Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

The universe has a sense of humor. It waited for the exact second Damon opened his mouth, then pulled the fire alarm on two matebonds simultaneously.

Rewind sixty seconds to a Beta trying to reason with the Dragon King.

Damon Tavian, the man who had outplayed Renwick Lunaris, was now standing in a doorway trying to flag that maybe Maddox didn’t want his entire team to hear this. But then again, Lunaris and Shadowfell warriors all saw it.

"Tavian," Maddox said with a nod. "I’m insisting every person in this room is on the same page."

Damon looked at Maddox. Looked at Kael. Looked at the bottle caps on the table. The bottle caps had become sacred. Nobody was going to say it out loud but every person in that room had developed an emotional attachment to a table full of trash.

Jaxon had arranged them by kingdom. Sterling had corrected his spacing. Lux had threatened physical violence when Ryker tried to move the Lunaris cap six inches to the left. This was their Sistine Chapel, and it was made of garbage.

His eyes landed back on Maddox.

"This has to do with a private issue with Guinevere. Are you certain you want everyone present, Drakencrest?"

The hesitation was a warning shot that every person in the room interpreted identically and incorrectly. Confidence is a hell of a drug.

Maddox’s jaw flexed. He thought he knew what was coming. The Landon situation. The bloody dagger. The arrest warrant. The thing they had just spent an hour building a cover story around. Damon was about to confirm it and he was doing the professional courtesy of asking if the Dragon King wanted his brother and his entire inner circle hearing that his wife had potentially murdered Landon Solveil.

"Yes," Maddox said, voice flat. "I think I know what this is. But let’s hear it."

He did not know what this was.

Kael leaned forward. Same read. Same conclusion. Damon was about to deliver the Landon confirmation and wanted to know if the room was cleared for it. The fact that he asked was professional. The fact that he looked at both of them before asking was telling. Whatever Damon had was ugly enough to warrant a consent check.

"Go ahead," Kael added. "We’ve already discussed it."

They had discussed a lot. None of it was relevant to what was about to come out of Damon’s mouth. They added two plus two and got seven and Damon was talking about something he saw with his own eyes.

Damon opened his mouth. The universe, sensing an opportunity for chaos, intervened before a single syllable could land.

Both dragons’ nostrils flared at the same time.

The reaction was so synchronized it looked rehearsed. Two heads snapping up. Two sets of eyes going wide. Two chests expanding with the same sharp inhale as two separate matebonds suddenly flooded with a signal so strong it bypassed scent and went straight to the nervous system.

She was close.

And she was crying.

"Drakencrest," Damon tried. "I need to tell you something before—"

Gone. Both of them. Through the doorway and into the corridor with the coordinated urgency of two men who had spent the last three days chasing the same woman and had just been told by biology that the chase was over.

Two territorial, testosterone-throttled twits tore through that corridor like they’d been personally summoned by the Gods and puberty at the same time.

Maddox was out of his chair before the breath finished. The movement was pure predator, zero king. The chair hit the wall behind him. That chair had survived three wars, an Alpha tantrum, and a fight. It did not survive Maddox hearing his mate cry. He didn’t hear anything except for his heart thudding in his ears and his mate’s tears twisting like a knife in his chest. His body had already tuned to a frequency that only existed between him and the woman producing the signal.

Kael’s body moved before his brain cleared the motion and the wound in his side screamed a protest he completely ignored because Guinevere Lunaris was in this building and she was in distress and every cell in his body had already voted on the response and the vote was unanimous. His brain hadn’t even finished processing the pain before his legs told his wound to shut the hell up and his body committed to a full-throttle sprint like a goddamn guided missile.

It was the most coordinated thing Maddox and Kael had done together since hugging when the Luminari Kingsguard stormed Guinevere’s chambers.

Ryker looked at Sterling. Sterling looked at Lux. Lux looked at Jaxon.

Jaxon looked at the bottle caps the way a man looks at his life’s work right before the building catches fire. The caps had been his contribution. The caps were about to become irrelevant. He had spent an hour arranging goddamn trash into a strategic masterpiece and the universe repaid him by flushing the whole damn thing.

"Should we follow them?" Ryker asked.

The question was rhetorical. Every person was already standing. The flask was already pocketed. The only thing left was deciding who got to watch from the front row.

Lux was already out the door.

"This is going to be bad," Jaxon observed.

"This is going to be spectacular," Ryker corrected, grabbing his flask.

He said it the way a man says it when he knows the shitstorm is somebody else’s problem and his flask is already full.

Damon Tavian, the brilliant-but-bulldozed beta, stood in a doorway delivering critical intelligence to an audience of abandoned bottle caps and bad decisions. The GOAT Beta of Shadowfell had checkmated Renwick Lunaris, drafted a widow’s contract on a living man, and navigated a double briefing with a poker face so clean it could pass a polygraph.

Two apex predators tracking a crying woman through a stone corridor at near-shift speed. Romantic? Yes. Terrifying for anyone in the hallway? Also yes. Every wolf who saw them coming flattened themselves against the wall and would be telling this story at every tavern for the rest of their natural lives.

They found her.

Nicholas Shadowfell had her pulled against his chest with one arm locked around her like a king who had already decided the universe would have to go through him to get to her. Renwick Lunaris stood with the energy of a father who had caused the crying but considered himself uninvolved in the aftermath.

Her eyes were red. Her hands were wiping her face with the back of her wrist in the fast, frustrated way people wipe when they’re furious at their own tears for existing.

"Guinevere," Maddox and Kael said at the same time.

Both moved toward her. Both reached for her. Nicholas’s arm tightened around her at the exact same second, his body responding to the approach of two men the way a wolf responds to anything moving toward what’s his. It communicated a thesis statement in one flex: mine.

If someone had designed this moment to produce the worst possible outcome, they could not have improved on the arrangement.

For one second, nobody moved.

Three territorial jackasses, one crying woman, and enough testosterone to fuel a forest fire. No exits. No referees. No chance in hell this ended well.

The geometry of a situation that had no clean resolution and approximately fourteen dirty ones. Every last one of those dirty resolutions ended with somebody getting punched in the fucking face, and at least three of them involved fire.

"Who’s up for breakfast?" Ryker asked, voice chipper.

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