clawed at my core as I imagined those strong hands finally rolling me onto my back and taking what was his.
The hard stone of anger that I’d carried—the resentment that had kept me alive in the dark—cracked and began to dissolve. I didn’t need it anymore. He wasn’t the boy who had left me. He was my mate holding the bridge so I could save myself.
The tremor in him settled into something else. Not peace. Faith. The hardest thing I had ever asked a protector to do, and he did it, and I loved him so completely in that moment that my heart ached.
“Take me back down,” I said.
His breath left him, long and shaking, against my hair.
“Go get your wolf,” said the Founding Alpha, and pressed his burning mouth to my frozen temple, and held.
I let my body go limp against his chest. I stopped fighting the black at the edges of my sight and I turned toward it the way you turn toward an open door.
Somewhere below the dust I caught it again—magma, and green sap, and the mate-smell of him that no cage ever built could take apart—and I carried it down with me like a struck match.
The room fell away.