Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

If there was a god of underestimated women, she was watching Blair Drakencrest tonight and taking notes.

Blair reached into her cloak, pulled out a sealed envelope, and set it on the table beside the others.

”Forgot about this one.”

Kael’s eyes moved to it. Then to Blair. ”Where did that come from?”

”Marek Navarre. He was holding it in the hall when he knocked himself out. I confiscated it.”

Kael leaned forward, eyes on the envelope. Then his gaze lifted to Blair. Something shifted in his focus, a recalculation, not about the letter.

”Tell me how he fell unconscious again. You keep glossing over that.”

The question was aimed at the room, but his eyes were on Blair, and the aim was too steady to be casual.

Blair met his stare without flinching. Her pulse didn’t change. Her hands didn’t move. Every micro-expression stayed exactly where she put it, because Blair Drakencrest had been managing people who were smarter than her in every room she’d ever walked into, and the trick was never about being smarter. The trick was about being faster at deciding which truth to spend and which to pocket.

”Irrelevant to the current discussion,” she said with the breezy authority of a woman steering a warship around an iceberg and pretending the iceberg was a cloud. ”The important thing is nothing happened when I touched it.”

Kael’s eyes narrowed by a fraction. The fraction said I will be revisiting this topic. Blair’s expression said you’re welcome to try.

Around her neck, a necklace sat against her skin. A necklace that may or may not have saved her. A necklace that Kael had failed to notice she’d been wearing in plain sight because Kael Ashenvale was the smartest man in every room except the ones where Blair Drakencrest had already been through his things.

She held up the sealed letter for the table.

”Solandris seal,” she informed the room. ”I’ve already touched it and nothing happened. Should I break it?”

”Hold on.” Brennan’s hand shot out. ”You can see through the paper. Look. There’s a second letter inside. Folded separately. With its own seal.”

The table leaned in collectively. He was right. There was a faint shadow of a second fold, visible inside the outer envelope.

”Classic Emma.” He exhaled through his nose. ”She nests them. The outer envelope is the handshake. The inner letter is the knife.”

Blair stood. Her chair scraped the obsidian floor with a sound that cut through the silence like a verdict.

Her eyes were wide. The kind of wide that had nothing to do with surprise and everything to do with a brain running at full speed while her body waited for the rest of the room to catch the hell up. Wheels were turning behind those gold eyes, and the wheels were connected to gears, and the gears were connected to a plan, and the plan was connected to violence.

Jaxon entered the war room at that exact moment with Lux Nash two steps behind him.

”Perfect,” Blair said.

She had mindlinked him forty seconds ago. The man moved fast.

”Jaxon and Sterling. Figure out how we can open this letter safely. Not if. How.” She pointed at the Solandris-sealed envelope on the table without looking at it. ”Kael supervises. Lux and Damon, with me.”

She said it the way a general deploys units. No justification. No discussion. Names, assignments, movement.

Nicholas and Ryker looked at one another across the table. The glance lasted one second and contained the specific indignation of two high-ranking men who had just been left off a roster. Nicholas’s expression said did she just skip us. Ryker’s said she absolutely did.

Damon was already standing. The chair was still rocking from how fast he’d vacated it. The Beta moved like a man whose body had received the order from Blair before his brain finished processing the words, and his brain was in no position to overrule what his body clearly considered the correct chain of command.

Lux didn’t ask any questions, ready to go.

Sterling’s arms uncrossed for the first time in twenty minutes. ”What are you doing?”

Blair was already at the door. She turned, and the look she gave Sterling was the look of a woman who had been running a dungeon interrogation for six hours, a war room briefing for two, and had just connected a conspiracy that spanned continents, and the man asking her what she was doing was standing between her and the exit.

”I’m getting Emma.”

The sentence sat in the room for exactly one second before Kael’s voice cut through it.

”How are you going to do that?” He leaned forward, hands on the table. ”You need Brennan to make a positive identification. She’s probably using a disguise. He’d know her magical signature.”

”Brennan is on standby.” Blair was moving through the doorframe. ”Once we have her in custody, he confirms.”

”Wait.” Kael stood. ”Slow down. What is your plan?”

”Kael. You either trust me or you don’t. Either way, stay out of my way,” Blair called over her shoulder.

Kael’s jaw worked once. The man who had an opinion about everything and a counter-strategy for every strategy and a backup plan for every backup plan was standing in a war room watching his younger sister walk away from him with a team he hadn’t picked, running a plan he hadn’t vetted.

He turned to the table. ”Jaxon, Brennan. Work on the letter. Sterling, supervise. My sister is about to do something crazy.”

Sterling looked at the table. Looked at Kael’s retreating back. Looked at the table again. The expression on his face belonged to a man who had been demoted to letter-duty while a princess, a dark mage, and a wolf Beta went hunting.

”Absolutely fucking not,” he said aloud to no one. Jaxon looked up from the letter but did not comment.

”She decorates rooms,” Kael muttered as he hit the corridor, catching up to Blair’s stride. ”She redecorates furniture and terrorizes servants and steals my operational methods and now she’s running a black ops extraction. What is this shit.”