Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

The universe had been stacking the deck against Guinevere Lunaris all night. Cuffs. Gag. Silver. Blade. Dark magic. A dead king.

Sixty-five dominoes.

The sixty-sixth was the one she shoved back up the chain where the sun don’t shine.

✦✦✦

DOMINO 66: TROUBLE IN DICK-DONKEY PARADISE

The purple light kept bleeding from her chambers, patient as a serial killer waiting for the right moment. Same color as the Dark Fae portal in the hallway. You didn’t need a PhD in wizard shit to know one was open.

While every man in the corridor was busy questioning the nature of reality because of the dead king and hostage situation, Guinevere Lunaris’s gears were already spinning like a bitch with a deadline and nothing left to lose.

Kael: What are you about to do? It’s something stupid. I can feel it. Don’t do it, Gwen.

Guinevere Lunaris stopped pulling forward.

Every muscle in her body flipped the script mid-second.

She drove backwards into him with pure fuck-you reverse-polarity physics he never saw coming, because the idiot had been leaning on her resistance like it was a load-bearing wall and she’d just dynamited the foundation.

He stumbled. Half a step. That’s all she needed.

She stomped his instep hard enough to feel the bones shift like tectonic plates. Tharos hissed through gritted teeth.

His weight transferred off the destroyed foot on pure survival instinct.

She took that opening and piledrove the back of her skull into his face. The nose-on-bone crack was disturbing and satisfying in equal measure.

"Hit her," Tharos snarled, blood streaming down his chin. "HIT HER WITH MAGIC. NOW."

The dick-donkeys looked at each other. The silent exchange lasted one full second and contained a complete conversation.

"We cannot," the smaller one stated.

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CANNOT!?"

Kael: The demons just said no. Sounds like trouble in paradise.

"Not until she’s on the breeding bench, Alpha."

Tharos’s nose was pouring blood onto the stone behind her. His balance had fucked off entirely. He stopped pulling her towards the portal for a split second.

That’s when the runes started carving.

White lines crawled up her forearms and chest, moving with the patience of something that had been doing this all night and was ready for another round.

"You little cunt." Tharos’s voice was nasal and murderous. "You think you can use your dark magic on me? On ME?"

Kael: Sir-Screams-A-Lot is a hypocrite fuckface—

Whatever Kael had finished that sentence with, no one would know because something had pulled the broadcast plug.

Eighteen wolves simultaneously lost the only source of joy they’d had all night and not one of them was allowed to talk about it.

"Looks like your little boyfriend’s magic show stopped." Tharos leaned into her ear. "Eleven times. That’s how many times he opened his mouth. I am going to put eleven scars on your perfect little face while you count and no amount of daddy’s tricks will help you."

CRACK.

White light flashed.

Guinevere winced, bracing herself for a landing somewhere as Stonehowl began to drag her again towards the portal.

Nothing happened outside of the flash. Except the cuffs on her wrists vibrated at a frequency that she could feel in her entire body.

PING.

One of the cuffs on her hand split. The silver-warded cuffs that had been causing her to bleed fell off in one clean fuck-you moment, clattering on the stone behind her.

Every eye dropped to the single cuff.

"BROTHER, THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE. IT IS WARDED AGAINST LUMINARI LIGHT—"

"THE VESSEL IS TAINTED!"

Gold warmth flooded her core.

It started deep, below her ribs, below her lungs, in the place where something lived that she hadn’t felt until now. She could trust it. This was something she didn’t question because she knew it on a soul-level.

It moved through her like a tide, rising from her core to her skin, and everything it touched changed temperature. The blade at her throat glowed.

"AAAUUUHHH!"

Tharos let out a door-rattling scream. The hilt was welded into his hand by molten steel and the animal shriek ripping from his throat was the kind a body makes when it already knows the score and the brain is lagging three seconds behind.

Guinevere felt her body turn. Her non-cuffed hand raised on its own.

Gold fire erupted from her palm, hitting Tharos Stonehowl square in the chest like a fist made of sunlight. He flew backwards, hit the wall, and slid down it leaving a scorch mark on the stone that would still be there in a hundred years.

Then the Dark Fae lunged at the same time like moths to an all-you-can-eat buffet.

"VESSEL ON HER KNEES, VESSEL ON HER BACK—"

Reed and Gavyn moved at the same second.

Two swords. Two necks. Two heads bounced off the floor in a synchronized splat that was gross as hell.

The bodies crumpled. The wings twitched once, twice, then went still.

In the same breath, gold light detonated from her body in a radial pulse, tagging every wolf simultaneously. Each one got sealed in a warm golden energy cocoon that locked over their skin like shiny magical plot armor.

Tharos was still howling against the scorched wall behind her as if the fire had decided to take the scenic route and drag out the process. It was a level of disturbing that would definitely keep her awake at night. But at the moment she felt nothing about it because every scrap of focus was locked on Nicholas Shadowfell.

She covered the distance in a dead sprint, gag still in place, one cuff still attached, and hit her knees next to him.

His eyes were open. They were looking at the ceiling. His chest wasn’t moving. His skin cool. The gold light surrounding everyone didn’t touch him. The one person it should have reached first, the one person she would have traded every drop of it for, was lying on cold stone untouched by the warmth that had come from his mate, and chosen everyone except him. The cruelty of that was so precise it felt intentional.

Tears fell from her eyes onto his chest.

She had cried tonight. Multiple times. From pain, from silver, from fear. This was different. These tears weren’t coming from any of those places.

They were coming from the part of her that had been running towards this man since she first saw him at the end of that hallway, the part that her soul had recognized, the part that her wolf had been trying to orient towards, the part that she didn’t understand earlier in the council chamber.

She understood now.

She understood because he was gone and the understanding arrived at the same moment as the loss, and receiving both at once was the cruelest thing the universe had done to her tonight, and the universe had done a lot.

Trembling, she put her hands on his sternum, her hands that were covered in blood from fighting the cuffs, and pressed like she could restart him through force of will alone.

Nothing happened. No rise. No fall. The body under her hands felt like a house with the lights off and nobody home, and the wrongness of it was so complete that it didn’t feel real.

Her wolf was full-on crying. It was making a sound that was low and keening and broken, the sound an animal makes when it finds its mate and can’t wake them. The sound lived in a register below language, below thought, in the basement of what it meant to be a wolf, and it wouldn’t stop because stopping meant accepting and her wolf was not accepting this.

Not him.

"No." The word came out cracked and soaked and barely human through her gag. "No, no, no."

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