Chapter 621: Please Allow Seven Business Days

SHADOWCLAW — ALPHA’S PRIVATE CHAMBERS — DAWN

Serena Frostborne woke up naked underneath the Alpha King of Shadowclaw.

His full weight was on her. Every goddamn pound of him. Chest against her chest. Hips pinning hers into the mattress. One arm hooked beneath her waist, the other wedged under the pillow her head was resting on, his bicep serving as both cushion and cage.

She blinked at the ceiling. The ceiling offered zero context.

The room was dim. Pre-dawn light filtered through the curtains in pale grey-blue bars that cut across the bed at the wrong angle, which meant she’d been unconscious for a while. Her body felt like she’d been run through a wringer, hung to dry, and run through again.

Fin was asleep. His face was turned against her neck, his breath hitting her collarbone in steady, slow intervals that said deep unconsciousness.

She lay there for a moment. Breathing around him. Feeling his heartbeat against her sternum, strong and even, the rhythm she’d memorized months ago and would recognize in a stadium full of heartbeats.

For ten seconds, she let herself have it. The weight of him. The warmth. The steady drum of his heart against hers. She let herself pretend this was a normal morning. That he’d chosen to hold her like this. That the arms locked around her were possessive because he wanted her and not because his unconscious body was running a program his waking mind had tried to delete.

Ten seconds. That was all she took. She couldn’t afford eleven because eleven was where the pretending stopped working and the remembering started.

She didn’t want to wake him. The extraction would need to be careful. She shifted her hips left by an inch. She waited. Shifted again. Another inch. She exhaled and slid sideways, using the pillowcase’s friction to her advantage, pulling her upper body free while his arm settled against the mattress.

Cold air hit her skin.

Every inch of her that had been pressed against Fin was suddenly exposed to morning air that should have felt cool and instead felt arctic by comparison, because the man she’d been lying under was running too hot.

She froze.

Her hand went back to his chest. The heat radiating from his skin was immediate, intense, the kind of heat that a body produced when it was fighting something internal at full capacity and losing the argument about thermodynamics.

He was burning up.

"Fin?" She touched his face. His forehead was a goddamn radiator. His cheeks were flushed beneath the stubble, and the flush was the wrong color, too deep, too even, the comprehensive red of a fever that had settled in for a long stay and had already unpacked.

He didn’t respond. Didn’t stir. Didn’t do the thing where his hand shot out and hooked her waist the second she separated from him. His body was present. The man inside it was somewhere else entirely.

Her eyes traveled down his neck.

A golden mark was sitting at the junction of his neck and shoulder. The teeth part of her mark, the part that was physical, was healing. But the golden symbol was glowing, pulsing at a rhythm that matched his heartbeat.

Her blood ran cold. She had seen this before and Dex had been unconscious for a week. A full week. Seven days of a Dragon Prince lying in a bed while his body processed the mark. "Shoot."

Serena: Aurelia, did we mark him?

Silence.

But Serena already knew the answer. Aurelia was also choosing this moment to be mute. Of course she was. Maybe Fin’s body would process it faster than Dex’s? Maybe. Possibly. Or maybe she was grasping at straws and the straws were on fire.

Serena scrambled out of the bed.

Her legs were unsteady. Her body registered complaints from departments she hadn’t known were staffed. She ignored all of them because the man in the bed was unconscious and glowing and running a fever that could fry an egg, and her internal HR department could take a number.

Her robe was hanging on the hook behind the bathroom door.

She stared at it for a full second. He hadn’t thrown it out. After everything. After the ancestor chamber and the fury and the silence and the get the fuck out, her silk robe was still hanging on the hook where she’d left it, occupying the same space it had occupied for months, untouched, unmoved, a piece of her still living in his room because Finnick Shadowclaw’s anger had never extended to her belongings.

She put it on with shaking hands.

Ronan’s words echoed in her skull. She could still hear it, could still feel the weight of those words pressing against the inside of her sternum, and the hearing was complicated because the man who had said them was wearing Fin’s face and using Fin’s mouth and the words belonged to a soul that Fin didn’t remember being.

Could Ronan feel what Fin felt? Could the past life access the present emotions? Was the ancient king who had whispered always aware that the body he was borrowing had screamed at this woman to leave twenty-four hours ago?

She didn’t know. The question sat in her chest like a splinter she couldn’t reach.

"Stop. Think, Serena," she said to herself.

She took a steadying breath. Then another. The breathing helped the way breathing always helped, which was marginally, insufficiently, and with the cruel reminder that the thing causing the panic was still there after the breathing finished.

She walked to his closet. The closet was organized with the military tidiness only Finnick Shadowclaw had. She bypassed the formal wear, the training gear, the row of identical black combat suits that made up roughly eighty percent of his wardrobe.

She found a pair of shorts. Soft. Grey. The kind of shorts that belonged to a man’s most private drawer, the drawer that contained the clothing he wore when absolutely zero humans were scheduled to see him, the between-shower-and-bed clothing that served no tactical or social purpose and existed purely because even Alpha Kings needed something comfortable to sleep in.

She had never seen him wear these. Finnick Shadowclaw had two wardrobe settings with her: fully clothed and completely naked. The middle ground between those two states was a territory he had never explored in her presence. She’d always assumed it didn’t exist.

It existed. It was grey and soft and had a drawstring.

She carried them to the bed.

Fin was exactly where she’d left him. Face down. Burning.