Chapter 284: His Dragon Heard the Wrong Words

ASH’S POV

Ash heard Dove’s name through the truck radio and broke the rail beneath his hand.

The metal bent with a sharp crack. Across the road, a driver stopped tightening a strap and stared. Ash barely saw him. The voice on the radio was reading back a message from a workshop south of the blocked crossing, and every word arrived too slowly.

Recovery crew. No agreement to leave. A woman taken. Injured man still inside.

"Again," Ash said.

The driver holding the receiver looked at his hand, then at the broken rail. "The relay’s bad. That’s what came through."

"Give me the location."

Behind him, the open rear doors of the medical truck framed Thorne on a narrow cot. A male medic stood beside him with clean bandages in one hand. Thorne had been sitting up, arguing about the delay. Now he was trying to stand.

Ash caught the cot before it shifted beneath him.

"Don’t," Thorne said.

Ash looked at him. "Then stop trying to fall on your face."

"Is she alive?"

The question dragged him back from the place his mind had already gone. A locked room. Strange hands. Dove’s chin lifted because she would tell them to fuck off even when she should have saved her breath.

He remembered her legs beneath a skirt, dusty knees, a loose thread she kept pulling at while she muttered under her breath at something he couldn’t hear. Little things he had pretended not to notice. He could picture all of them. He could not picture her gone.

"The message didn’t say she was dead."

"That’s not what I asked."

Thorne’s hand pressed against his chest, over the bond Ash didn’t have. His face changed, tight with the effort of trusting something Ash couldn’t feel.

"She’s alive," he said. "She’s scared. I can’t tell where."

Ash released the cot slowly. The urge to tear something apart had nowhere useful to go. He could rip the entire truck open and still know nothing more than he did now.

The medic stepped between Thorne and the doors. "You move again without help, I tie you down. You can be furious while you’re lying flat."

Thorne looked as though he might bite him. Ash almost respected the medic for not stepping back.

"Keep him here," Ash said.

"You don’t command me."

"Then keep him here because you’re the one with the bandages."

The medic gave him a short, disgusted look and turned back to his patient. That was enough. Ash crouched beside the cot so Thorne couldn’t mistake where he was looking.

"I’ll find the workshop. I’ll find Edrik."

Thorne grabbed his wrist. His grip still had strength behind it, even with everything else failing him.

"And you’ll listen to him."

Ash’s first answer rose hot and ugly. The bear had lost her. The bear had been there and she had still been taken. Then Ash saw the bandages, the cot, the half-empty water bottle Thorne had saved beside his hand as though Dove might walk up and want it.

He had not been there either.

"I’ll listen."

The driver repeated the workshop’s location. County road, old repair sign, white van damaged outside. Ash made him point on the paper map spread across the hood. Not a guess. Not south somewhere. He needed the actual road and the crossing they had failed to reach.

The medical vehicles couldn’t take the broken bridge. The driver showed him an eastern loop that would take longer but remained open according to the last convoy. Ash pointed to a maintenance turnout just before the workshop road.

"Send help this way. If the road changes, use the radio. Don’t come blind."

The driver nodded. Thorne’s medic called for another man to secure the cot before they moved. Ash waited until he saw the straps fastened and the rear doors ready to close. He hated every second of it. Leaving Thorne without care would not bring Dove back faster.

He stripped behind the truck, shoved his clothes into the bag he’d been carrying between stops, and stepped onto the open shoulder. Men moved away before he asked. They had watched him shift before. That didn’t make them comfortable standing close when his body grew.

The dragon rose where the man had stood, huge enough that the nearest driver stumbled against his door. Ash took the bag carefully between his teeth, spread his wings, and drove himself into the hot air.

Below him, the convoy shrank into a line of roofs and dust. Ahead, roads cut through brown fields and patches of standing red water. The world had burned cold, then started cooking. None of it mattered as much as the one small woman somewhere beneath him.

His fox.

The thought came without permission. He had no right to it. He had no bond, no invitation to her bed, no place beside her when she slept. He had memories of the way she looked at him when she expected him to make things worse.

He wanted to put his body around her and dare the world to try again.

He wanted her to stop flinching before he even moved.

The second want hurt more.

At the broken crossing, he banked low enough to see men waving from a stalled vehicle. He could not tell whether they wanted help or feared him. He marked the place in his mind for the convoy and kept flying. Every choice cost someone something now. He would not pretend stopping for strangers was the same choice as getting to her husband before the bleeding took him.

Ash followed the road rather than a feeling. A feeling had never told him where she was. A map, a radio message, and the white slash of a wrecked van beneath the afternoon sun finally did.

He circled once. The workshop’s front doors stood open. A truck had pulled toward the road, one man in its cab and another climbing into the passenger side. Near the building, something moved low against the doorway.

Ash saw silver-white hair darkened with dust.

Edrik was on the ground.

The truck engine revved as its driver looked up.

Ash folded his wings and dropped straight toward it.