The first thing that registered was his scent. Pine and fire and the specific warmth underneath both that her body had learned to associate with the only safe place she had ever known.

The next thing that registered was it was dark and took a moment for her wolf eyes to adjust.

"Maddox?"

"Fuck."

His mouth was on hers before the word had finished leaving his lips. The kiss was deep and desperate and tasted like relief so total it had a flavor. His lips pulled heat from hers. Literal heat. The burning inside her body migrated toward every point of contact between them, flowing out of her and into him, and the relief was so immediate that a sound escaped her throat that was closer to a sob than a moan.

Her fingers went into his hair. More heat bled from her hands into his scalp, and the sparks that came with skin contact fired between them, and the combined sensation of the pain leaving and the current arriving was so overwhelming that she pressed harder into the kiss because stopping felt like dying.

He pulled away just enough to speak on her lips. "I love you. So goddamn much."

The words landed in the center of her chest and stayed there. She had never said them before, and outside of her mother, she’d never heard them before.

The closest they had come was his body and his hands and the way he held her after, and the vows he had spoken in a language she did not know, and the ring forged from his own scale.

"I love you too, Maddox." She swallowed the lump at the back of her throat. Her eyes were burning. "I missed you."

More emotion came out behind those words without her meaning for it to. Taking his flame was so painful. All of it bled through, and Maddox heard every ounce of it because the matebond, damaged and muffled as it was, carried the weight of what she could not say.

He pressed his forehead to hers, both of them breathing into the space between their mouths, and for three seconds in a dungeon that smelled like iron and old stone, nothing existed except the two of them and the heat flowing out of her and into him and the fact that they were both alive.

"Where are we?"

"Kael’s dungeon. How did you get here, Gwen?"

She opened her mouth to answer. The dungeon door groaned open at the end of the corridor.

Footsteps. Two sets. Heavy. Armored. Moving with the unhurried pace of guards on a routine check.

Maddox’s hand came to the back of her head. His mouth was at her ear, his voice pitched below a whisper.

"Close your eyes. Don’t look until I say, no matter what you hear. Understood?"

Gwen nodded once. She closed her eyes.

"Good girl." He kissed her again. Then his hands moved, lifting her off his lap and setting her against the wall beside him. He guided her head down onto his shoulder, angling her face away from the corridor so she looked unconscious.

The footsteps grew louder. Torchlight bled through her closed eyelids. Keys scraped against iron.

The cell door swung open.

Maddox was beside her one second. The next, he was air.

The heat slammed back into her the instant his skin left hers. Every degree he had pulled from her body returned in a wave that made her muscles lock. Her wolf bristled under her ribs, alert and pacing.

She heard the first guard make a sound. Wet. Short. The kind of sound that happened when air tried to leave lungs that no longer had the architecture to hold it. A body part hit the stone floor, followed by a body, and she didn’t want to know.

The second guard inhaled to shout. The shout became a crack. Then nothing. The specific nothing that followed the end of something alive.

Chains. She heard chains moving. The sound of iron being tested and then the sound of iron losing an argument. A snap. Metal on stone. His wrists were free.

Then his hands were on her.

He pulled her up so fast she did not register the transition between sitting and standing. "Wrap your legs around me, baby."

She did. Her arms locked around his neck. Her legs cinched around his waist. One of his arms came under her, locking her against his chest. The other was free. She could feel the tension in his shoulder that meant it was occupied.

"Keep your eyes closed."

He moved.

The speed of him was beyond anything she had prepared for. Wind displaced against her face as scents blurred past. His boots hit the ground in a rhythm that should not have been possible for a man who had been chained ten seconds ago, each footfall driving forward with the specific force of a dragon king whose body remembered what it was built for and was finished being caged.

A shout echoed ahead of them. "The prisoner is—"

The shout stopped. The sound that replaced it was brief and conclusive.

Stairs. She felt the angle change as he took them three at a time, his arm tightening under her with each vertical push. Another voice, this one farther away, carrying the specific panic of a soldier who had just seen his colleague stop existing.

"The wards! How is he—"

That voice also stopped.

More stairs. A door. The sound of wood splintering inward with a force only a dragon could do.

His breathing was controlled. Even.

Air hit her face.

Cold. Clean. Moving fast enough to pull her hair sideways. The dungeon smell vanished, replaced by pine and snow and the open sky. Sunlight pressed against her closed eyelids, turning the darkness red.

Then sunlight on her skin. The warmth of it collided with the inferno still burning inside her body, and for a moment the two temperatures warred with each other before Maddox’s arm pulled her tighter against his chest and the contact point between their bodies drained the excess again.

He was running. Outside now. Across stone, then dirt, then something softer: snow compacting under his boots.

Shouts behind them, distant and multiplying, carrying the confusion realization that the chained dragon king in their dungeon had just walked through their wards and their guards and their locked doors and was currently sprinting across open ground with an unconscious woman wrapped around him.

Arrows came. She could hear them. His arm moved. More screams. His stride lengthened. The shouts behind them faded by a fraction.

She felt his heart hammering against her chest, steady and strong and running at a pace that said his body was performing at maximum capacity and had reserves left.

"Maddox," she whispered against his neck.

"Keep them closed."

A horn sounded behind them. Low. Long. The kind of sound that moved through stone walls and across open ground and told every soldier within five miles that the Keep had been breached from the inside.

His pace did not falter. His breathing stayed even. She could feel his muscles working beneath her, the coiled precision of a body operating on training so deep it had become architecture.

Then his stride shortened. A fraction. His arm adjusted her weight. She felt the shift in his center of gravity, the way a rider feels a horse change direction before the turn begins.

He had stopped running forward. He was running down.

The ground angled beneath his boots. Steep. Loose rock under snow. She could hear it scattering behind them in small cascades. The air changed, colder, thinner, carrying the scent of pine thickening around them. Tree cover.

The horn sounded again. Closer. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

She heard wings. The leathery percussion of dragon shifts behind them and above them, and the shadows that crossed her closed eyelids told her at least three had taken to the air.

She pressed her mouth to his neck. "How many?"

His jaw tightened against the top of her head. He did not answer.

The first blast of fire hit the treeline forty feet to their left. The heat of it washed over them in a wave that made her wolf flinch. Trees cracked and fell. Embers drifted past her face.

Maddox changed direction. Hard. Her body swung with the turn, and his arm locked tighter, and the trees were thicker here, the canopy closing above them, buying seconds from the dragons who could not dive through dense cover at speed.

A second blast hit behind them. Closer. The ground shook.

She felt his heartbeat change for the first time. Faster. Still controlled, still steady, but faster.

Her body was shaking against him. The merge heat was climbing again, the relief his skin contact provided losing ground to the inferno rebuilding inside her. Her muscles were seizing in small involuntary contractions, and the sweat on her skin was evaporating on contact with the cold air, and she was becoming dead weight in increments she could feel and could not stop.

"Maddox." Her voice was thin. "I am slowing you down."

"You are doing nothing of the sort."

"Put me down, and escape. You can come back for me."

"That is never going to happen."

A third blast. This one close enough to throw heat across her back. She heard a tree explode ten feet behind them. Splinters hit his shoulder. He did not flinch.

Then a sound she had never heard before.

A roar. Ahead of them. Coming from the valley below, from the direction they were running toward, rising through the trees with a force that shook snow from the canopy and silenced every dragon behind them for two full seconds.