Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

Tharos Stonehowl had the edge in every category.

Silver cuffs. Stab wound. Three against one.

This was supposed to be a slam dunk on an empty court. A blowout before tipoff. A first-round knockout. Instead it went into overtime, extra innings, and a penalty shootout.

The DELETE-TESTICLES button changed the game to two against one. Add Cassian’s underwear in the mix and shit got interesting.

A mule-kick is what got her to the door. The door got her into the hallway. And the hallway got her to Nicholas.

✦✦✦

DOMINO 63: NOT JUST A KING. HER MATE.

Everything in her, wolf and woman, pointed at him and fired. She sprinted for Nicholas Shadowfell the way a compass needle finds north.

Her wrists were burning, her side was screaming, and none of it mattered because Nicholas Shadowfell was thirty feet away and closing the distance at Alpha speed.

Warmth flooded her chest at the halfway mark like she was coming home. Ten steps from reaching it, Tharos yanked her back into the cold.

”Got you, you slippery little shitstain,” he rasped as he locked her from behind with his blade at her neck.

”Get your fucking hands off of her,” Nicholas roared.

”Take another step, Shadowfell, and she’s dead.”

”She’s your only leverage, Tharos. You aren’t going to hurt her.”

”Doesn’t matter. You aren’t going to risk her and we both know it, so back the fuck up.”

Nicholas stopped, his wolf growling under his ribs. ”I want you to understand something. Not as a king. As the man whose mate you just put in silver. There is nowhere. No kingdom, no continent, no hole in the ground deep enough. I will find you. And what I do when I find you will make men afraid to say your name.”

His eyes dropped to Guinevere’s for a fraction of a second. Immediately her wolf surged, reaching for him on pure instinct before recoiling from the silver hard enough to make her wince.

Pain followed in multiple waves as it thrashed inside her ribs like a caged animal slamming itself against electrified walls and couldn’t stop. Each recoil was weaker than the last, costing more than the one before.

Her eyes welled as her knees hit the stone. She had never felt silver to that degree before. All her wolf did was surge, not shift. But that particular response matched an attempted shift in silver.

”Did you really just try shifting in silver? You idiot girl,” Tharos snapped, yanking her up by her hair.

The sound that came out of Nicholas Shadowfell was older than words. It came from the basement of his species, from the place where wolves existed before language gave them names for what they wanted and territory was just blood and bone.

Nicholas half-shifted, his eyes turning full molten and his voice layered.

”Let. Go. Of. Her.”

The dominance hit Tharos like a wall of gravity. His knees bent before he could stop them, his wolf slamming itself into a submissive posture his pride refused to complete. He locked his legs at the last second, trembling, vertical through stubbornness alone, his hand fisted in Guinevere’s hair and shaking.

The blade he had pressed against her throat drew blood. Possibly accidental, possibly just to be a jackass and make a point. Guinevere would never know because everything after this point happened so quickly.

A door swung open behind her, where Gavyn stood groggily in his boxers, barefoot, with his shirt off and looking like he’d been hit with a confusion bat. Something that Guinevere Lunaris couldn’t see in her current predicament, but would find out about in two seconds when her Beta drew steel.

Gavyn’s sword was at Tharos Stonehowl’s throat at a shocking speed considering the boxers-and-bedside-table logistics.

”Drop the blade, boy. This is your one and only warning,” Tharos growled.

Every door in Lunaris’s corridor slammed open the next second and blades were out. Her flock stood there half-naked and ready. She had thought they left already. People tended to distance themselves from her. But they had waited like she was important enough to wait for. The emotion that fact produced was large and badly timed. She shoved it down before it went anywhere.

Behind Tharos, the demon chanting kicked in again at full volume like the surrounding wolves were just background noise. Both actually seemed delighted with the audience and the vessel arrangement as a whole.

”VESSEL SECURED. VESSEL BOUND. VESSEL READY FOR THE UNDERGROUND. DEEP IN THE DARK WHERE THE SEED IS SOWN—”

A purple portal cracked open.

Tharos’s voice cut over the chanting.

”Hit him. Now.”

White light flashed behind her eyes right as she screamed ”no” into the gag and dark magic hit Nicholas square in the chest. She felt every ounce of it, tearing from him into her through a connection like lightning through a wire. It flooded her chest with a pain so repulsive and violent that she could taste it.

A noise ripped through her skull at a frequency that belonged to Nicholas’s wolf, not hers, a howl of rage and agony so raw it blurred the line between his body and hers until she couldn’t tell whose lungs were burning and whose heart had just stuttered.

Nicholas hit the wall. She watched him hit it and felt the impact in her own spine as his body slid to the floor and didn’t move. Then nothing.

One second she could feel him, his fury, his wolf, the full-throttle intensity of a man mid-shift running towards her with murder in his eyes. The next second, nothing. A void where he’d been, cold and empty and so sudden that her body physically lurched like she’d been leaning on a wall that had vanished.

His wolf’s howl hit her a fraction of a second after the silence, delayed, distorted, the echo of something that had already happened, and the sound of it was wrong. It was the sound a wolf makes when it’s been separated from its body, still conscious, still fighting, but no longer connected to the thing that lets it fight.

She couldn’t breathe. Her chest was locked, her ribs frozen around lungs that had forgotten how to expand. The tears came before she could stop them, hot and immediate, blurring him into a shape she couldn’t verify was breathing.

Tharos Stonehowl shook her once and was saying shit. His mouth was moving and producing sounds she couldn’t process because every part of her brain that handled language had been hijacked by the static screaming into her nervous system where warmth was a moment ago and a heartbeat was supposed to be.