Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

The war room had required a king. The corridor required a husband. Something that Maddox apparently was now, whether he remembered signing up for it or not.

When he reached his chambers, the doors were open, servants already moving with urgency. Trunks were being carried.

He turned left into his study. The fireplace was cold. He didn’t bother lighting it. He would keep the woman in his arms warmer than any fire could.

He sat in his desk chair. Adjusted her against his chest. Her head settled into the crook of his neck like it had been designed to fit there, which, given recent revelations, it had.

He kissed her hair. Held his mouth there.

The desk beneath his free hand was buried. Letters. Reports. Correspondence that had been piling up during the week he’d spent at his field tent managing a summit instead of managing his mail. The stack had the look of a man who had been too busy to read and too important to ignore, and the result was a small mountain of parchment that his adjutant had probably been sweating over.

He shifted Guinevere to one arm, freeing the other, and began sorting with the efficiency of a man who ran an empire and had learned to triage paper the way medics triaged wounds. Urgent. Less urgent. Can wait. Should have been burned before it reached his desk.

A letter near the middle caught his eye. The handwriting was feminine. Looping. Confident. The kind of penmanship that had been tutored into existence at great expense and with marginal results. The seal was unfamiliar, which was unusual, because Maddox recognized most seals the way other men recognized faces.

He opened it.

My Dearest Maddox,

Hey there sexy....

He skipped to the signature.

Yours Always,Emma

Maddox stared at the name. Emma. He searched his memory with the focus of a man who had excellent recall and zero results. Emma. Nothing. He tried attaching the name to a face. A house. A conversation. A location. Anything.

The shelves were empty.

He looked at the letter again. Our last conversation. He had apparently had a conversation significant enough for this woman to reference it in written correspondence, and he could not conjure a single detail about her.

He set the letter in the should have been burned pile. Emma sounded batshit crazy. Next.

The next letter had a Lunaris seal.

Drakencrest,

I am writing to demand the immediate disclosure of my daughter’s status.

Renwick Lunaris

The date on the letter lined up with the jungle.

”What the hell was I doing.” He said it out loud. To the empty room. To the unconscious woman in his lap.

He set Renwick’s letter in the urgent pile. Then moved it to the top of the urgent pile. Then looked at it again and moved it to a separate pile he mentally labeled respond before he invades.

More letters. His elders requesting a review of ”the Lunaris situation,” which Maddox now understood was code for your wife and the understanding made his blood simmer.

He made a pile of the ones he would be addressing first thing tomorrow.

The sounds from his chambers had quieted. He stood, scooped her tighter against him, and walked through the study door into the bedroom he apparently shared with his wife and couldn’t remember sleeping in.

The servants were gone. The room was transformed. Her presence had been restored with the speed and precision of a team that feared their king, and the fear had produced excellent results.

His dragon exhaled.

Home. She is home. This is correct.

He carried her through the bedroom the way he had carried her through every corridor tonight: like she weighed nothing, like his arms were the only place she was allowed to exist, like the concept of putting her down was a suggestion that had been reviewed and permanently rejected.

He walked into his closet.

His side was organized with military precision: black, charcoal, midnight blue, arranged by function and season. Her side was full. Abundantly, generously, excessively full.

His lips twitched.

The version of himself that he couldn’t remember had filled this closet for her. Row after row of fabric and leather and silk that said, in the only language Maddox trusted more than words: you live here and I want you to stay. If his current self had been starting from zero, he would have done the same thing.

He selected a chemise from a drawer. Light blue. Soft silk. Small enough for her frame and pretty in a way that made his chest tighten for reasons he refused to examine because he was a man among men.

He carried everything back to the bed and laid her down.

She looked smaller against the mattress. The crimson dress consumed her. The earrings, Kael’s earrings, caught the candlelight with a weight that made him wince. Heavy gold dangles, teardrop shaped, lined with diamonds.

He reached for the first earring and unclasped it carefully. The weight of it in his palm was absurd.

”How did you wear these all night?”

The second earring came free. He set both on the bedside table with the care of a man handling evidence he planned to replace with something better. Maddox’s would arrive by morning. Aggressively, as promised.

Then he looked at her. Really looked. The dress. His hands. The task ahead.

He had never done this before. Changed a woman’s clothing while she was unconscious. Then he remembered they were married. The ring on his finger glowed in confirmation.

He exhaled. Started with the dress.

”I much prefer you sleep naked. If you wake up while I’m doing this, I blame the dress.”

The crimson silk was tight, and getting it off an unconscious woman required patience, angle adjustments, and a level of restraint that Maddox was going to use as a personal benchmark for the rest of his life. His dragon was very unhelpful during this process, offering commentary that would have gotten them both arrested in polite society.

He kept her undergarments on.

The chemise went on easier. Light blue silk slid over her skin.

Dressing his unconscious wife. In his chambers. After tackling and biting her in front of five hundred people on their first date.

Well done, Commander.

He stripped down to his briefs, then crawled into the bed. Put his arm around her. It didn’t feel right.

He lifted her on top of him, guiding her legs to either side of his hips until she was straddling his lap with her chest against his, her face pressed to the hollow of his throat, her weight settling into him like a key finding the lock it was cut for.

His body seemed to think he had done this before.

Much better.

That was the strangest part. The logistics were automatic. One arm around her waist, the other cradling the back of her head.

He inhaled against the top of her head. Deep. Slow. The kind of breath a drowning man takes when his face breaks the surface.

Oh.

The sound that left him was involuntary. Low. Almost wounded. Because the breath filled something in his chest that he hadn’t known was empty until this exact second, and the relief was so sudden and so total that it buckled every wall he’d built in the war room.

The ache he’d been carrying for five days had a name, and the name was breathing against his chest, and every second she stayed pressed against him the ache receded another inch.

His dragon went still.

Her. She was the missing thing.

He understood it now with the clarity of a man standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down at the place he’d already fallen. The last five days had been wrong.

His body had been searching for something his brain couldn’t name, and his brain had been filing the absence under ”stress” and ”dark magic” and ”war” because those were problems a king could solve.

This was the problem a king couldn’t solve.

Married.

The word sat in the center of his mind and waited for him to panic.

He didn’t.

He should have. The Dragon King had just learned he had a wife he couldn’t remember marrying, and the appropriate response was somewhere between existential crisis and a very large drink. Every rational cell in his brain agreed. He ran the word through himself again, testing it for shock, for fear, for the vertigo of waking up inside a life he hadn’t chosen.

Married. To this woman. The one breathing against his chest. The one who had been apologizing for existing in his orbit while his inner circle tried to ship her back to a father who had sold her.

Nothing. Zero panic. The word landed and fit like it had been carved there first.

”Married,” he murmured against her hair. Testing it aloud. The word sounded right in his voice. It sounded like it had been there for a while and was just waiting for him to say it again.

She shifted against him in her sleep. A small sound escaped her throat. Her fingers curled into the bare skin of his chest, right over his heart, and held.

His lungs stopped working.

”I’m here, baby,” he whispered. The words came out wrecked. ”I’m right here.”

She didn’t hear him. Her body was recognizing his even while her mind was somewhere else entirely.

He kissed her forehead. Slow. His lips stayed pressed against her skin long enough to feel her pulse underneath. Steady and even.

”All of it, Guinevere. I’m going to fix all of it.”

The Dragon King did not sleep that night. He held his wife in the dark, listened to her breathe, and rebuilt the man he was going to be for her from the ground up. One breath at a time.