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They can tell me to wait all they want, but when the time is right, I’m going to claim Aya of House of Zorah and bring her to my clan. My father and the protocols won’t stop me, and neither will she. She’s mine.

That’s a promise.

1

EZRA

ONE YEAR AFTER CROWNING AARON

The rooftop of the astronomy tower has always been my favorite place to think, and tonight I need it. Years of writing poems to a wolf who still isn’t mine have me losing my goddamn mind. My dragon is keeping me up. He’s been pacing all night. Every time I sit down on the ledge, he pushes me up onto my feet again. My patience with him is shot.

Aya. Even her name sets him circling faster. I’ve memorized everything about her, from how she laughs when she thinks no one is watching to how her eyes flash when she’s angry. I know the exact shade of her skin in moonlight and the curve of her mouth. I want her so bad. I can’t have my mate yet, maybe not ever if Valek has his way. My dragon growls low at the thought of him.

The sky is clear and full of stars. My father would make that poetic. He’d turn it into a lecture about cosmic dust and how the light reaching us tonight left its star thousands of years ago. He sees meaning in everything up there, but none of it has Aya in it. My mate is a territory away, too far for me to catch a trace of wild berries on the wind.

I extend my wings into the night air. My dragon rises until the hair on my arms stands up. He knows what this is. Of course he isn’t telling me.

When I tilt my head back and roar from deep in my gut, the sky answers. Thunder cracks overhead. Blue lightning forks across the dark and flashes off every window in the Academy below. My nose stings with the burnt smell of it.

I stumble with my wings flared for balance. My hands are shaking at my sides. What the hell was that?

The storm rolls off as fast as it came. The charge in the air sticks around and buzzes in my blood. My dragon is downright smug about it.

Wings beat behind me. I turn as my father touches down on the rooftop with his blue eyes catching the last of the lightning and his scent warm with pride.

“Father.” I’m still breathing hard. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I just felt this urge, but I don’t understand it.”

He tucks his wings in and walks over to me. I’ve always envied how calm my father is. Dragons in Ash Clan still whisper behind his back and treat him as a threat. He carries a dead clan’s name everywhere he goes. None of it touches him. “You are a true Stormscale, Ezra. You’re acting on natural instincts.”

“Stormscale.” I search his face. “You’ve told me about the power, but I’ve never felt it like this before.”

He stands beside me while the night goes quiet again. My dragon still strains toward the clouds for more. I can’t say I blame him. I grew up on my father’s stories about our people bringing rain to the farmlands in a drought and leveling armies in a war.

He glances down at the grounds below the tower. “We were protectors once. Guardians. The other clans looked to us when they needed help. Before everything went wrong.”

His mouth goes flat whenever he talks about the past. My father was too young to claim his clan’s legacy when Stormscale fell. He tried to warn them and stop the madness, but they were too far gone in their grief to listen. They wanted vengeance more than they wanted to live. Now the only Stormscales left are him and me.

“Do you miss it?” I ask. “Being a Stormscale?”

My father never rushes his words. I wait him out while the wind picks up around the tower.

“Sometimes,” he admits. “I miss what we could have been. I miss flying with my father the way I fly with you.” He turns to me, and there’s no bitterness in his scent at all. “But I would give up the title a thousand times for you and your mother. A thousand times, Ezra, and I would never regret it.”

My eyes sting. I grin through it and bump my shoulder against his.

He looks up again. “You know,” he continues, “giving up something in exchange for a better future aligns with the natural order of the cosmos. The stars understand sacrifice. When a massive star dies, it doesn’t simply vanish. It collapses, yes, but from that death, new stars are born. New possibilities. New light.” He gestures at the sky. “Stormscale died so that Ash Clan could have a future. So that your mother could find happiness. So that you could exist. That collapse created something beautiful.”

I follow his gaze. The night is brighter than usual after the storm I called down by accident. “I hope one day in your lifetime, Father, you get to visit the stars.”

He laughs. “Oh, but I do.” He puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “I see them in my son. And in my lovely mate. Every day I wake up beside Claudia, every day I watch you grow into the man you’re becoming, I am among the stars. I need no spaceship to reach them.”

Damn, he always knows exactly what to say. His grip is warm and heavy. We stay on the roof with our faces tipped to the sky, and my dragon quits pacing. I still want Aya and my cabin, but up here with my father, I don’t feel like burning anything down over it.

I step up onto the ledge. “Fly with me, Father.”

He’s already spreading his wings. “Gladly.”

We launch off the rooftop together and climb through the thin clouds until all of Wintermoon is under us. The wind roars in my ears. I don’t care about the lake sliding by below, but I find House of Zorah without even trying. Aya is asleep down there in wolf territory. I have to haul my dragon back level to keep him from diving. I’d swear on the cabin I don’t have yet that she isn’t dreaming about me half as hard as I dream about her.