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Cables tore free of their housings. A bank of screens that had once tracked Romily’s every movement across the city went dark, one by one, under the simple, total pressure of a tail sweeping them from their mounts. Cabinets full of intelligence he intended to have Victor comb through later went over in a single sweep, drawers spilling paper across the floor in a mess that looked far more mundane than the rest of the destruction around it.

Somewhere in that scattered paper, he suspected, sat months of surveillance photos of Romily’s studio, her routines, the exact schedule that had made tonight’s attack possible in the first place — and he found he took an uncomplicated satisfaction in watching it all end up on the floor, ruined, useless.

Romily stayed close behind him through all of it, glass shard gripped tightly, refusing every instinct he had screaming at her to fall back.

One of Tarek’s men, smarter than the rest or simply more desperate, broke off from the group Norden was occupied with and went for her instead — the obvious move, the predictable one, and dead wrong. He got a hand around her injured arm before Norden had fully noticed the threat, wrenching hard enough that her breath caught audibly.

She didn’t freeze.

She drove the jagged edge of the glass panel straight into his grip, hard, deep enough to draw blood immediately, his scream sharp and short in the wreckage-filled air. The man’s grip loosened, buying her seconds. Three seconds was as long as it took Norden to close the distance and make absolutely certain the man never finished the thought he’d been reaching for.

He didn’t remember crossing the room. He remembered only the after — the man on the ground, unmoving, and Romily still standing, glass still in her hand, blood on it that wasn’t hers, her chest heaving but her feet planted, still fighting, still stubbornly upright.

Tarek was waiting in the command center on the sixth floor, which told Norden everything he needed to know about the kind of man he was dealing with — not fleeing, not panicking, simply waiting, arms folded, the composure of someone who’d spent years directing threats instead of surviving them. He hadn’t so much as loosened his tie. The room around him told a different story than his face did: monitors dark, staff long since fled, the polished consultancy veneer stripped away to reveal what this floor had been underneath the paperwork the entire time.

“You’ve made this interesting,” Tarek said, unbothered by the furious, ancient bulk of dragon filling half the room, by the wreckage behind him, by the blood on the floor that belonged to men who worked for him. His gaze moved to Romily, assessing, cataloging, a man pricing an asset rather than looking at a person — lingering, for exactly one second, on the broken edge of glass still in her fist, the very thing his people had spent two years trying to get close enough to study, already weaponized in someone else’s hand and never once available to be his. “She’s a resource.”

“She is my mate.”

The distinction became permanently, unmistakably clear over the next thirty seconds.

Tarek’s composure held for precisely as long as it took him to realize the calculation he’d been running for months had been wrong in a way that mattered — that the woman standing behind eight hundred years of furious dragon wasn’t a resource to be acquired but a claim already staked, already defended, already won. His certainty cracked for one visible second, the first genuine break Norden had seen in him, gone again almost before it registered.

He reached for the console — a weapon, a failsafe, Norden didn’t wait to find out which — and the command center stopped being a functioning space shortly afterward.

It wasn’t, by any reasonable definition, a fair fight. Norden had never once claimed to be interested in fair. Tarek was intelligent, and intelligence counted for far less than he’d spent years assuming it did, against centuries of teeth and fury and a woman standing behind him with a glass shard she’d already proven she knew how to use. It ended the way it had always been going to end, from the moment Norden had made the decision in the corridor two hours earlier — thoroughly, and without any further conversation Tarek was in a position to participate in.

He shifted back in the wreckage, human again, breathing hard, bare skin scraped raw in places against fallen debris, the total stillness of a dragon that had finally, finally done what its nature had required of it settling over him like a weight lifting rather than landing.

He held his hand out and Romily placed his phone on his palm.

“It’s handled,” he said to Victor.

“Define handled.”

“Not the version going into any formal report. Send a cleanup team, and something for the authorities that keeps this out of the papers by morning. I’ll explain the rest later.”

“Is she⁠—”

“She’s fine. Bring the cars around. We’re coming back.”

He hung up and crossed the wrecked command center toward her.

She was standing exactly where he’d left her, glass shard still gripped in one hand, blood — his, hers, Tarek’s men’s, he honestly couldn’t tell in the wreckage’s poor light — drying dark across both of them. Her eyes tracked him the entire way across the room, wide, taking in details he suspected she’d be turning over for far longer than tonight.

He checked her bandage without being asked, turned her arm gently in the emergency lighting, found the wrap intact, no fresh blood beyond what had already dried there — methodical in a way that had nothing staged about it, the same instinct that had driven him through a corridor two hours earlier now running on fumes and no small amount of relief.

Her pulse under his fingers was fast but steady enough that he finally let himself think about anything else. Only then did the tension in his chest finally, completely settle — the first time it had managed that since the alley, since the knife, since a night that had come far closer to going wrong than he intended to examine too closely tonight.

“You’re not hurt. Beyond the arm.”

“I’m fine. You can stop patting me down like airport security.”

“I intend to keep patting you down like airport security for a while yet.”

“Is that a threat or an offer?”

“Unclassified. Ask me again once we’re home.”