Chapter 438: I Will Carry Her Back Myself

Nicholas Shadowfell had been a wolf his entire life and the wolf had never once caused him pain by existing. The wolf caused him pain by wanting things he couldn’t have. But the having was free.

"How is he in pain from having a wolf?" Nicholas asked. The question was genuine. "The first shift is painful but the wolf itself is part of you. It does not hurt to have one."

"He said, and I quote," Kael replied, lifting one finger, "’I am frightened.’ Those were his words. From a king. On a couch. To a woman who believed every word." He crossed his arms. "She thinks he is having trouble shifting. I think he ate something bad. We all think something different. Nobody is happy about it."

The sentence sat on the table and every person in the room agreed with the last four words and disagreed with each other on everything else.

Blair leaned forward.

"We need to redirect," she said, and her voice hit the room at the register that meant the clapping tourist was gone and the dragon princess was running the table. "Guinevere chose to stay. That is her decision and we can address it separately. In the meantime, their Master Mage is examining her memory loss. I informed him that we would be sending our people as well to collaborate. He was also informed that Emma is our prime suspect for Guinevere’s memory loss."

She placed both hands flat on the obsidian.

"Emma is in custody here in Drakencrest. Emma is the only suspect we have for the Mirrorlock. Emma wrote letters to Maddox that were likely designed to trigger whatever was planted inside Guinevere. Emma infiltrated this Keep for seven weeks and would still be operating if we hadn’t caught her." Blair looked around the table. "I propose we use the time Guinevere is in Solveil to dismantle everything Emma built. We collaborate with their Master Mage. We share findings. Guinevere’s light is unstable regardless of where she is and their mages understand Luminari light better than ours. Let them work on the stabilization while Jaxon and Lux work on the Mirrorlock from this end."

The proposal was clean, logical, and designed to give every person in this room something productive to do instead of what they were currently doing, which was marinating in territorial fury.

Sterling wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were locked on his king because he knew that expression. Maddox was about to make a decision that was strategically inadvisable, personally inevitable, and almost certainly Sterling’s problem to fix.

Maddox stood up.

The chair scraped the obsidian. The sound cut through Blair’s strategy like a blade through silk.

"I have the final say," he said. His voice was level but the level was the level of a lake before a storm, flat and dark and hiding everything beneath the surface. "My orders are she returns to Drakencrest. Their Master Mage comes here. I will carry her back here myself if I have to."

Blair pinched the bridge of her nose. "Maddox, how well do you think that is going to go over?"

The question was rhetorical. The answer was badly. The answer was always badly. Nothing involving Guinevere Lunaris and multiple kings had ever gone over well and the statistical probability of this being the exception was zero and Blair’s nose-pinch was the acknowledgment of zero.

"I don’t care, Blair. She is my wife. The future queen. Her safety is the priority above all else."

Three words that ended every remaining argument in the room. "I don’t care" from Maddox Drakencrest was not defiance. It was a weather report. The weather was a category five hurricane named Husband. This was not the Dragon King speaking. This was a husband whose wife was in another man’s chambers holding another man’s hand and the husband was done talking about it.

The husband had been patient. The husband had let his brother go to prison. The husband had let the legal team work. The husband had sat through a one-man show about wolf labor and STDs. The husband was done. The husband was standing. The husband was going to get his wife and no one was going to stop him.

Kael uncrossed his arms. "I’ll back that. I’ll go too."

Kael agreeing with Maddox was a lightning-strikes-twice moment. But Kael agreeing instantly, with zero sarcasm, conditions, or fight? A sign of an apocalypse.

Nicholas pushed off the wall where he had been standing since Kael finished the briefing. His amber eyes were steady and his voice was iron and the wolf behind his ribs had stopped making noise, which meant the decision had been made and the noise was no longer necessary because the body was about to do the talking.

"Same," Nicholas said.

Three men. Three words. One woman. The war room had produced many strategies tonight. This was the first one all three of them agreed on without discussion, without debate, and without a single glance at each other to confirm.

Blair looked at Damon. Damon looked at Blair. The glance lasted one second and contained the mutual understanding of two people who recognized that three territorial males agreeing on anything was either a miracle or a catastrophe and the odds favored the second one.

Beta Draven reached for his water glass, which had migrated three inches to the left during Maddox’s dragon tantrum, and took a sip. The sip was the sip of a man watching a storm form and choosing hydration over commentary.

"So we are sending three kings to retrieve one woman from a fourth king’s chambers," Briggs said from his end of the table, speaking for the first time, his voice carrying the calm exhaustion of an attorney who had been doing math all night and the math kept getting worse. "I want that noted for the record."

"Documented," Beta Draven confirmed.

"Noted and seconded," Reed added, because the Gamma of Shadowfell recognized a historical moment when he saw one and intended to survive it with documentation.