“What the hell is going on?” Drakken barked, the voice of a general demanding a situation report. “This had better not be another bid for attention!”
“Stop being insensitive,” Caspian snapped at him, his wolf pressing close to his skin, as it homed in on the dragon prince. “Don’t you see Max is crying? Something happened.”
“That’s why I asked,” Drakken shot back, but the bite had gone out of it. He was staring at my face. At the tears. At the way my fingers were knotted in Aelindor’s shirt like it was the only thing keeping me from falling through the floor of the world.
If I hadn’t been so destroyed, the scene might have been hilarious. Four of us crammed into a tent meant for one person and a bedroll. Caspian hunched sideways to avoid elbowing Drakken. Drakken bent at the waist like a man trying to fit inside a child’s playhouse, smoke leaking faintly from his nostrils, broadsword scraping the canvas. Aelindor was the only one wholooked remotely composed, even with his linen shirt buttoned wrong.
I knew in my bones that these heirs had never bent for anything or anyone, but they were here, bending for a tent that was too small for even one of them. Something about that image lodged in my chest alongside the grief.
“Get out before this tent collapses,” Aelindor advised in his steady voice. “I’ll bring Max to our tent. She’ll sleep there tonight.”
“Get out, Drakken,” Caspian said. “You’re in my way again.”
Drakken scowled at the shifter, but he backed out. The canvas rustled as his shoulders scraped both sides of the flap on the way through. Caspian followed, but he didn’t go far. I heard him stop just outside and hold the flap open for Aelindor and me.
“I can walk,” I murmured through the last of my tears.
“Shush,” Aelindor crooned, his lips brushing my hair. “Let us take care of you.”
He shifted me in his arms, gathering me against his chest. He bent low to clear the entrance, moving with a grace that made the awkward geometry of the tent irrelevant. His arms were steady. His heartbeat was even. Everything about him was an anchor dropped into the storm inside me.
The night air hit my damp face as he carried me out. Cold, sharp, laced with the sulfur tang that clung to everything this close to the DarkVeil. The campfire had burned down to a low bed of embers that threw unsteady light across the circle of tents.
Caspian moved to Aelindor’s side, one hand hovering near my arm, ready to help. His wolf instincts had him pacing, guarding, checking the perimeter with quick turns of his head even as he stayed close.
Drakken stood a few feet away.
He’d planted himself like a sentry, watching me—for the first time not with hostility, but with the lost expression of a man who didn’t know what to do with me.
The Spartans at the perimeter watched Aelindor carry me toward the heirs’ tent, and then, without a word or an order, they fanned out into the dark, back to guarding the line.
I wondered if they’d still see me as one of their own after this. The girl cadet who’d drunk their war-grade liquor reduced to a sobbing wreck in their beloved Fae prince’s arms.
But that was the smallest of my fears now. So small it barely registered against the inferno of panic burning through my chest.
Missy, my little viper. Alone and taken!
“You can bring her bedroll to our tent, Drakken,” Aelindor said over his shoulder as he brought me into the larger tent.
He lowered himself onto his bedroll with me cradled against him. I pressed my face into his neck and breathed him in, his addictive scent of pine and powerful Fae male blanketing me.
It comforted me for a second before my lungs seized again.
A tightness started in my ribs, a band of iron cinching around my chest, squeezing the air out in thin, useless gasps. The tent walls seemed to contract, the canvas pressing inward, the air thickening until every breath was like trying to inhale through wet cloth.
Panic attack.
I’d had them in the deepest shafts of Crimson Ridge when I was a kid, when the rock groaned and the dust was so thick you couldn’t tell if you were breathing air or stone.
I knew what this was, but knowing didn’t help.
“Her face—Aelindor, she’s turning blue!” Caspian said from somewhere beside me, as if he was having a panic attack himself.
“Max. Breathe.” Aelindor’s hands framed my face, tilting it toward his. His impossible blue eyes filled my vision. “Breathe with me.”
I couldn’t. The air wouldn’t come. My chest was a locked door and someone had thrown away the key.
He kissed me. Not the way he’d kissed me minutes ago. This was deliberate as he pressed his mouth to mine and breathed into me, slow and measured with care, filling my lungs with his air when mine refused to work. His exhale became my inhale, his tenderness and calm pouring into my body like liquid sunlight.
