Rhen held her still, jaw clenched, tracking every ragged breath.
Malakai crouched beside Cole and pressed two fingers against the scorched place beneath his ribs, reading the old animating force that held their kind together. It had steadied at last, no longer jerking beneath the remnants of the storm.
The storm had left him, but the damage remained.
When Malakai rose, uncertainty and reluctant awe sharpened his expression.
Malakai moved into Dax’s line of sight and signed,
“Let me take him to his chamber. He’s stable, but he’ll need time.”
Rhen gave a curt nod without looking away from the witch. Malakai lifted Cole’s limp body with ease and carried him from the room, his footsteps fading along the corridor.
Dax remained near the wall, his usual irreverence stripped away as his gaze moved between the unconscious female in Rhen’s arms and the doorway through which Malakai had disappeared.
“What the fuck now, Rhen?” he asked, dragging a hand over his face. “She’s not one of us. Her body can’t carry that shit. She’s—”
“Human,” Rhen growled.
His silver eyes dropped to her as another tremor moved through her body. Sweat shone across her skin, and her chestlifted in shallow, uneven pulls. The storm looked obscene inside something so physically unequipped to contain it.
The knowledge that she had chosen to take Cole’s agony made Rhen’s blood burn all over again.
What the hell had she been thinking?
Dax stepped closer, his eyes narrowing. “She’s tougher than she looks, but she’s breaking, brother.”
Rhen’s arms tightened around her before he forced them to ease. Every muscle in his body remained coiled as though there were still an enemy in front of him that he could tear apart.
“I know.”
He looked at the pain carved into her features and the way each aftershock dragged another involuntary sound from her throat. For the first time since she had appeared at their gates, he saw more than an unknown witch carrying too many secrets.
He saw the cost of the decision that had saved Cole.
The debt it placed upon the clan infuriated him almost as much as the helplessness of watching her pay it.
“Fuck,” Rhen muttered.
He wanted to be furious with her. He wanted to drag her awake and demand why she had risked her life for a male she did not know, why she had thrown herself into their war with the kind of self-destructive courage that got people buried.
Instead, she burned in his arms while he stood there unable to kill, threaten, or brutalize the problem into submission.
“She’s going to fucking break,” Dax said, the edge of his voice dulled by something uncomfortably close to concern.
Rhen’s gaze snapped toward him. “You think I don’t know that?”
The witch groaned again, her head tipping back as her lips parted around a thin, fractured breath. Rhen adjusted his hold by instinct, frustration rising through him because he could not fix this. He could end threats. He could reduce enemies toblood and bone. He could carry the condemned across the final threshold without hesitation.
But this was a human body trying to survive power it had never been made to contain.
His jaw ground hard. “I need to get her out of here.”
The words came rough, more to himself than to Dax.
“She can’t stay on this floor.”
Dax stepped aside, giving him room without argument. “Do what you’ve got to do, brother.”
