Nicholas Shadowfell tore through his borderlands with the kind of speed that reminded every wolf why he was the Alpha of the largest pack in Nyros.

The run was routine. Weekly. A king surveying his territory, and his patrol scrambling to keep up.

The burn hit between his shoulder blades without warning.

His wolf stuttered mid-stride, hind legs catching on each other for a fraction.

It spread from his spine outward, along his ribs and down through to his paws. The heat of it was so far beyond any injury his body had logged that his wolf could not categorize it.

There was nothing in the forest that could produce this kind of pain, and he knew it, and the knowing made it worse because a wolf with no target has no way to fight.

The pain doubled. Tripled. Climbed past every threshold he had ever crossed in combat.

His wolf form collapsed inward, shifting back into human form, and Nicholas hit the forest floor on his knees.

A scream tore out of his throat before he could stop it. Raw. Guttural.

His patrol converged. Wolves shifted to human around him, voices overlapping, hands reaching for a king who was convulsing on the ground with no visible cause.

His Beta dropped beside him, gripping his shoulder.

"Nick. Talk to me. What happened?"

Nicholas could not talk, his jaw locked. The pain rolled through him in waves that were timed to a heartbeat that was not his, and somewhere in the wreckage of his nervous system, the wolf inside him said a name he had been carrying for weeks.

The pain peaked. Held. Then released in a rush that left him hollow and shaking on the frozen ground.

He stayed on his hands and knees. Breathing. Sweat dripping off his jaw into the dirt. His muscles trembling in aftershocks that ran the length of his spine.

His Beta had not moved. "Nick?"

Nicholas lifted his head. His eyes were gold. Bright. Wet. He just felt the woman he claimed across an ocean almost die, and had been powerless to do anything except absorb her agony.

Nicholas pushed himself to his feet. His legs shook. He locked his knees and forced them steady because a king did not stay on the ground, and the rage building behind his ribs required him to be standing when he gave the next order.

"Get me Renwick Lunaris. Now."

✦✦✦

The snow sizzled when she landed in it.

Guinevere had made it ten feet down the mountain before her body decided it was finished cooperating. Her legs gave out on a ledge wide enough for her wolf to run, and she went down hard, shoulder first, rolling twice before the snow caught her.

She lay still. The cold was the first good thing she had felt in hours. Snow melted against her skin in hissing lines, evaporating on contact, and steam rose off her body in thin curls that the mountain wind carried away.

Her training suit was ruined. The flame merge had burned through it in patches, leaving charred edges and exposed skin.

Her wolf was quiet. Exhausted in a way that transcended physical. The howling inside her skull had stopped, replaced by a low hum that she recognized as Maddox’s flame settling into her bones, still doing whatever it had been doing inside the volcanic chamber when it had taken her apart and put her back together wrong.

She needed him. She did not know why she knew that, but the knowledge sat in her chest with the certainty of instinct.

Her body was burning from the inside out, and the gold flame under her skin was looking for something it could not find, and the absence of whatever it was looking for was turning every nerve ending she had into a live wire of heat and discomfort.

She pressed her face into the snow. It evaporated against her cheek. Even the mountain was too warm.

Above her, on the ledge she had descended from, Tormund Embervale stood at the mouth of a cave and watched the white-haired girl steam in the snow.

He had seen this before. The flame calibrated with the body over days, and the process was brutal without intervention.

The intervention was the bonded. Their body absorbed the excess heat. Their fire recognized its own signature inside the mate and pulled the temperature down to something survivable.

Unbeknownst to him, her bonded was five hundred miles east, inside a dampening field, fighting a war he did not know had become secondary to what was happening on this mountain.

Tormund: Sterling. The girl has completed the trial. She needs her bonded. Her temperature is climbing and she is losing consciousness on the descent.

Nothing. The mindlink reached the edge of the Keep’s range and found empty air.

Tormund: Sterling. Respond.

Silence. He tried three more times. Each attempt returned the same flat void.

He looked down at Gwen. She was still conscious, but the margin on that was narrowing by the minute.

In forty years, no woman had completed the third task. The rules said the Keeper does not intervene.

✦✦✦

Kael Ashenvale landed on the eastern face of the mountain in human form.

His dark mage had tracked the flame signature an hour ago. A merge. Inside the old altar.

The spike in energy had been visible across three wards and two dampening fields.

He did not know who had merged or whose flame was involved. What he knew was that the Flame Altar had activated for the first time in decades, and that the timing coincided with Maddox being five hundred miles east inside the dampening corridor, chasing the bait Kael had set for him.

Ryker’s column was the lure. The dampening field was the cage. Maddox’s absence was the opening.

Kael dropped from the ledge and landed on the snowfield below without sound. His boots sank two inches into the powder. The air was cold and thin and carried a scent he recognized from a forest .

Her.

He went still, and his nostrils flared. The scent was unmistakable.

✦✦✦

Gwen’s eyes opened to snow and sky and a silhouette standing over her that was wrong.

The shape was too tall and too still and the scent was cold iron where it should have been pine and fire. Her vision was blurred from the heat and the fumes and the merge, and for one merciful second she thought it was Sterling, because Sterling was tall and stood that still and would have come looking for her.

Then her vision cleared.

Kael Ashenvale looked down at her with an expression that was curiosity and hunger and the specific patience of a predator who had found wounded prey and was in no rush.

"There she is."

His hand extended towards her. She flinched, but her body had no capacity to retreat. His fingers touched her forearm.

The relief hit her so fast that her body arched off the snow and a sound escaped her throat that was involuntary and wrecked.

It felt wrong. She tried to pull her arm away, but her muscles were not working. Her entire nervous system wasn’t working actually.

The heat continued rushing into him from that one spot. If he wasn’t a psycho, she would have said thank you.

He expected her to feel hot with Ryker’s flame. He hadn’t expected the flame to come to him.

It moved into him the way flame moves into its own. Willingly. Eagerly. Filling spaces in his blood that the dark magic had hollowed out years ago, settling into his marrow in recognition.

His eyes went wide.

He stared at his own hand. At the warmth flowing into him with zero resistance. At the gold light dimming under her skin as his body did what only a bonded’s body could do.

His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

He said nothing.

For the first time in her presence, Kael Ashenvale had no words ready.

The man who had played a throne room full of elders and walked through dark magic portals with a smile was staring at his own hand on a half-conscious wolf’s arm and watching every assumption he had built about her rearrange itself in real time.