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A primal growl came from Vorzyr.

Kai shifted his weight, his eyes hooding.

“I need the three of you.” Her voice was all husky and heavy with lust and desperate, undisguised need for connection and comfort as she uttered, “All. Over. Me.”

As the three of us stared out at her, a whole lot of sexual tension ramping up, she suddenly swept a glowing silver palm around and in the very next moment, we were all enveloped in a cloud of teleportation, our surroundings slipping away.

6

~Vorzyr~

We rematerialized in an unfamiliar area shrouded in darkness.

As the teleportation spell slipped away, I employed my dragon senses to take in our surroundings.

We appeared to be deep within a ravine forest. It was surrounded by weeping trees. A dense fog rolled through the immediate area. It wasn’t eerie, but ethereal in nature instead.

I turned, brushing against Nyx as I did, who was looking all around as well, his horns glowing vibrant-blue as he reached out with his specific senses in his way. He trembled at the very slight touch of my arm skimming his shoulder. He was really worked up.

It was no surprise. With the emotional weight of everything, it had to be taking a major toll on him, especially. He felteveryone’semotions surging and slamming into him, and while it was an ability that was largely underappreciated because it wasn’t combative in nature, even I, someone who was predisposed to focus on might, could recognize what a powerful gift it actually was. Especially in situations like this, where we all really needed it, needed him to employ that ability, to readwhat we didn’t want to expose but needed heard in spite of that reluctance, and what we needed him to translate.

But with that power came a significant drawback.

And I could see it now blatantly and painfully—it hurt him. It wore him down, even as it held the rest of us together.

“It’s all right,” I told him softly, wrapping my arm around him and tucking him into my side. “Let go with us in a moment, baby.” I stroked his vibrant-blue hair with my free hand, little peaceful groans emanating from him. “Do you hear me? It’s okay for you to do that. Let it all out. We’ve got you, just like we’ve got Ariana.”

He craned his neck to look into my eyes, and emotion welled. But there was a spark there, too, like he was so grateful that I understood, thathewas being read well for once, his needs noted how he clearly desperately craved them to be right now.

“You already acquired it?” Kai’s voice sounded to our right, drawing our attention.

He was a few feet ahead with Ariana just beyond that and standing in the shadow of a building that hadn’t been there before. At least not visible to us.

She was sweeping her hand in an arc, finishing up, and as she pulled her magic back, I realized that the place had been glamoured, and she’d just removed it to reveal what it had been concealing and protecting.

“I call it Solumira,” she told us.

“From‘solus’meaning ‘alone’,” I mused. “And‘mira’meaning ‘wonder’.The wonder of being alone.”

“Yeah,” she said.

Kai was scrubbing his hand over his face, looking none too happy. “You already had a place ready to go.”

Our conversation a while back slammed into me as the realization took me.

“After this year is done, she’ll have fulfilled her promise to her family. And that will be it. She’ll resort to what she’s wanted all this time because of her fear of her own power.”

“Resort to what?”

“She’ll disappear into the ozone.”

No.She wasn’t doing that. She wasn’t going to disappear from the world and hole up here.

Was that why she’d brought us here? To say goodbye and sink into that solitary existence?

“No,” I ground out. “Not happening.Never.”

Kai walked to her and grasped her arm, not containing his urgency one little bit as he told her, “Tonight was a lot. There’s no doubt about that. But you can’t allow it to pull you from the life that you want, to—”