Chapter 308: Dad Left For Five Fucking Minutes

Two wolves on a cliffside. One who came back from the dead. One who brought him back.

They started the run.

She tucked behind him, matching his stride, following his lead.

Her wolf wanted to go faster.

Guinevere told her wolf no. They were going at the pace he set and that was the pace they would keep because this was his territory and she was a guest and guests don’t sprint past their hosts.

Nicholas’s wolf sped up.

The new pace was faster than anything she had run with Gavyn and her men. Significantly faster. Her wolf matched it without effort and then pushed past it because her wolf had apparently been waiting for permission to open up and the permission was a black wolf who could actually keep up.

She was running faster than she had ever run in her life and the joy it produced was so enormous it probably slammed into their matebond like a tidal wave because Nicholas’s wolf glanced behind him and she caught something on his face that looked suspiciously like a wolf smile.

Wolves don’t smile. She knew wolves don’t smile. And yet that black wolf was grinning at her like a man who’d just been told he was right and was choosing not to say it out loud.

He pushed faster. She matched. He pushed again. She matched again. Two wolves playing chicken at full speed and neither one was blinking. Each acceleration was a question and each match was an answer and the conversation happening between their legs was more honest than anything either of them had managed with words tonight.

They found a rhythm.

His stride and hers. His pace and hers. His turns anticipated by her body before her brain caught up. Her adjustments mirrored by his before she finished making them. The way he dropped pace before a hill and surged after the crest was identical to the way Gavyn had taught her, except Nicholas hadn’t taught her anything. She was reading him the way she had read Gavyn and the reading was effortless.

Two wolves who moved like a single animal with two bodies.

Run fast enough and the world reduces to two things: your stride and whoever can match it.

The sync was wrong. It was too good. Too fast. Two people should not work this well together after this little time. Nicholas had said they knew each other well during the era she couldn’t remember, but this kind of rhythm was something that should have taken months of training together. Years of it.

It was more coordinated than even the run she had with Gavyn and the other Lunaris men. And they were the best flock in the building. The kind of seamless coordination that she and Nicholas were doing on a cliffside on their first run was the kind that she didn’t know existed.

Her wolf knew why. Her wolf had known since the council chamber.

Mate.

The word didn’t arrive like a revelation anymore. It arrived like a fact that had been waiting for her to stop arguing with it.

She ran beside him through the pre-dawn dark with salt air in her lungs and a matebond humming in her chest and a man she couldn’t remember but also a man she couldn’t forget.

The forest blurred. The miles disappeared. The pre-dawn grey that had been holding steady was thickening at the edges, clouds stacking in layers that swallowed the last of the starlight. The kind of dark that turned a glowing white wolf into a lighthouse and a glowing black wolf into a very expensive problem. Tactically fucking catastrophic.

When Greyhall came into view a few miles out, a dark mass of stone against the darker sky, Nicholas slowed. She felt the deceleration through their matebond a half-step before his stride changed and matched it without thinking.

He wanted her beside him. Not behind.

She moved up. Shoulder to shoulder. Two wolves running side by side toward a fortress that held their packs, their problems, and a list of crises that had been accumulating interest since they’d left.

They kept the pace steady. Mile after mile of synchronized stride, the rhythm they’d found on the cliffside holding like it had been set in stone instead of stumbled into. The gates grew larger. The torchlight along the walls became visible. Wolves on the ramparts were moving, armed, alert, and operating at a tempo that said something had happened while they were gone.

The gate was close. It had also seen kings arrive, but nothing like this.

She felt Nicholas’s shift coming through the matebond before his body started the transition. A gathering of energy behind his ribs, a compression, the specific coiling that preceded the change. Her wolf felt it too.

Before Guinevere could think about it, before she could choose the timing or overthink the mechanics or worry about tripping or stumbling or any of the thousand anxieties that had been living rent-free in her head about shifting in front of people, her wolf moved.

One flash.

White light erupted from both of them simultaneously. Two wolves became two people in the same heartbeat, the shift so perfectly synchronized it looked choreographed. Rehearsed. The kind of unison that her flock had delivered at the gates except this wasn’t six rookies following a formation drill. This was two wolves whose bodies had decided to be the same animal at the same time and hadn’t consulted their brains about it.

Credit to her wolf. That furry little traitor had felt Nicholas shifting and matched it on instinct with zero input from Guinevere’s nervous system. Five years of hiding and the wolf was out here doing synchronized performances with an Alpha King like they’d been partners for decades.

The effect on the gate was immediate.

Everybody’s mouth fell open. Soldiers quit. Patrol wolves mid-stride became taxidermy. A crate guy put the box down because both hands were required for the full religious experience of two people flashing in at the same exact second at the gates of a Keep that had already told the staff the king was dead.

Nicholas pulled her hood up. His hand found her back, firm, guiding, and he led her through the gate without breaking stride.

His expression said everything his mouth didn’t.

Every wolf at the gate read it loud and clear. Eyes forward. Mouths shut. Spines straight. The kind of instant, unquestioning obedience that only happens when dad is home.

Reed rounded the corner at sweep pace and drew on them out of pure muscle memory.

His sword was mid-draw when his nose told his eyes to sit the fuck down. What followed was the complete mechanical failure of a Gamma watching his dead Alpha approach like he’d just been stuck behind a slow cart and would they please not make it weird.

Reed’s blade went back into its sheath. His spine went straight. His face did something it almost never did, which was show everything at once before the training kicked back in and locked it down and grinned.

"Alpha, you’re looking very alive."

The understatement of the goddamn century. He said it with a smile but there was weight behind the smile because Reed had been kneeling beside a body with no pulse and now that body was out and about like the apocalypse was just a detour.

Nicholas gave him a nod. The nod said everything the corridor didn’t have time for.

"Status," Nicholas said.

Reed fell in beside them without missing a step, his sweep forgotten, his priorities instantly reshuffled around the fact that his king was breathing and everything else could get the fuck in line.

"Those black feathers? Turned out to be portal anchors. You and the Luna disappeared in a flash of white light and hundreds of them appeared. Brennan arrived with Drakencrest and has been disposing of them through ocean portals. The little mage who could."

None of that statement phased Nicholas in the slightest. Guinevere’s stomach dropped at Luna and dropped again at Drakencrest.

"How many are left?" Nicholas asked.

"Unknown. Some are appearing out of nothing. Delayed activation. Like a demon glitter bomb that keeps finding new places to sparkle. He clears a wing, comes back twenty minutes later, and three more have materialized. The open portals inside the building can’t be closed. They burn out on their own, so we’ve stationed men at every active one. Anything that comes through dies before it finishes its first chant."

"Casualties?"

"Zero, and that includes Stonehowl."

Nicholas stopped mid-stride. The rage that flowed into Guinevere’s chest through their matebond made her gasp. Nicholas gave her hand a squeeze, but the storm inside didn’t stop.

His Alpha aura also apparently made an entrance. Guinevere was unaware of that part. But every wolf within earshot felt his dominance like a change in air pressure. The torches on the walls dimmed. Two wolves on patrol dropped their eyes to the floor on instinct.

"Zero casualties." Nicholas repeated it the way a man repeats a wrong answer on a test he’s about to fail someone for. "Tharos Stonehowl cuffed my Luna. Held a blade at her throat and had Dark Fae blast me with dark magic. And he is currently inside my keep. Breathing."

"Yes, on Renwick Lunaris’s order."