Chapter 595: Velkaris Knew The Answer Was Away

"But I also love you, Fin. I’m s-s-sorry."

"BULLSHIT." He was screaming now and the screaming was so wrong on him that it sounded like watching a cathedral collapse. "I would rather have lost you the way I lost her. Because at least that ended."

The sentence fell.

It fell like a blade into water. Clean. Devastating. The kind of truth that only surfaces when pain has burned through every filter and the raw nerve underneath speaks a language that politeness has never learned.

Serena’s chest caved.

"I’m sorry, Fin. I want you to be happy and I hate that this is because of me. You’re the last p-p-person I wanted to-"

He held up a hand cutting her off.

"Get the fuck out."

Tears fell freely.

"Fin—"

"I said get out." He slammed his hand on the desk hard. "What part of that is confusing you?"

The sound rang off the stone walls like a gunshot.

She didn’t flinch at the volume. She flinched at the face behind it. Serena flinched so hard her ribs seized and the breath she’d been holding came out broken.

Because Finnick Shadowclaw had looked at her a hundred different ways, with heat, with hunger, with the kind of softness he only gave her when no one else was in the room, and he had never once looked at her like she was the thing that broke him.

"I understand," she whispered.

She turned and left without another word because she understood that leaving would hurt him less and that was the only thing she could do. The door closed behind her.

The hallway was empty.

She lifted her hand before the door finished closing because she was not going to sob in his castle. She was going to in private.

Pink magic sparked at her fingertips and died. Gold followed. Also dead. Her insides burned like she’d swallowed a lit match, her body’s way of telling her that making a portal right now was the magical equivalent of writing a check on an account that had been closed for days.

On the third try, her pink worked.

She stepped through and let it collapse behind her.

Drakenfell’s training field materialized around her and she was already walking. Fast. Head down. Jaw locked. The tears she’d been holding since the hallway were winning the war against her composure and the composure had maybe thirty seconds of fight left.

Across the field, Bellatrix was mid-tirade.

"I will not have him standing next to that dragon... move him with the adults or make a gifted program for him. That is a direct order!"

The words didn’t register. They hit her ears and fell through, landing nowhere, absorbed by the same void that was currently swallowing everything that wasn’t the door she’d just walked through and the word that had come out of it.

She hit the tree line before the first sob escaped. The forest swallowed her the way forests do, quietly, without judgment, offering shadows to a woman who needed them more than air.

She needed a place to go where Gavriel and Dexmon wouldn’t feel her. She knew she had to tell Dexmon but she wasn’t ready for round two. Not yet. Dexmon was going to be worse.

The forest was supposed to be empty. Forests at dusk were supposed to be the one place on this continent where a woman could cry without an audience and without a performance review.

She found a large boulder. Leaned against it. Slid down until she sat on the forest floor and her knees hit her chest and the tears she’d been rationing since Fin’s study finally broke through the dam and came all at once, hot and silent and relentless, the kind of crying that didn’t make noise.

Her insides were still burning. The pink and gold were gone, drained, the magical equivalent of an engine running on fumes that had run out of fumes three towns ago. Every breath reminded her. Every inhale was a bill she couldn’t pay.

THWACK. THWACK. THWACK.

She lifted her head.

Thirty feet away, a man was chopping down a very large oak with the focused determination of someone operating under orders that didn’t make sense but came from a person whose orders you didn’t question. The tree was old. The tree had been standing for two hundred years.

Unbeknownst to Serena, the tree was losing a fight it didn’t know it was in because a queen had decided its branch was blocking the moonlight at the wrong angle.

Serena stared at the man. The man hadn’t noticed her. The chopping continued.

Then the sound of wings.

Above the canopy, heavy and rhythmic, the displacement of air that belonged to something too large for the sky and too stubborn to care. The wingbeats shook leaves from the branches and she knew who it was before she saw him because she always knew, the way you know your own heartbeat, the way you know the sound of home.

She was on her feet and out of the tree line before she made the decision to stand. Velkaris was already descending, his massive body angling downward through the dusk with the controlled urgency of a dragon who could feel his rider’s distress across any distance and had opinions about how long she’d been feeling it without calling him.

He lowered himself. She climbed on.

The climbing was a crime against every medical instruction Alaric had ever given her. Her insides burned. Her ribs screamed beneath the bandages. Her wrapped leg protested the angle. She was in no condition to ride a dragon and they both knew it and neither of them cared because Velkaris had never once asked if she was cleared for flight and Serena had never once waited for the answer.

He vaulted skyward without a sound. Just the massive downstroke of wings that understood their job was to take her away from wherever she was and ask questions never.

She didn’t know where they were going. She hadn’t given a destination because she didn’t have one, and Velkaris hadn’t asked because dragons don’t ask questions they already know the answer to. The answer was away. The answer was always away.