Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

Somewhere between unconsciousness and the smell of whatever the hell he’d put in that bath, Guinevere Drakencrest rejoined the living.

The first thing she registered was cold. An icepack against her neck. Wonderful.

The second thing that registered was Maddox.

"There she is." His thumb traced her cheekbone. "Morning, baby."

Her face went hot immediately. The blush arrived before a single coherent thought did, her body’s priorities apparently being: step one, turn scarlet in front of the Dragon King, step two, figure out where she was, step three, maybe remember her own name at some point if there was time.

She blinked at the ceiling. Wrong ceiling. Wrong walls. Wrong light. This was not their chambers. But there were more pillows and she appreciated that.

"We’re across the hall," Maddox said, reading the confusion on her face before she finished having it. "Our quarters are getting scrubbed. Long story. Boring really. Something about my wife getting attacked by dark magic. I’ll tell you later."

Guinevere had started keeping track: "later" was Maddox’s favorite dumping ground for anything he wanted to forget for a little. Usually it aligned with what she wanted to also remove from her memory, so there were no complaints on her side. Just a growing pile getting taller by the day.

His lips found hers. She jolted at the sensation. Gods she missed that.

He lifted the ice from her neck and set it aside. Then he offered her his hand. She took it, and the warmth of his grip against her cold fingers sent something rolling through her chest that she chose to ignore because she was already blushing and adding a second layer of feelings to the blush was going to turn her into a medical event.

"Bath’s ready," he said, pulling her to standing. "You’ve got thirty minutes before the Luminari healer arrives."

She blinked. "Luminari healer."

"Landon’s man. Coming at dawn. He’s going to look at you." He said Landon casually, like they’d known each other for years and with enough confidence that she almost believed the situation was normal.

He walked her to the bathing chamber. The smell hit her three steps before the doorway did.

It was strong. Aggressively strong. The scent of something floral mixed with something herbal mixed with something that might have been pine if pine had ambitions of becoming a weapon. The bath was full, steaming, and a deep, alarming shade of green that suggested either healing properties or a terrible mistake.

She looked at the water. She looked at him. She looked at the water again.

He had done this himself. She could tell because the bottles on the ledge were arranged with the chaotic confidence of a man who had opened every single one, smelled none of them, and poured generously on the theory that more was better. One bottle was on its side. Another was uncapped. A third appeared to have been used entirely.

It was the most adorable thing she had ever seen in her life.

"Thank you, Maddox." She kept her voice soft and her observations about the smell to herself.

She stepped in. The water was perfect, which made the smell more forgivable, and she sank down until the heat covered her shoulders and the green swallowed her collarbone.

Maddox climbed in behind her without a word, without asking, without making it a thing, settling against the back of the tub and pulling her against his chest like this was something they had always done.

She leaned into him. His arms came around her, loose, warm, and she let herself relax into him.

"Thirty minutes," he repeated against her hair. "Then they look at you, and I’ll be in the room the whole time. Landon’s healer is seeing Kael after you."

She remembered last night.

It came in flashes, out of order, a broken reel of images that played too fast to hold.

Then the reel stopped.

Kael.

Kael on the ground with blood on his teeth. Kael’s hand sliding off her wrist. Kael’s chest rising once, falling, and staying fallen. The gold pouring out of her hands into a body that gave nothing back.

Her vision flickered gold.

She felt it happen at the same time Maddox did, the stress spiking through her chest and flooding into him through the sensory bridge they shared, and his body answered before his mind caught up, his arms going rigid around her, his breathing shifting, the physical echo of her panic arriving in his muscles like a fist he hadn’t seen coming.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. She blinked, trying to clear the gold from her eyes. Blood slid from her nose in a thin line, dropping into the green water and blooming red against the surface.

Her eyes burned. Kael had died. He had died in her arms, on Diplomat Row, with a joke on his lips and gold fading across his ribs, and the last thing he’d said was fuck me, I’m thirsty, and she was in a bathtub crying about it while the Dragon King held her and the water turned pink at the edges.

Maddox moved. He picked her up and spun her around. His hands found her jaw, tilting her face up, and he kissed her once, firm, grounding, the kiss of a man who was watching her spiral and cutting the wire before it pulled her under.

"What’s wrong?" His forehead pressed to hers. "Talk to me, baby. What just happened?"

"Is Kael okay?"

Maddox blinked. The question had landed somewhere he hadn’t expected, and she watched him rearrange the concern on his face into something steadier.

"He’s fine." He kissed the bridge of her nose, then under it where the blood had been. "Alive. Complaining. Insulting Blair’s taste in robes, last I heard. The healer is with him right now, and he’ll be seen before you. He’s handled, Guinevere."

She exhaled, and the exhale shook, and she hated that it shook, and she pressed her forehead harder against his because looking at him while she said the next part was going to make her cry again.

"I would never have agreed to that blood oath if I’d known he felt pressured into it." Her voice cracked on pressured. "He took it because of me. He risked his life because I was in that tent, and if he’d walked away, they would have wiped his memory and he would have been safe, and instead he swore a death oath to stay in a room with me because he thought I needed him there."

Maddox pulled back just enough to look at her, and the expression on his face traveled through three distinct phases in under two seconds: the first was surprise, the second was something dangerously close to pride, and the third was the specific look of a man loading a sentence he was going to enjoy delivering.

"Kael is a grown-ass man who can make his own choices." He tucked a wet strand of white hair behind her ear. "He’d hate every single word you just said about him feeling pressured." The corner of his mouth pulled. "I’ll be sure to pass it along to him. Word for word. Especially the part where you called him a victim. He’s going to love that."

"Maddox, I did not call him a victim."

"You implied he was a delicate flower who couldn’t make his own choices. Close enough." He kissed her forehead. "Kael, a delicate flower. I’m telling him. Today. While he’s still weak enough that he can’t chase me."

Guinevere laughed. A sound that was music to Maddox’s ears.

When her lips hit his, the speech about Kael being a delicate flower died mid-delivery and the thirty minute time constraint died with it.

His dragon surged behind his ribs.

Yes. We mate again.

Maddox told it to shut up. The dragon did the opposite, purring so loud it vibrated through the bathwater.

Her boldness surprised him. The kiss went from cute to something else entirely in the space of one breath. The woman who blushed when he called her baby had just grabbed the back of his neck and kissed him like she was trying to settle an argument they hadn’t started yet.

He’d mated her. Marked her. By every biological and mystical metric available, the hunger should have been sated.

It should have cooled into something manageable, something a grown king could carry through a morning without losing his mind in a bathtub.

That was a lie. Whatever ancient dragon had written that Chapter of mating biology hadn’t seen a matebond like this clearly.

Their kiss deepened. His tongue slid into her mouth and a sound left his throat that no king should make before sunrise.

He needed more. He always needed more. That had been the problem since diplomat row, since the dance, since the scoreboard, and the problem was accelerating.