The pain hit him just as he dozed and footsteps echoed down the dungeon.

It came while his body was drifting toward something resembling sleep, a low burn that started in his chest and spread outward through his ribs and down his arms and into his fingers.

A heat that had no source and no logic and sat behind his sternum.

His eyes opened. "What the..."

The dungeon ceiling was black stone. The chains on his wrists clinked when he moved, iron scraping iron, and the sound bounced off the walls of a room built to make men feel small.

Footsteps echoed down the corridor. Measured. Unhurried. The walk of a man who owned the ground beneath his boots and wanted the listener to know it.

"I really was hoping for a better fight from you, little brother."

Kael’s voice arrived before his shadow did. The torchlight from the corridor carved his silhouette against the far wall, and Maddox watched it grow larger without lifting his head.

He did not answer.

"I will say, the timing here is impeccable. Holding someone to keep them alive is not ideal. Fun at first. I liked it even. But I’m over that. And here you are. I have kingdoms to conquer. Babies to kiss. You know the drill."

The cell door opened, hinges screaming.

Kael stepped inside carrying something in his arms. Maddox’s eyes had been in darkness long enough that the sudden light burned. He squinted. Blinked. Tried to make out the shape in Kael’s arms.

Kael dumped the thing onto Maddox’s lap without ceremony.

Dead weight. Limp. Her head rolled against his chained wrists and her body folded across his legs, and the heat that came off her skin hit him like opening a furnace door.

"Keep her alive. I will be back for her."

Maddox’s hands moved before his mind caught up. The chains pulled taut. His fingers found her arm and the contact sent a jolt through his chest that restarted something he had believed was dead.

"What the hell did you do to her?"

Kael paused in the doorway. Half-turned. The torchlight caught his profile and the faint ghost of something complicated on his face. It disappeared before it could be named.

"Saved her life, dipshit."

The cell door slammed, deadbolt sliding into place.

His footsteps faded. The corridor went dark. The dungeon went silent.

The first thing he registered was that she was burning. The worst he had ever felt from her. Heat seared off her skin into him, his own energy reflecting back from her core.

Whatever had happened to her had happened at a temperature that laughed at fireproof fabric.

Hers looked like it had been through a volcano and lost the argument. It was burned through in patches, charred edges curling away from skin that was flushed deep red and radiating a temperature that made his dragon blood feel cool by comparison.

She was in a sports bra and the remnants of fabric that had once been functional clothing and was now evidence of something catastrophic.

"Fuck."

He felt for her pulse. Running fast and shallow beneath skin that was hot enough to sear. His fingers stayed on it.

His hands were chained. The radius of movement was eighteen inches at best, wrist to wrist, the links running through a bolt in the wall behind him. Enough to hold her. Enough to shift her weight. Enough to press two fingers to the side of her throat and search for the thing he needed to find more than he had ever needed to find anything in his life.

It dawned on him that the pain he’d been feeling was hers. A damp version of their matebond. The wards blocking it.

He shifted her, so her head fell in the crook of his neck, breathing her in. Her pulse was there, but faint.

She was alive, and the matebond was damaged, and everything he had felt on that dragon, the agony, the silence, the certainty that she was gone, had been the wards choking a signal that was never actually lost.

"Baby, I thought you were..." His voice cracked, eyes filling. She was unconscious. But she was in his arms and breathing. "I love you, Gwen."

He buried his face in her neck. The heat coming off her skin burned his cheek and he didn’t move. His chest compressed against hers, his arms pulling her in until the chains went taut and the iron cut into the raw skin beneath his cuffs. He didn’t feel it. He could feel her pulse against his lips where his mouth pressed into the side of her throat, and that pulse was the only thing keeping his body from shutting down entirely.

His breathing fractured. Quiet, involuntary sounds left him between inhales, the kind of sounds a man makes when the grief he’d been holding meets relief so sudden it has nowhere to go but out.

His shoulders curled around her. His fingers found her hair, the chains limiting him to the first few inches, but he threaded them through and held on.

He said it again. Quieter. "Fuck. I love you so goddamn much."

He held on tighter. Some part of him was convinced if he loosened even a fraction, she would disappear and the silence would come back.

His chin rested on her head. His eyes were fixed on the cell door. "Over my dead body is he taking you from me. If anyone comes through that door with the intention of putting hands on you, I am going to wrap these chains around their throat and watch the light leave their eyes. And then I’m going to carry you out of this dungeon over the bodies without looking back."

He kissed her hair.

He held her, racking his brain on why his mate was on fire. The list of things that could make a bonded mate run that kind of temperature was short and none of the options were good.

There was no way Sterling of all people would have her go through a flame merging. Right?

The thought surfaced and he dismissed it immediately. No, absolutely not.

After looking into it further, Maddox planned on vetoing that anyways for her. A unilateral veto on a ritual his mate didn’t know he’d researched, for a ceremony she hadn’t been told about.

Riders don’t need it to fly, and it wasn’t expected for the high queen. Only fated bonds can perform it. And every account he had read ended the same way. Women who attempted the third task died on the altar stone, and the men who loved them carried the weight of that for the rest of their lives.

So why was she burning?

His dragon who had been silenced from the wards stirred for the first time. Deep in his chest. Faint enough that the guards outside would never hear it, strong enough that Maddox felt it in his ribs.

One word. The same word it always said when it felt her. The same word that had started all of this during a dream that felt like a lifetime ago. The word that led him to another continent of wolves. It never got tired of saying it. Maddox never got tired of hearing it.

He held her. The heat poured off her skin and into his chest and his arms and his blood, and he absorbed it the way he had absorbed it the first night in Drakencrest when Aldric had told him that skin contact would help her body calibrate with his. The same mechanism. The same physics. His body pulling her temperature down because it recognized the flame inside her as its own.

Maddox looked down at Gwen in his arms. The energy coming off of her was feeding him. No question. Whatever Kael’s wards were designed to suppress, they weren’t calibrated for this.

"A miscalculation on your part, big brother."