Chapter 320: Something Was Done To That Boy
Dex’s eyes went to Serena first. Her face was tear-streaked. Her composure was gone, replaced by the raw, unguarded expression of a woman watching a man she cared about die and having no magic, no portal, no ancient power that could stop it.
Then Dex’s eyes went to Gav. His best friend. His brother. The man he had punched in the jaw and poured whiskey for and still trusted like gravity. The man who loved his wife and had chosen to carry that silently because the alternative was losing both of them.
"He severed the matebond," Alaric said, without looking away from Gav.
"How long ago?" Fin asked.
"A few hours."
"What do you need?"
The healer straightened. He looked at Fin, then at Dex, and the expression on his face was the one that made Dex’s stomach drop, because Alaric Kestrel always had an answer.
The expression on his face right now was the absence of one.
"I have never seen this before," the healer said. "I have never heard of it. Matebond severance causes pain, nausea, disorientation. Documented cases describe it as debilitating for weeks, sometimes months."
He looked at Gav on the bed.
"What it doesn’t do is this. His vitals are crashing. The discoloration in his irises is spreading. His core temperature has dropped four degrees in thirty minutes. This is beyond matebond shock. This is organ-level failure from a source I cannot identify, because nothing in any text I have ever read describes a severed matebond killing the wolf who severed it."
The word hung in the room.
Killing.
Serena’s grip on Gav’s hand tightened. His fingers moved once against hers. Weak. Intentional.
"Hey." His voice was barely there, a whisper scraped from the bottom of a chest that was running out of reasons to keep breathing. His darkening eyes found Serena’s face. "Don’t look at me like that, Frostborne. I’ve survived worse. Probably."
"Name one thing," she whispered.
"Dex’s cooking."
"I can hear you," Dex said from the doorway.
"Good. Make sure it goes on the headstone."
Dex crossed the room. He stood beside Serena, looking down at the man on the bed, and his face did something that Gavriel Sterling was never supposed to see. It broke. For one unguarded second, Dexmon Drakenfell’s composure cracked wide open and the grief underneath was so total it could have filled the room.
Then it sealed. Fast. Rebuilt itself behind the jaw and the eyes and the particular set of his shoulders that communicated control.
But Gav had seen it. And the ghost of a smile that crossed his face was the saddest thing in the room.
"Don’t you dare cry over me, Drakenfell. I’ll haunt you."
"Shut up, Gavriel."
"Terrible last words, by the way. ’Shut up, Gavriel.’ Write something better."
"You’re going to write your own because you’re going to be alive to do it."
"Optimistic. I appreciate that. Wrong, but optimistic."
Elara looked at Fin. He was standing at the foot of the bed, arms at his sides, watching Gavriel with the expression of a king who had buried one person he loved and was watching the preparations for another.
"Both of you should leave," Alaric said to Serena and Elara. "Until I understand what’s happening, proximity to the patient is..."
"No," Serena answered.
"Absolutely no," Elara agreed.
Alaric looked at Dex. Dex looked at Serena.
Serena looked at Alaric with eyes that carried the full weight of every argument she was prepared to have and every authority she was prepared to defy.
"I am staying with him. You can work around me or through me. Those are the options."
"What she said," Elara added.
Alaric exhaled. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at his flask. He looked at the ceiling again.
"Fine. Stay. Do everything I say. Touch nothing I don’t tell you to touch. And pray that the mages-librarians have read something I haven’t."
✦✦✦
ONE HOUR LATER
King Tiberon entered the chamber, his eyes sweeping the room.
Dex’s head lifted. His eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with exhaustion and something rawer underneath. He saw his father and the mask went up, automatic, inherited, the particular reflex of a Drakenfell man who could not afford to be seen breaking even by the man who had taught him how to break quietly.
"Father."
"How is he?"
"Dying," Dex said, and the word came out flat in a way that was worse than if it had cracked.
Tiberon crossed to the bed. He looked down at Gavriel Sterling, at the dark-veined skin and the purple-black lips and the sweat that sheened across a chest that was rising and falling in rhythms too shallow to sustain.
He had known this boy since he was born. He had watched him grow into a Gamma with instincts sharper than his mouth, which was saying something. He had sat across from him at war tables and recognized, with the grudging respect of a commander who valued competence above all things, that Gavriel Sterling processed a battlefield faster than officers twice his age.
He had looked at Gavriel Sterling as a second son. He had never said it, because Tiberon Drakenfell did not say things like that, because saying them made them real and real things could be taken and the taking was the part that broke you. But real things were being taken right now, and the breaking was happening in the chair beside him whether he acknowledged it or not.
He put his hand on Dex’s shoulder. One squeeze. Firm. The only language Tiberon Drakenfell had ever been fluent in when it came to his children: contact without commentary. Pressure that communicated everything his mouth would never deliver.
Dex’s jaw tightened beneath the touch. He covered his father’s hand with his own for one second. Then both of them let go, because Drakenfell men held on in private and let go in public.
Tiberon turned.
"Alaric. Thornfell. Corridor."
Both men moved without argument. Tiberon followed, pulling the door closed behind him.
"Explain."
"There is something layered underneath the matebond that neither of us have encountered before," Hyran replied. "The severance triggered it, but the severance didn’t create it. Whatever is killing him was already there. Dormant. Waiting for a soul-altering event to activate."
"How long do we have to find a solution?" Tiberon asked.
The silence that followed lasted one second too long, and Tiberon felt it land in his chest before Alaric spoke.
"At this rate, a day if we’re lucky."
Tiberon’s expression held. "Will having the Ashford woman mark him, and keeping her alive, save his life?"
Hyran dragged a hand down his face. "We are uncertain. We did raise the possibility with him. He said absolutely not, and that he would rather die."
Tiberon said nothing for a long moment. His eyes moved to the closed door, behind which his son was sitting beside a man who would rather die than accept the one thing that might save him. The mathematics of that refusal were ugly, and Tiberon Drakenfell understood ugly mathematics better than any man alive.
"But even if we did, it isn’t a guarantee that would solve this, regardless," Hyran continued. "Serena’s situation with the matebond severance was different. The energy signature coming from him is dark. I have never sensed anything like it. But it is wrong."
"I had the same read," Alaric added. "Something was done to that boy, and my guess is it was done before the matebond ever triggered for him. The way it’s manifesting resembles patterns of a dormant curse surfacing."
Tiberon’s eyes narrowed by a fraction so small it would have been invisible to any man who didn’t know him.
"Who has the knowledge to fix this?"
"The list is short," Hyran said. "And every name on it is a problem. I was going to have Maelor Vantheos take a look after the execution."
"Make the call," Tiberon ordered. "Pull from whatever budget you need. If Maelor requires compensation for his time, the Crown will cover it, and if he requires flattery, I will have Bellatrix write a letter complimenting his robes."
Alaric’s mouth twitched. "That might actually work."
Tiberon turned toward the corridor that led back to the throne room, back to the execution, back to the crown that demanded his presence at events he would rather burn than attend.
He stopped.
"Alaric."
"Your Majesty."
"If that boy dies in my castle, I will take it personally. Adjust your urgency accordingly."
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