The only currency she possessed that might actually carry weight.
But then that thought—the one she couldn't let finish—rose anyway.
If he'd frozen her. If the Void-Ice had claimed her faster than his consciousness could catch up. If the dragon had killed the woman it loved because the woman's daughter had finally pushed the last wrong button—
What would that do to him?
What would waking up to that do—?
The question snapped off like a guillotine blade before it could complete, too vast, too dark, too permanent to hold in one breath.
Before the horror could metastasise, Maya Scarlett had materialised like smoke given purpose and made the entire hypothetical irrelevant.
Melissa exhaled once—shaky, ragged—and began cataloguing the night's lessons the way she catalogued everything: methodically, ruthlessly, each new truth another brick mortared into the wall she was building between herself and the chaos trying to swallow them all.
