Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

There was no right way to hit water from a hundred feet, but there were degrees of wrong, and Guinevere found the worst one.

The river punched like an ice god, forcing a shift on impact.

White flash. Fur gone. Lingerie pajamas back. The cold upgraded from bad to FUCK with a capital scream.

She hit a rock, then pinballed on more. Back. Shoulder. Forehead. Each one stole something. Air. Orientation. The ability to tell up from down.

Drowning in a freezing river after escaping a goddamn glowing cult of brothers who lived in a brown bachelor pad together was not the ending she had written for herself.

✦✦✦

Nicholas didn’t hesitate.

His wolf tore across the cliff at full sprint, four hundred pounds of Alpha predator locked onto the white blur disappearing. The edge came and he launched.

A hundred feet of open air.

The shift ripped through him mid-fall. Claws retracted. Muscle condensed. Skin replaced fur.

By the time gravity had him at sixty feet, Nicholas Shadowfell was in a dive position as a human. Arms up. Body arrow-straight. Then he hit the river.

The cold drove so deep into his chest his lungs seized.

Barely above freezing. Mountain snowmelt with zero interest in keeping warm-blooded creatures alive. The current grabbed him immediately, pulling him under and south with a force that made his Alpha strength feel like a suggestion.

He’d fought currents before. Trained in rivers, lakes, open ocean. This was different. This water was faster than anything he’d swum in, and it was getting faster.

He couldn’t see her.

The water was black. Silt, depth, and speed turned everything past his hands into nothing, and his wolf’s tracking instincts, which could find a rabbit across a moonless field at three hundred yards, were useless when the trail was underwater.

He surfaced, gasping.

”GUINEVERE!”

He dove again.

Her name roared through his blood.

Every second she was under was a second her lungs didn’t have. A woman her size, unconscious, in water this cold. The clock was ticking.

Their matebond had been half-broken since she woke. Her emotions reached him muffled, like hearing someone speak through a wall. But the wolf signal had been clean. Clear. That was how he had reached her first in the forest.

But now that was dimming too.

He broke the surface again, catching his breath. Then he refocused so his wolf could properly orient to hers.

For a second, nothing.

Then a pulse. His wolf grabbed it.

She’s downstream. We don’t lose her.

He went under and Nicholas swam toward her with everything his body had left.

Then his shoulder slammed into a rock hidden in the black. Bone cracked. Pain detonated. He didn’t slow. If he lost her now, he wouldn’t be able to sense her again.

✦✦✦

Maddox reached the cliff edge four seconds after Nicholas went over.

He didn’t stop.

Just a king in a dead sprint who treated the edge of a cliff the way other men treated a doorway, something you go through without pausing because what’s on the other side matters more than the fall.

His body was a straight line. Arms forward, chin tucked, every muscle locked into a position that turned six-foot-five of Dragon King into a torpedo aimed at black water.

The river rushed up to meet him. His gold eyes stayed open the entire way down because Maddox Drakencrest did not close his eyes for anything, including gravity.

He hit the surface clean and the river swallowed him whole.

His eyes opened in black water and saw nothing. He swam deeper, arms sweeping in wide arcs through a current that was trying to kill him one degree at a time, searching for a body that the river had already carried past his reach.

Maddox: Guinevere.

Nothing. It had been nothing every single time. He already knew the wall was there. He hit it anyway, the way a man hits a locked door when the person he loves is on the other side.

Maddox: Answer me. Please, baby.

Like Nicholas, he could barely sense her through their matebond. But he could call for her flame. He reached for the fire, calling for it, the flame that had answered him in the forest. A signal that should have cut through cold water.

It didn’t answer.

Maddox: Don’t you dare. Answer me. Now.

His dragon roared in his skull.

He reached again. Harder. Deeper.

Still nothing.

He surfaced, sucked air, and dove again.

Maddox: GUINEVERE. RESPOND. NOW.

✦✦✦

Two kings swimming blind. Landon fell from the sky and gave the river nowhere to goddamn hide.

White exploded outward in a sustained pulse. Thirty feet of black water became transparent. The current drew itself in visible lines. Rocks appeared. The riverbed revealed its shape, its hazards, its lanes. Everything the dark had been concealing was laid out in front of him.

But Guinevere wasn’t in any of it.

He gritted his teeth, pulled from somewhere deeper, and pushed. The light expanded, slow and grinding, pressing outward through resistance until sixty feet of river was illuminated in every direction.

Holding illumination underwater was costing him triple what it cost in open air. He had no defense against the cold. But he didn’t stop. He scanned the riverbed as he swam at full speed. Beneath that, he called for her light again and again.

No signal. No glow. No answer. Just cold water and the growing certainty that the current had her.

Landon surfaced beside Maddox. His body was shaking from the cold. Maddox was gulping air between clenched teeth. Nicholas broke the surface downstream, coughing, and one look at his face answered the question nobody wanted to ask. None of them had found her. The river had three kings in it, and it was winning.

”She’s still moving south,” Maddox called between breaths.

Landon’s jaw clenched. ”I feel that. Can you sense how far?”

”Quarter mile, maybe more. Current’s got her.”

The three dove simultaneously, which was instinct, not teamwork, and they would insist on that distinction later.