Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

Guinevere had turned into a fierce, forgiveness-forcing, fear-killing freight train aimed directly at Maddox’s self-destruction and she was not slowing down.

Maddox blinked down at her as the information landed in stages.

”Kael’s room was decorated like this. Blair did it,” he managed after a moment, realizing Guinevere had been asleep, as in double venomed, when they were in Kael’s quarters and it hadn’t come up in front of her yet.

She grinned. ”Oh, I love that.”

Maddox watched her grin about interior decorating while sitting in his lap with a bruise on her face and a stab wound in her recent history, and decided the priorities in this conversation needed immediate restructuring.

”You fell on a dagger?” he pressed.

”Oh, that,” she said like it was an afterthought. ”Technically, the dagger and I arrived at the same location at the same time.”

”That’s falling on a dagger.”

”It was more of a mutual collision,” she stated, describing the self-inflicted stab wound as a mutual collision with the deadpan, damage-deflecting, dignity-preserving delivery of a woman who had started rebranding her disasters and was going to die on that hill.

”Between you and a weapon.”

”Correct. I didn’t have great spatial awareness at the time.”

”And this is... the abridged version?”

”Significantly.”

”And this is the story you’re choosing to tell me right now. While sitting in my lap. With a bruise on your face,” Maddox stated, lips twitching.

”Yes,” she replied. ”Would you prefer the one about the high-speed chase?”

”Are you talking about when you were almost arrested with Shadowfell?”

Her face went red. ”Oh, I forgot about that time.”

She forgot about being almost arrested. The near-arrest was so low on her list of weekly crises that it had slipped her memory entirely. Maddox’s expression suggested this was not the reassurance she thought it was.

”The Luminari take trespassing very seriously,” she explained.

Maddox’s jaw worked once.

”Why did you have a dagger?” he asked, voice steady.

A reasonable question. The most reasonable question in this conversation. And somehow, out of everything she had told him tonight, this was the one that made her mouth stop working.

Guinevere’s mouth opened. The words were right there, lined up, ready to march. They refused to move.

It wasn’t about trust. She trusted Maddox. She had chosen this man’s lap. The problem was that the truth sounded crazy.

”I’ve already used my ’this sounds insane’ card in this conversation,” her voice came out softer. Smaller. The voice of a woman who had been doubting her own perception for days.

”Use it again.”

”You can’t use the same card twice.”

”You can with me.”

Maddox adjusted the ice on her cheek. His hand had finally stopped shaking. The tremor had been replaced by something steadier, something that had clicked into place when she started talking, as if her voice was the thing his nervous system had been waiting for to remember how to regulate.

”What is it, baby? You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone,” he said softly.

She believed him. The matebond carried his sincerity the way it carried everything else between them, unfiltered and immediate and impossible to fake.

”I thought I was hallucinating. I saw my father’s wife holding it. She was talking about my brother.”

Brother. The word split in half in her mouth. Underneath it was a grief that was complicated but still there, still real. She swallowed the crack and moved on, and the effort of sealing it cost her every muscle in her throat.

”She was going to stab herself. So I knocked it out of her hand and grabbed it before she could pick it back up.”

Maddox’s eyes moved across her face, reading the truth of it in the way her voice had cracked and the way her eyes had gone glassy and the way her hand had squeezed his harder on the word brother like the name of something she had lost and was still looking for.

”You weren’t hallucinating. I invited Maria and Draven to stay in Drakencrest,” Maddox said, choosing his words carefully.

”Invited?” she repeated.

Maddox held her gaze. ”Yes.”

She shifted in his lap to look at him directly. The matebond was doing something deliberate on his end. A warmth being pushed toward her. A cushion being placed between her and something that he didn’t want her to know.

”I can feel you trying to protect me through our matebond. At least I think that’s what you’re doing. And I’m going to need you to stop and tell me.”

Every muscle in his body answered before his mouth did. His arm around her tightened. His breathing changed. The hand that wasn’t holding ice pressed flat against her back like he was bracing her for impact, and the matebond flooded with something that felt like a man standing in front of a door trying to decide if opening it was an act of honesty or cruelty.

”Is it about my brother being dead? Because of me,” she pressed, entirely too calm for its contents, the way sentences come out when the person saying them has already processed the worst version.

”It wasn’t because of you,” Maddox said immediately.

No hesitation on that one. He had been ready for that sentence. He had been preparing for it.

”Who killed him, Maddox?”

Point blank. No cushion. No windup. She asked it the way you pull a bandage: fast, committed, knowing the sting is coming regardless of speed. Her eyes didn’t leave his.

Her heartbeat was slamming so hard he could probably feel it through her back and underneath the question was a prayer so loud she was surprised the matebond didn’t transmit it. Please. Not you. Anyone but you.

There is a specific way a man holds a woman before he tells her something that will change her life.

Maddox’s chest expanded under her. Held. The exhale was slow and deliberate. His eyes stayed on hers and she watched him make the decision to tell her.

”Your father.”