He pulls me against him. Cradles my dying body in arms that have killed gods’ servants and torn monsters apart. His heat is a memory of warmth that can’t reach me anymore—my body has gone too cold, too far gone for his fire to help.
“Don’t.” His voice breaks on the word. Shatters completely. “Don’t leave.”
I’m not leaving. I’m being taken.
The distinction matters. Would matter, if I could say it. Would matter, if I had the breath to explain that I would stayif staying were an option, that I would fight if fighting could change anything.
But the poison has won. The magic is dead. And my body is following.
My eyes drift closed. The effort of keeping them open has become too much.
Darkness.
Comfortable. Welcoming. The absence of pain and cold and the constant pressure of survival that has defined every moment since I first understood what my bloodline meant.
I could let go. Could slip into the nothing that waits beyond consciousness and let the poison finish what it started.
Easy.
Easier than fighting. Easier than struggling against an ending that was always inevitable. The dreams showed me this moment for a reason. Prepared me for a death I couldn’t escape no matter what choices I made.
Dying in a frozen canyon with a dragon holding my body like I’m the precious thing. The irreplaceable thing. The thing worth roaring for, worth breaking for.
There are worse ways to go.
But his heartbeatwon’t let me surrender completely.
I feel it through the layers of his ruined body—that strong, steady rhythm drumming against my ear where my head rests against his torso.
Alive.
He’s alive. Fighting to keep me that way, even though there’s nothing his fire can burn to save me.
The poison doesn’t care about his heartbeat. My body doesn’t care about his desperation.
But I care.
I care that he’s here. That he came for me, again and again, even when it cost him pieces of himself he’ll never get back. I care that the coldest, most controlled predator I’ve ever met is falling apart because I’m dying in his arms.
I care.
And caring is the last thing I feel before the darkness takes me completely.
His voice followsme into the nothing.
“Soreia. Stay with me. Stay. I’ll find a way. I’ll?—”
The words fragment. Scatter. Lose meaning as my consciousness dissolves.
But beneath them—carried on the current of his breath and his heat and his desperate grip—is an intensity that has no name. A need that transcends language or logic or the careful walls we’ve both built around ourselves.
I fall into the dark holding onto that.
Holding onto him.
And somewhere in the space between dying and dead, I hear him say my name one more time.
Not a command.
