Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

The hardest part of the worst night of her life wasn’t the throne room. It was after.

When the hostages were safely en route through the passage, and the elders had settled, Ryker entered the antechamber to get Maddox.

Nicholas and Kael entered behind him with the spatial awareness of two cats who had both decided the same box was theirs. Neither yielded the doorframe. Both entered sideways. The compromise pleased no one.

Kael was mid-sentence. ”Take the wolves and get out through the passage with the others. Both girls and Maddox too. I’ll handle the ward nexus.”

Ryker’s jaw tightened. He did not trust a single word of that, but he had arrived at the same conclusion independently, which was the infuriating thing about Kael Ashenvale: his plans were usually right, his motives were always suspect, and the two facts existed in a space that made every tactical decision feel like swallowing a fishhook.

Then all three men froze at the sight.

Guinevere was crouching in front of Maddox. Blair had an arm around her shoulders.

”Maddox?” She’d whispered his name ten times already.

His head was propped against the wall. Eyes closed. Jaw slack. The gashes from his ribs to his hip had stopped bleeding, which should have been reassuring and was the opposite, because the skin around them was grey in a way that living skin was never supposed to be.

She couldn’t feel him through their matebond.

He was burning up, which for a dragon should have been impossible, because dragons ran hot the way the ocean ran deep. She had fallen asleep against this man’s chest enough times to know his temperature by touch. This wasn’t it.

Renwick’s rules had no Chapter on what to do after the room cleared and the mask came off. When she spoke, her voice was level and she didn’t turn to look at them.

”He won’t wake up.”

Three men smelled the salt from her tears at the same moment. Each one had the same involuntary response: a tightening behind the ribs, a lock in the jaw, and the specific helplessness of a male body confronted with a woman’s grief and possessing zero tools to fix it.

”Don’t cry, Gwen.” Ryker kept his voice light. The delivery was practiced. The steadiness underneath it was earned. ”He’s hard to kill. Trust me, I’ve considered it.”

The joke was six years old and it always landed. Tonight it barely survived the delivery.

Kael glanced at him with a look that resembled indigestion. He stepped past Ryker towards Maddox with the clinical focus of a man who had seen enough dark magic casualties to recognize the signs. Ryker’s blade came up, blocking his path, the steel catching the torchlight.

The blade said explain yourself. Kael’s response to the blade was to pretend it was not there. He pushed past it. The blade scraped across his shoulder guard and he gave it the same attention he would give a tree branch in his path. His knees hit the stone beside Guinevere. He leaned in and inhaled.

His nostrils flared. Then his head pulled back.

”What the hell...” He leaned in again, scenting the air above Maddox’s gashes. ”Dark magic. The bad kind. It’s suppressing his healing. The longer it sits in his blood, the deeper it roots.”

He looked at Ryker. ”Get him to Aldric immediately. Every minute you wait reduces Aldric’s odds of reversing it.”

Ryker did not need to be told twice. He did not enjoy being told once. The fact that the telling had come from Kael Ashenvale added a flavor to the urgency that he would describe later, over drinks, as ’the emotional equivalent of being pantsed.’

Ryker sheathed his blade without ceremony and moved to Maddox’s right side, hooking an arm under his shoulder.

Guinevere was already on the left, pulling Maddox’s other arm across her shoulders, trying to take his weight while her legs shook beneath her.

The fever, the blood loss from her palms, the flame she had held across four hundred people, all of it was catching up at once, and the only thing keeping her vertical was the man draped across her shoulder who needed her to be.

She was going to collapse. Everyone in the room could see it except her.

Three men exchanged a look. The look said: who’s going to tell her?

”No, Gwen.” Nicholas’s voice was soft. ”Let me.”

He moved to Maddox’s left side, taking the weight from her without waiting for permission. His arm replaced hers under Maddox’s shoulder, and the king’s body shifted from her frame to his, and the relief that her legs felt was immediate and involuntary and accompanied by a flash of guilt so sharp she flinched.

Nicholas took the weight without comment. He adjusted Maddox’s arm across his shoulders and locked his grip. Ryker on the right.

Kael gave Guinevere an unimpressed look, then he turned and walked out of the antechamber without another word, the six recruited soldiers and the mage falling in behind him.

✦✦✦

Nicholas and Ryker carried Maddox in silence, following Guinevere who became the leader for the entire group. The walls had lit gold for her, showing a path.

Ryker and Blair wore identical expressions when they saw it, but neither commented.

The tunnel was narrow enough that their shoulders brushed the walls on both sides. Maddox’s head lolled between them, chin to chest, and the sound of his unconscious breathing was the only rhythm in the passage.

His boots were dragging on the stone.

Ryker was going to tell Maddox about the scrape marks when he woke up. The description would be unflattering. The sound effects would be included.

Nicholas carried his half of the weight without complaint. The man he was helping transport was the man who had bought the woman he loved at an auction. The man who shared her bed. The man whose mark was on her neck while Nicholas’s mark sat silver and unacknowledged beneath it. The irony was so layered it had developed its own geology, and Nicholas was choosing to excavate none of it while carrying the man through a collapsing tunnel because Guinevere needed him to.

”The tunnel opens ahead,” she called over her shoulder in a hoarse voice. The runes ahead blazed brighter, and she could feel cold air pushing through from the other side. The outside was close.

She pressed one hand against the tunnel wall and kept moving. The wall was warm under her bleeding palm, and the gold runes pulsed once under her touch in a way that felt, absurdly, like encouragement.

A three-thousand-year-old Keep was rooting for her. It was the most consistent support she’d received all night.

The tunnel opened.

Cold air hit her face. Mountain air, sharp and clean, carrying the scent of pine and snow and the distant smoke of dragon fire.

Torchlight ahead. Voices. The organized chaos of a military camp in siege mode, and the unmistakable sound of Sterling Emberfell giving orders with the emotional range of a man scheduling an appointment.

”Sterling,” Ryker called out. His voice carried the specific relief of a High General who had been operating without his Third for too long and was prepared to hand over roughly sixty percent of his problems immediately.

Sterling appeared from behind a formation of warriors. His eyes swept the group in one pass: Guinevere bleeding, Maddox unconscious between Nicholas and Ryker, wolves and dragons mixed in a corridor that shouldn’t have existed, and a tunnel opening in a wall he had spent hours trying to breach.

Damon brought up the rear.

”Aldric,” Ryker said. One word. Directed at a healer who was already moving.