Page 126 of Mate of a Monster

She’s gonna burn that bitch to the ground.

And we’re all gonna help her.

“She orchestrated her parents’ deaths.” I had suspected as much, but it’s clear now. “They must have had some tapped Siren magic in their bloodline. Killing them would have released it to their heirs, like the power of our fallen kings strengthening our soils here in Rathe.”

“Just another way the ‘bond’ to a royal helped her with her plans.” Mother smirks. “Your ties to her and you setting foot on their grounds likely helped her draw on it even more.”

My insides twist but I force the feeling down.

The map Mother conjures floats above what’s left of the table, holographic and pale blue, crackling at the edges where the ceiling used to be. Valeryth sits at its center, ringed by a band of dark water that pulses even on the projection.

“We go through it,” Haide says. “Hit the water line with everything we have, the dragons push from the air, I take the front—”

“No,” I interrupt, the word flat and final.

Her jaw is set the way it gets right before she does something catastrophic and calls it strategy. “I wasn’t asking.”

“I know you weren’t.” I move around the rubble between us, keeping my voice controlled and my hands at my sides. Because the bond is already running hot, and if I touch her right now, this conversation ends in a completely different kind of wreckage. “That’s the fucking problem.”

“Thyrix is dead.” She says it like I need the reminder. Like his name isn’t already burned inside me where the bond lives. “He is dead, and Arabella is sitting inside those walls right now, and every second we stand here arguing—”

“The water isn’t a ward.” I point at the projection. The dark band pulses again, slow, patient. “It’s not something you break through with enough firepower. Creed, tell her.”

Creed’s been quiet since Mother spoke, which is its own kind of alarm. He looks up from whatever corner of guilt he retreated to, and his voice comes out low. “The elemental opposition isn’t a metaphor. Siren-aligned water in its oldest form doesn’t just resist fire. It consumes it. The more heat you push into it, the faster it feeds.” He pauses. “Thyrix didn’t die because the water was strong enough to kill him. He died because his fire made him the perfect fuel.”

Ben’s dragon form shifts somewhere in the wreckage overhead. I wonder if he still thinks about burning Knight to a crisp. I would.

Haide doesn’t look away from the projection. “So, we go cold. We go at night, we—”

“You are fire,” I say the words slowly just in case she’s having a slow fucking day and isn’t hearing me. “You and every dragon you command. Your power doesn’t have a cold setting, Haide. The Drakaryth’s flame isn’t something you dial back. It’s what you are. And that water was built to drown exactly what you are.”

Her temple jewel pulses once, red, and she rounds on me with the full weight of it, grief and fury running together until I can’t tell which one is hers and which is mine. Both. It’s both.

“So, what’s your plan?” Her tone is threaded with warning. “We watch the rot take Rathe? We let her sit in there and pick off the rest of them one at a time, because going after her isn’t safe?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“That’s exactly what you said.”

“I said stop being fucking stupid.” Goodbye control. “Charging a Siren water barrier with a fire-born army isn’t a plan; it’s a funeral. Thyrix’s body isn’t even cold and you want to line the rest of them up behind you and walk into the same trap that killed him.”

Haide takes a step forward. I don’t move back.

“Don’t.” The ache is evident in her word before she locks it down, the bond shuddering between us like a band about to snap. “Don’t stand there and use him to stop me.”

“I’m using him to save you.”

“I don’t need—”

“I get it,” I hurry. “You were born on Exile alone. You walked into Valeryth alone. You pulled yourself through shit most wouldn’t survive, alone. Every time there’s a wall you decide the only option is to throw yourself at it—and you survive. I get it. But I am telling you that this particular wall will not leave anything behind that you can survive.”

I swallow, the ache in my chest sharp as fucking ever. “Need me. Fucking, please. I need you to need me.”

Knight shifts his weight near the far wall, a slow movement, probably deciding whether to intervene. London has gone still beside him, watching the space between us with tight focus. Always on alert.

Zev’s spread across a chunk of fallen stone with his arms folded and his expression doing something infuriating: tilting his head. “She usually wins these,” he says to no one in particular.

“Zev.” Haide’s voice.