Page 35 of Too Dangerous To Die

“Medea.”

My knees give out completely. The world reels. My thoughts unravel into threads, each one a memory I don’t recognize but can’t deny.

“No,” I gasp, dragging myself backward. “That’s not who I am?—”

The figure rises.

And I finally see his eyes.

Not empty sockets.

Butmirrors.

He sees me. Knows me. Not Nora, but whoever I once was, buried beneath magic and time.

And he’s not here to kill me.

He’s here toclaimme.

Rhaegar hits him like a meteor.

Stone crashes into steel. A scream—mine—cuts the air as the Wraithborn is torn from me and hurled across the clearing.

Rhaegar isvicious.Feral.

No sword. No hesitation.

Just claws and fury.

He doesn’t ask questions. Doesn’t wait for them to explain.

He tears.

Herips.

One of them lunges, but Rhaegar’s wing slams him into the rock wall with a crack that echoes through the canyon. Another charges from the left, but he’s too slow. Rhaegar twists mid-air, his fist slamming into the creature’s helm hard enough to crumple it inward.

They don’t scream. Don’t cry out. They move like shadows given shape—fluid, relentless, unyielding.

But Rhaegar isworse.

His obsidian skin splits in places where light bleeds through, as if he’s coming undone to become more than he was. His magic roars through the bond, and it scorches me from within.

But he’s not fighting to protect me.

He’s fighting tokeep me.

And that makes something dark and primal twist deep inside me.

When it’s done, when the last of them flees into the dark with a sound like cracking ice, Rhaegar turns back to me.

His chest rises and falls with uneven breaths. His left arm bleeds molten, hissing into the earth.

“You’re not safe anymore,” he growls.

I try to answer, but the voice inside me speaks first.

Medea.

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