Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

The questions came fast. The answers came from whoever was unlucky enough to make eye contact.

Ryker answered three. Sterling answered two and tried to pass one to Blair, who passed it to Kael, who answered it with the wrong amount of honesty and created three new questions. It was the most inefficient debrief in Velkaris military history, and it was about to get worse.

”Why was she in the foreign court wing, in sovereign quarters?” Maddox asked. ”And not in the royal wing with full security and a guard escort?”

”We had her things moved,” Blair replied. ”But she has been staying in my chambers with me.”

Kael glanced at Blair. The glance was fast, loaded, and poorly disguised. His brother had not known where Guinevere slept. Good. He shouldn’t. The fact that his reaction suggested he had been trying to find out was a problem Maddox would make sure to extinguish.

”My guards were briefed and took over her safety as well,” Blair continued. ”I can’t answer why she wasn’t assigned any outside of that.”

”You moved her things from where?” Maddox asked.

The silence that followed was the kind that precedes a verdict.

Blair met his eyes. ”Your chambers, Maddox. You moved her into your chambers the day you brought her here. The day Lux treated you, before we woke you, all of her things were moved. We had her scent scrubbed so you wouldn’t suspect someone was breaking in.”

Maddox’s vision went red at the edges. The timeline assembled itself with military precision, every piece falling into a sequence that made the rage in his chest climb higher with each connection.

”So let me make sure I have this right. After she was choked, you moved my wife out of my chambers and had her run a Skyrunner Lethal Simulation.”

The sentence sat on the table like a lit fuse with a very short wick. Every person in the room stared at it and chose to let it burn.

”Yes. I was against it,” Blair snapped. ”Her hands were sliced open from catching a blade the night before in the throne room. She saved a child’s life, and Sterling and Ryker still had her run the flight trial. Shadowfell had to dress her wounds again after she flew.”

Sliced hands. Every new detail was a brick being added to a wall of things that had happened to his wife.

”Don’t worry,” Kael said, leaning back in his chair. ”I killed that guy.”

Maddox looked at Kael. Kael looked back. It did not make Maddox feel better.

His dragon whimpered in his mind.

She was hurt. We were here. We did nothing. Fix it. Fix all of it.

He intended to.

”Nobody defended her to the elders,” Blair continued. ”She saved their lives in the throne room. Not one of them has thanked her.”

”Technically I saved everyone in the throne room,” Kael commented.

Blair gave him a look so flat it could have been used to level a foundation.

”It was a team effort,” he amended. ”In which I disabled the wards, took down an army of mercenaries, and killed the man who was trying to take her.”

”You know ten percent of what she did,” Blair clipped. ”She freed four hundred hostages of dragon iron. And killed three people before you got there including the ones trying to kill Maddox and Ryker.”

Kael gave her an unimpressed look. ”With a flame she can’t control?”

”With blades, Kael,” Blair answered flatly.

”Did she?” Kael took a sip of whiskey. ”Because when I got there, she shut her eyes and swung a blade around blindly like she was trying to hit a piñata.”

”She can throw blades, Kael,” Ryker cut in. ”Three kills. Three throws. One was about to kill me. One was holding a blade to Maddox’s throat. The third was Draven’s translator.”

Kael opened his mouth like he wanted to argue. Closed it. Whatever he was about to say, he decided to keep to himself.

Maddox spoke. Low. Quiet. The kind of quiet that doesn’t compete with noise.

”I am Commander of the Drakencrest Armed Forces. Under no protocol, in any branch of my military, would I have a wounded soldier run a lethal simulation trial. Let alone the day after combat. The throne room constitutes as both.” He paused. Let the silence carry the weight he refused to raise his voice for. ”Why. Was. She. Running. A. Lethal. Simulation. I want the answer. Now.”

”You had slotted her in to run that trial...” Sterling paused, choosing his words carefully. ”Before everything.”

”The elders,” Ryker explained. ”She needs to be a dragon rider to have a shot at being queen. That’s the reality.”

Kael’s jaw tightened. Recalculation. Maddox had seen that now multiple times with Kael when it came to his wife.

”The elders have been trying to remove her since she arrived,” Sterling added. ”She holds zero value in their eyes and the eyes of the visiting lords—”

”Yes, and you made damn sure she was aware of that.” Blair’s voice hit the room with enough force to crack the professional distance Sterling maintained between himself and every living thing. ”Shut the hell up.”

Maddox blinked. He had never heard his sister come at Sterling with that specific register of fury, and this was the third time tonight. Whatever Sterling had done to earn it had clearly been accumulating, and Blair’s patience was a currency she had spent down to zero.

”Yes. Sterling is a robot. We know,” Ryker said, rubbing his face. ”He apologized. He also led the—”

Ryker stopped mid-word. The kind of stop that comes from a man’s brain outrunning his mouth and slamming the brakes a syllable too late.

”What.”

”What your second pussed out of saying,” Kael said, ”is that Sterling also led the strike team to retrieve your wife after she was captured mid-battle.”

The sentence sat on the table.

Captured. Mid-battle. His wife had been taken during a fight, and Sterling had assembled a team to get her back, and this was the first time anyone had thought to mention it.

”But, I tracked her down and saved her from that, actually,” Kael continued. ”And again right after, when she decided she wanted to jump through a mystery portal that dumped us in freefall. I shifted. Caught her. Was trying to take her back to you, believe it or not, when we were attacked.”

Maddox rubbed a hand down his face. The first crack in his composure. ”Why the hell would she be in battle?”

”She merged with your flame while you were away,” Kael answered. ”I found her half-unconscious, lying in the snow on a volcano, dying of merge fever. I still can’t believe you had her do that when you weren’t here. So I dropped her in your lap, little brother. Which, in hindsight was the wrong move because she got captured.”

The room erupted.

Blair started. Sterling talked over her. Ryker corrected a date. Kael corrected Ryker’s correction. Jaxon joined in, which was new, and his contribution involved a magical discharge event that Maddox’s brain filed as his wife had a seizure and would revisit with appropriate horror later.

Lux listened. Her expression traveled through surprise, concern, and professional fury in a sequence that told Maddox the woman running point on his brain had been kept partially in the dark as well.

Fantastic. Even the expert wasn’t fully briefed. The compartmentalization in this room had more layers than the Mirrorlock itself.

The details arrived in no particular order and all of them were devastating. Black ops mission to retrieve his wife. Missing. She merged with his flame. Because Sterling hadn’t read the fine print of a ritual document.

Maddox looked at Sterling. Sterling looked at the table.

And the offhand comments Ryker had said to him all week. The jokes. The remarks that Maddox had dismissed as his High General’s peculiar sense of humor. Every single one of them had been true.

His formal jacket came off. He draped it over her body, like a blanket. The room went silent watching him do it.

”Calder and Wessick.” Maddox’s voice was steady. ”Where are they?”

He used to interact with both men daily. Their absence had registered in the background but he had let it pass because the week had been loud enough to cover it.

”They’re dead,” Ryker answered. ”I’m sorry, Maddox. They volunteered for the strike team to rescue her. They were attacked in the air. Fae wards blocked dragon fire and shifts.”

The words hit like a whip drawn across an open wound. Two men Maddox cared about were in the ground, and the grief he should have been carrying all week had been deleted along with everything else.

That’s when he noticed Kael’s jaw tighten. Every person in this room had tells, and every tell was firing at once. He was missing something key.

”The black ops report. When I go through it, am I going to find anything else I won’t like?”

”Yes,” Ryker replied. ”The company in this room is mixed, Commander. I suggest we debrief on that specifically in private.”

Blair’s eyes narrowed. ”What.”

Ryker didn’t answer. The look on his face said that decision had been made for reasons Blair was going to hate and Maddox was going to understand.

Her expression said this conversation was far from over.

Kael took a long sip of his whiskey and didn’t comment which, for a man who had an opinion about everything, was the most damning thing he could have done.

”The parchment.” Maddox looked at Ryker. ”Whatever she pulled from that man’s body was important enough for you to arrest him on sight.”

Ryker reached into his coat and placed the parchment on the table. The wax seal faced up. Red wax. An emblem pressed into it that Maddox didn’t recognize from this angle.

He turned the parchment so the seal faced the room. ”Ashenvale seal.”

Every head turned to Kael.