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It’s just another outer wall tower, old stone and newer repairs, a place rangers pass through on the way to somewhere else. There are logbooks and weapon racks below, bunks that smell like oil and old wool. Up top, there’s a narrow ring of battlements, the city a distant glow on one side and the black line of the forest on the other. It’s late enough that the regular patrol has already come and gone. Quinn knows their rotation by heart; she picked this gap on purpose.
Shyvana isn’t supposed to be here without Jarvan. She knows it. Quinn knows it. The walls know it. A half‑dragon in Demacian steel is a weapon checked out of its rack, a problem waiting to be noticed.
Quinn doesn’t care tonight. She leans on the inward‑facing parapet, crossbow set aside, hood down, letting the wind cool the sweat at the back of her neck. Valor sits two towers away, a darker shadow on a higher parapet, head tucked. Close enough to hear if she whistles. Far enough not to see what he doesn’t need to. Nor wants to.
Which Quinn is quietly grateful for.
Footsteps are heavy and measured behind her. The faint and distinct sound of claws clicking against stone.
“You keep doing this,” Shyvana says quietly, coming to stand beside her. “Finding places you shouldn’t be.”
Quinn huffs. “I’m a ranger,” she says. “That’s the job.”
“You’re a knight as well,” Shyvana counters. “You have a place inside these walls. At court. With the others.”
“Mm,” Quinn says noncommittally. The thought of a banquet hall makes the muscles in her jaw work, fingers twitching absently.
They’re close enough that Quinn's shoulder brushes just above Shyvana's elbow when the wind pushes them. Shyvana stands very straight, staring out over the dark fields. She never quite relaxes in Demacia, but tonight there’s an extra tightness in her jaw, a coiled readiness that has nothing to do with Noxians.
Quinn watches her for a moment, the hard line of her mouth, her tail awfully stiff, the way her hands flex and settle at her sides like she’s rehearsing restraint.
“You’re the one out of place,” Quinn says. “If anyone should be lecturing anyone…”
Shyvana’s lips twitch, a tiny almost‑smile. “If anyone sees me,” she says, “this becomes something else. Questions. Accusations. More threats.”
“Then don’t let them see you,” Quinn says simply.
She says it like it’s easy: just a matter of angles and timing. And to her, it is. You learn how to be where eyes aren’t.
She turns fully then, putting her side to the stone so she can face Shyvana. The lantern in the stairwell throws just enough light to outline her cheekbones, the pale line of her throat, the small scar at her jaw from harsh lessons learnt by dealing with an azurite eagle. Shyvana has looked at that scar more times than she’ll admit.
Quinn tips her head. “Tell me you don’t want to be here,” she says. “And I’ll call it a night, go do my rounds, you go back to pretending you sleep.”
Shyvana looks at her. The lie dies somewhere behind her teeth.
“You know I can’t say that,” she mutters.
“Good,” Quinn says. “Come here, then.”
Shyvana does. She always does now.
It starts like it always does: a touch that could be passed off as nothing if someone came up the stairs—the back of Quinn’s hand brushing Shyvana’s forearm, the shift of weight closer. Then her fingers curl in the front of Shyvana’s breastplate, pulling her down. The first kiss is quick, testing. The second is not.
Shyvana has learned to match her. The care is still there—there will always be care—but it’s less like she’s afraid Quinn will snap under her hands. She presses Quinn into the stone with the full, contained weight of herself, one hand braced on the wall by Quinn’s arm, the other finding Quinn’s hip. Quinn’s breath catches, then steadies, her hands sliding up to Shyvana’s shoulders, thumbs tracing the line of muscle under scales and skin then over the spikes protruding.
The city is a distant murmur. Up here, there’s only the scrape of armor, the soft, inevitable sounds of mouths meeting, parting, meeting again. Quinn hooks her fingers into the hair at the nape of Shyvana’s neck, tugging just enough to draw a low sound out of her. It vibrates against Quinn’s chest.
“Better,” Quinn murmurs when they break, breath fanning Shyvana’s mouth. “You’re getting less polite.”
Shyvana huffs against her lips. “You complain when I am careful, you complain when I am not.”
“I complain when you’re thinking about the palace instead of me,” Quinn says, and pulls her back down.
Shyvana lets herself fall into it. For a little while, she forgets about banners and vows and what Demacia would call this. There is only Quinn’s mouth, Quinn’s hands, the way Quinn’s heart is hammering faster with each shift of weight. Her own breathing grows rougher, heat pooling low and familiar. The dragon stirs, but in a background way, a furnace turning over, not yet a blaze.
Quinn tilts her head, deepening the kiss until it’s more teeth than lips. Shyvana answers, finally, with strength instead of restraint, backing Quinn a fraction harder against the stone. Quinn makes a sound into her mouth that is not entirely from surprise, her free hand bracing herself from behind.
“Rougher is allowed,” Quinn gets out between breaths. “I’ve told you that.”
Shyvana’s fingers tighten on her hip. It’s a small thing, permission, but it lands. The dragon in her doesn’t understand human words, but it understands increase. More pressure, more heat, more everything.
She moves her mouth from Quinn’s lips to her jaw, then down, following the line of tendon and pulse. Quinn tilts her head back automatically, exposing a stretch of throat to the night air and to Shyvana’s mouth. The skin there is thin, warm. Shyvana can feel the beat under her lips.
Her hand leaves the wall and slides up Quinn’s side, splaying between her shoulder blades to anchor her there. The other stays on Quinn’s hip, thumb feeling the jump of muscle as Quinn tries to keep herself steady on the rather narrow footing.
“Don’t drop me,” Quinn mutters, half‑laughing, half serious.
“I won’t,” Shyvana says. It comes out low and rough.
She parts her lips against Quinn’s throat, the taste of sweat and cold air on her tongue. Her teeth skim, testing the line between mark and wound. Quinn’s fingers spasm in her hair, encouraging. Shyvana’s heart thuds harder against armor. Her senses sharpen, the scrape of fabric, the rasp of Quinn’s breath, the very specific sound of Quinn’s pulse speeding up under her mouth.
Something primal watches that pulse and licks its lips.
She tells herself she can control it. She will give Quinn what she wants: a mark, a reminder, nothing more. She lets her teeth close, just enough to pinch skin, to bruise, to make Quinn gasp.
Her canines have been edging sharper with every beat.
They catch.
It’s barely pressure. Her jaw doesn’t even close all the way before there’s a give, a tiny tear in flesh. Blood beads instantly. A flick of her tongue catches it without her meaning to.
Taste detonates in her mouth.
It’s not much—less than she had from a single slash on a battlefield—but in this context, this small, stolen tower, it hits differently. Copper and warmth flood her senses. The dragon in her, lulled by the illusion that this was human play, snaps awake, furious and delighted that a line has been crossed.
Everything tightens.
Her pupils constrict to pinpoints, then widen in a thin, vertical band. The world sharpens in edges and contrasts. She can hear Quinn’s heartbeat now in the space under her teeth, loud as a war drum. Her fingers spasm on Quinn’s back, nails almost digging through fabric.
Her jaw wants to close. Hard.
Her mind races with images . The desire to have Quinn arched against the stone, not from pleasure but from panic, her hands pushing uselessly at Shyvana’s shoulders as teeth sink and rip. Flesh stretching and pulling thin as it dislodges from the body. Hot blood gushing over Shyvana’s tongue, down her throat, coating her fangs. The sound Quinn would make as the last breath took hold. The way the body would jerk, then go slack. The absolute, explosive satisfaction of it. The satisfaction of a predator getting its kill.
Hunt. Kill. Consume. Devour.
The urges don’t come in words, not really, but if they did, that’s what they’d be. They flood her, obliterating for a moment the careful scaffolding of discipline she’s built. Her spine arches, instincts screaming: now. Now. NOW.
She jerks back like she’s been ripped on a chain.
Her hand tears away from Quinn’s back and slams over her own mouth, palm mashed so hard against her lips she can feel the points of her teeth digging into her skin. She staggers a step away, leaving Quinn almost pasted to the wall by momentum before gravity pulls her forward again.
Quinn’s hand flies to her neck, where the bite stings sharp. She is breathing too fast. Her fingers come away red. Not much. A smear between two knuckles.
She looks up.
Shyvana is standing a pace away, hunched, shoulders bunched near her ears. Her eyes are wrong—amber lit from within, pupils narrow and vertical. There is a smear of red at the corner of her mouth where Quinn’s blood marked her. Behind the web of her fingers, her teeth look longer, white and vicious. A thin line of drool slips from the corner of her mouth under her hand and drips to the stone between her talons.
Her chest heaves. Each breath drags Quinn’s scent deeper, tormenting her with it. She can taste Quinn’s blood still, a phantom sweetness, and everything in her wants more. Wants to lunge forward, tear Quinn’s hand from her throat, clamp down. To end this tension in one glorious, terrible act.
She forces herself still. Her fingers dig into her own jaw until it hurts.
Quinn doesn’t speak. For a heartbeat, maybe two, they simply stare at each other.
Quinn’s instincts, honed by years of watching things kill, tell her exactly how close she just got to being nothing but meat on stone. Shyvana’s stance—weight slightly forward, hand clamped over her mouth instead of on Quinn, the tremor in her forearms from the effort of not moving—screams of a predator on the verge. The part of Quinn that survived the wilds wants to shrink, to move slowly, to lower her gaze and edge away without turning her back.
She doesn’t move at all.
The only sound is her own pulse and Shyvana’s ragged breathing.
“Quinn,” Shyvana says at last, voice warped by her hand. The word scrapes out like it’s been dragged over stones. “Get away.”
Quinn’s throat works around a swallow that sets the bite throbbing. It would be so easy to obey. One step sideways to the stairwell, one whistle for Valor, one shout and guards would come. There would be a flurry of steel and accusations and a story everyone in Demacia already believes, neatly confirmed.
They would call Shyvana what she almost was, and they would be right.
Quinn doesn’t move.
Shyvana’s eyes flicker, some mix of frustration and something like despair. “I tasted you,” she manages, each word heavy. “You don’t understand. I wanted—” She cuts herself off, jaw trembling under her own palm. Admitting it feels like feeding it.
She doesn’t need to finish. Quinn saw it in that one heartbeat. The weighing, the hunger, the way something inside Shyvana leaned toward her with more intent than any sparring or kiss.
Nothing eats through trust faster than seeing the moment someone you love considers you food.
Her neck burns, sharp stings climbing up her throat. She keeps her hand there anyway, both to hide the blood and because it’s something to do. The sting is almost nothing in the face of the sharp, icy clarity sliding into her.
All the pragmatism that makes her Quinn—the ranger who chooses the ugly option because it keeps people alive—rises, cold and unforgiving. She has been ignoring the calculation because she wanted this, because it felt like she’d carved out something small and defiant for herself. But the math is simple in the end.
There is a line in Shyvana that Quinn can’t see until it’s already beneath her teeth.
She loves someone who, under the right stimulus, will want to kill her more than anything else in the world.
Quinn takes a breath that feels like stepping onto a loose ledge.
“You wanted to,” she says quietly. “Didn’t you.”
It’s not a question. Shyvana flinches like she’s been struck anyway. Her eyes squeeze shut.
“Yes,” she forces out. There’s no point lying. Not after Quinn saw her. “For a moment. I wanted to… to open you. To—”
“Eat me,” Quinn finishes for her, because there’s no use flinching from the word. It lands between them like something dead.
Shyvana nods once, tiny, miserable. Her hand presses harder over her mouth, as if she could stuff the word back in.
Quinn’s jaw tightens. “And you pulled away.”
“I don’t know how,” Shyvana says. “I only know I did. This time.”
The last two words hang there.
Quinn’s fingers curl against her own throat. The pulse under them has steadied, but her skin feels too thin, too vulnerable. Every beat reminds her of the weight of Shyvana’s mouth, the sudden vice of that bite.
“How many times,” Quinn asks, slow, measured, “have you wanted that, around me, and not said?”
Shyvana’s eyes open. They’re less bright now, the slit of the pupil a fraction wider, but still wrong enough that looking into them feels like leaning over the lip of a chasm. “Every time,” she says, because if she is going to be hated, she might as well be hated for what she is. “Every time you bleed near me. Every time I smell you tired and hot after training. Every time your heart races when you are too close.”
She takes a ragged breath. “I have been… very disciplined.”
It’s true. Quinn knows it’s true. That almost makes it worse. All those moments she thought of as trust and ease were also moments Shyvana was white‑knuckling it behind her own ribs.
“And one day you won’t be,” Quinn says.
It isn’t accusation so much as grim prediction. Shyvana hears it for what it is.
“I joined Demacia to be more than that,” Shyvana says, voice low, desperate. “To be part of something bigger than hunger. To protect.” The words she told herself on the vellox hunt taste like ash now. “But my nature does not care about banners or vows. You bleed, anything that can bleed, and it—” Her throat works. “It rejoices.”
Quinn closes her eyes for a moment.
She thinks of Caleb’s grave. Of sitting there, unable to move on, replaying that one accident in the mountains over and over. Of realizing that the wilderness doesn’t care how much you love someone, only how prepared you were. How ruthless you’re willing to be with yourself to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
She opens her eyes.
“This can’t happen again,” she says. Her tone is flat, Ranger‑Quinn, the one who doesn’t flinch from orders that get people killed as long as they’re the right people.
Shyvana goes very still. For a second, the hunger roars at the opening—if this is ending, if this is the last time, then take. Take now. Take everything. No more need to hold back.
She doesn’t move.
Her hand slips from her mouth to hang useless at her side. Her teeth are still a fraction too sharp; she clamps them together until the points hurt. “I will control it,” she says. It sounds thin, even to her. “I have controlled it.”
“And you almost didn’t,” Quinn says.
There is no anger in it. That makes it worse. If she shouted, if she cursed, Shyvana could burn that into herself as penance. But Quinn is just… stating facts.
“Do you trust yourself around me?” Quinn asks. “Honestly. With this.” She lifts her hand from her neck, showing the smear of red. Showing Shyvana the proof of how little it took.
Shyvana looks at it. Her vision tightens. The dragon in her howls. She clamps down, nails digging into her own palm again until she feels skin break, her blood hot across her hand. The extra pain, the extra scent, helps blur Quinn’s.
“No,” she says finally. Bare. “No. Not… not always.”
Quinn nods once.
“But I don’t want to—” Shyvana starts, and stops. There’s no word that doesn’t sound small. Lose you? Let you go? Give this up?
Quinn’s face does something complicated and then smooths.
“I know,” she says. “I don’t either.”
That lands harder than any insult.
Quinn pushes off the wall. For a heartbeat, Shyvana tenses, expecting a flinch, a retreat. Quinn doesn’t step back. She steps sideways, putting half a pace between them, just enough that if something in Shyvana snaps, she’ll have a sliver of time to move.
“We choose risk every day,” Quinn says. “Out there.” She jerks her chin toward the dark beyond the walls. “We choose ambush routes because they’re efficient, take missions that might get us killed because the alternative gets someone else killed. This… isn’t that. This is me deciding to stand at the edge of a cliff and hope the ground holds when I know something underneath is already cracking.”
Shyvana swallows. Her throat feels raw. “You are saying—”
“I’m saying I can’t keep—” Quinn gestures between them, the tower, the way Shyvana’s hand still shakes, “—pretending this is only sweet and secret and brave. It’s also stupid.”
The last word lands like a slap on herself as much as on Shyvana.
“If I keep coming up here with you,” she says, “if I keep letting you this close, knowing what it does to you, and one day you don’t pull away fast enough…” She trails off, throat tightening. “That’s on both of us. And Demacia will tear you apart for doing what your body was screaming to do. I’m not giving Jarvan that choice.”
The silence after that is colder than the night air.
Shyvana feels something in her chest crack, a different kind of fire catching. Not hunger. Not rage. Something like grief, twisted around the old, familiar core of self‑loathing. Of course. This is what happens when she moves too close to anything warm.
“You are afraid of me,” she says. It’s not accusation. It’s a statement that tastes like truth.
“Yes,” Quinn says. Then, softer, “And I’m afraid of what will happen to you if I ignore that.”
It’s a rotten kindness. It still counts as kindness.
Shyvana looks past her, over the walls, toward where she knows the palace sits even if she can’t see it from here. The place that took her in, that keeps her on a leash of honor and service and cold courtesy. The place that will never really see her as anything but a scaled shadow by their prince’s side.
“I should go back,” she says. Her voice sounds like it’s coming from far away. “Before they notice I’m gone.”
Quinn nods. “You should.”
She doesn’t move to stop her. That, more than anything, makes reality settle.
Shyvana turns toward the stair. At the top of the first step, she pauses. There’s a pull, physical, behind her sternum, the residual drag of Quinn’s warmth, Quinn’s mouth, Quinn’s blood on her tongue. The dragon in her, sated by nothing, whispers that she is a fool to walk away from prey that offers itself so willingly.
She’s used to ignoring that voice. It doesn’t make it hurt less now.
“Quinn,” she says, still facing the stairs.
“Yeah,” Quinn answers.
Shyvana’s hand curls on the stone of the stairwell arch. She wants to say something noble. Something like I’m sorry, or it’s better this way. What comes out is small and ugly.
“I liked it,” she says quietly. “The taste. For a moment.”
There’s a sharp breath behind her.
“I know,” Quinn says. There's a lack of judgment, just tired certainty. “That’s the problem.”
Shyvana nods once, unseen, and descends into the tower.
Quinn stays where she is, hand pressed absently to her neck until the sting dulls to ache. Below, she hears the heavy door open and close, the brief murmur of guards surprised to see the prince’s half‑dragon heading out alone, the clank of armor moving away toward the inner city.
To the side, Valor shifts, then launches, wings beating the air as he glides to her parapet. He lands beside her with a soft thump, head cocked, sharp eyes dropping immediately to the mark on her throat.
“Don’t start,” Quinn mutters. “I know.”
He ruffles his feathers, unsettled, but says nothing Quinn can translate into words. He hops closer, presses his head briefly against her shoulder, a weight and a warmth that doesn’t come with fangs.
Quinn lets out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. The city lights flicker below. Somewhere in those walls, a dragon curls in on herself in a stone room, jaw clenched, trying not to think about the shape Quinn’s throat made under her teeth.
The instincts don’t quiet because they broke this. Hunger doesn’t care about good decisions. It will ignite next time, and the time after that, every time Shyvana smells blood or fear or wants. The only thing that has changed is that now Quinn has stepped off the ledge before the ground crumbled, leaving a gap between them that neither duty nor desire is enough to bridge.
"I love you, that's what hurts most."