Chapter 315: Also My Mate, Maddox

There are conversations you plan, conversations you wing, and conversations that go so catastrophically sideways they qualify as natural disasters. Guinevere was about to have all three at once.

"Kael, there’s something I need to tell you."

She began to pull out of her hug. She didn’t get very far before Kael corrected that. He picked her up with one arm, walked to the armchair, and sat down with her on his lap the way a toddler reclaims a stuffed animal that was briefly confiscated.

The stuffed animal had opinions about this. The toddler did not care. The stuffed animal’s opinions could go fuck themselves six ways to Sunday, because this toddler had already moved on to nap logistics.

She opened her mouth.

Closed it.

Looked at the lap. Looked at the man attached to the lap. Looked at the door Maddox was going to walk back through in approximately thirteen minutes.

Kael pressed his lips to the top of her head. The gesture was automatic. The kind of thing a body does when the person it’s holding is shaking. The man had two modes: territorial and affectionate. He toggled between them with the subtlety of a light switch.

Her face flushed red. "This isn’t how I planned this conversation going."

She attempted to stand. Kael made a quiet sound that was not agreement and hauled her in. One arm. No discussion. He dragged her back until she was fully seated, ass in the cradle of his hips, the hard line of him flush against her. There was nowhere polite left to put her weight.

"Adapt."

He said it into her hair. Mouth at her crown. The word landed warmer than a command and less kind than comfort.

"Kael. There’s something that I need to—" She took a breath. "I don’t know the right thing to do."

She knew at least four wrong things to do. She was currently seated on one of them.

Kael’s chest tightened.

"I know."

He did not, in fact, know.

Kael was assuming she was trying to tell him about Landon. The guilt of what she did in Solveil was crushing her and she was asking him whether to confess to her husband that she had potentially killed a Luminari king.

She was not asking him that. She was asking him something significantly worse. Or better. Depending on which mate you’re asking.

Guinevere shook her head. "I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing."

"Hey." He tilted her chin up. "Look at me."

Green eyes. Wet. Red-rimmed. The eyes of a woman who was drowning in a moral dilemma and couldn’t find the surface.

"We already know all of it," he said.

Her brow creased. "All of it?"

"Yes."

"The Dragon King is aware of it too?"

"Maddox knows. I know. We discussed it. We’re handling it."

They had discussed a murder. She was confessing a marking. This conversation was two trains on parallel tracks and both conductors thought they were on the same one. And absolutely no one was hitting the brakes because that would require these dumbasses to communicate.

"Kael, this isn’t something that can be erased. I don’t know if handling it is possible."

"You don’t need to carry this. We’re covering it up. It stays between us. Nobody outside this room finds out."

Her face cycled through three expressions in rapid succession. Confusion. Relief. Then confusion again, deeper this time.

"You... already know?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"We put it together. But what matters is we’re handling it and you’re protected."

She stared at him. The confusion was calcifying into something she couldn’t resolve because the words he was saying made sense individually and made zero sense collectively. They knew about Nicholas? They already knew she had marked him? And they were covering it up?

Hell, maybe they did. It could just be the dragon way of life. For all she knew, dragons collected mates like stamps. She had been in this kingdom for less than an hour and if it was anything like the Luminari civilization, there would be zero orientation resources.

"Did you kill Cassian because of me? I never wanted..." She wiped her eyes.

The question landed and Kael’s face did something she had never seen it do. It shut down. Every muscle, every micro-expression, every tell he normally wore openly went behind a wall so fast it was like watching a door slam.

Then the wall cracked.

His eyes. Just his eyes. The rest of his face held but his eyes couldn’t, and what came through was hurt so specific it had her name on it. It was the quiet, undressed hurt of a man hearing the woman he loved ask if he was the monster in her story and hating that he had started out as that, so it was entirely earned.

His throat bobbed once. His hands tightened on her waist.

"No. But I would have if you hadn’t needed his blood to survive. A man who lays hands on a dragon’s mate has already chosen how he dies."

Dragon’s mate.

"Kael." Guinevere swallowed. "Am I Maddox’s mate?"

Not the most direct way for her to ask. Am I mated to two dragons? That was what she was really asking and they both knew it. Would Kael make this easy for her?

"Yes."

Of course not. That gave her zero information.

"Am I also your mate?"

She had finally asked the question. Directly. Clearly. With no room for misinterpretation. The universe decided this was the line.

The door slammed open.

Maddox stormed in like a fire-breathing, fist-clenching, fuckstorm dragon who had been eavesdropping the entire time and had lost the argument with himself. He was on them in four strides.

Kael did not stand. Did not dump her off his thighs. Kael clutched his claim like a cocky, chest-thumping caveman who occasionally confused kidnapping with courtship.

"Get off him."

That was directed at Guinevere. Maddox’s vocal cords were having a civil war. The dragon wanted to do a mating roar. The king wanted to command. The husband wanted to scream. The result was a sound that technically qualified as language.

She tried to stand. Kael’s arm tightened around her waist. He had many talents. Letting go of things was absent from the list.

"She asked me a question," Kael said. "I was answering it."

"You were answering it with her on your lap."

"The lap is unrelated to the answer."

"The lap is ENTIRELY related."

Maddox reached for her. Kael’s free hand caught his wrist.

"Don’t," Kael said. Quiet. The kind of quiet that precedes landslides.

Maddox’s pupils slit. Gold bled through his irises until there was no white left.

"She is my WIFE."

Maddox’s chest heaved. His hands shook. His vision tunneled. The dragon in him was clawing at the walls of his skull, and the man holding the leash was losing grip one finger at a time. He was watching someone else hold the thing he would burn continents for.

"She is also my mate, Maddox."