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My head’s pounding. It hurts so badly that I can’t even form words.
“She’s coming back.” The voice is unfamiliar.
Foreign.
“That’s a heartbeat,” the same voice says. “I told you she’d be fine.”
It’s hard—so dang hard—but I force my eyes open. Gideon’s holding someone by his collar. I blink, my eyes burning, and the image is still there. Gideon’s shaking the smallish man now. “You told me it would be immediate. Why did it take more than an hour to get her back?”
“I told you she had to be cold.”
“She was cold!” Gideon’s roaring now, and I’m worried what he may do to the poor man.
“Not within the parameters I set, and frankly, even those were outside of what?—”
“It was a bloody war zone!” Gideon’s rattling this poor man’s brains. “We did everything we could, but one of the stupid earth dragons smashed?—”
“Gideon?” My voice sounds like two pieces of sandpaper being rubbed together. “Where are we?”
He turns toward me, releasing the lapels of the man’s white coat. “You’re—your brain’s fine? You know who I am?”
My hands move then, both of them coming up to press against the fronts of my eyes. “If this horrible, painful pounding is normal, then sure. It’s working.”
“She’ll be pretty dehydrated,” the white coat man says. “To reverse the metoprolol, we had to push glucagon and epinephrine?—”
Gideon waves his hand through the air. “Don’t care as long as that’s not medically alarming.”
I slowly force myself to a seated position, and that’s when I realize what’s missing. “Where’s my bond to Azar?”
Gideon’s face transforms in that moment, from handsome to dizzyingly beautiful, because he’s beaming with real joy. “It worked.” He crouches next to my bed, his hand reaching for mine. “I freed you from him.”
He freed me.
Instead of allowing him to take my hand, I ball mine into a fist and slam it into his jaw, sliding off the bed on the side opposite of him, yanking leads and an IV needle out of my arm as I do. Blood sprays outward, splattering all over the man whom Gideon was just borderline strangling.
“You can’t take those off,” the white coat man says, poking at now-alarming machines frantically. “You’re awake, but your system?—”
“Fix it,” I shout, ignoring the doctor. “Fix it!”
“I can’t fix it,” Gideon says. “Even if I wanted to, you can’t be bonded to a dragon who’s dead.”
I knew he was going to say it. I knew, but it still didn’t prepare me to hear the words. It can’t possibly be true. “No!”
“He died after you did,” Gideon says. “And that’s why his death didn’t kill you! I did it—I found a way to save you, just like I swore I would.” He’s shaking his head. “I killed you first, and the trauma sent him crashing into the ground. We lost a lot of good men, but we killed hundreds of dragons, including one of the invulnerable flame ones. You have to see that this is good news for all humanity.”
I’m not even listening to him anymore. If Azar was really dead, I’d know it, right? I crouch on the floor, my hands flung up in front of me to block out his words. And then I close my eyes and reach for Azar.
“Your mother’s free too, now. And her dragon’s almost surely dead.” Gideon’s still trying to get my attention, but I can’t even look at him. If I do, it’ll be like accepting that he’s right. It’ll be like acknowledging that he really did what he always wanted to do.
That he freed me.
By slaying my captor.
Except Azar wasn’t my captor, not anymore.
Gideon would call it Stockholm Syndrome, the feelings I have for Azar, but it’s not that. It isn’t.
And I can’t feel him at all. Not a location. Not a single emotion from the bond. No colors. No pain. Nothing. It’s like it’s just. . .all gone.
