Chapter 467: Balls-Deep In One & Fingering The Other

With zero warning, Maddox picked Guinevere up and tossed her like she was a ball.

She squealed in surprise.

Maddox grinned, entirely too pleased with that, and threw her over his shoulder like she was a sack of grain.

Guinevere was now upside down. The classic dragon carrying position. Kael did this too. She had assumed it was standard for all dragons.

"Maddox, wait. There’s something I need to tell you about King Solveil." She lowered her voice, which did nothing, because everyone in the courtyard had excellent hearing.

"I know. You told me that. Before your runes flashed. Remember? He’ll be fine."

Guinevere was silent for a moment. She didn’t know where his memory stopped, actually, and didn’t want to say anything that triggered him remembering beyond that.

"Please, Drakencrest." Landon stepped forward, towel still slung around his hips, glowing faintly. "Let my Master Mage look at her. I have a team working on her memory. We have the dark magic traced. Her light is also not stabilized. You just saw what happened when I wasn’t touching her."

Maddox stopped mid-step, Guinevere still very upside down over his shoulder.

Truthfully, Maddox did not fully remember what had happened when he wasn’t touching her. He had been carrying her over his shoulder then everything went fuzzy.

He exchanged a look with Kael, who appeared to be running the same failed calculation and coming up with the same blank.

Do you remember? No. Do you? No. Are we going to admit that? Absolutely not. Then it couldn’t have been that important. Exactly. Don’t worry. I’ll handle him.

"Correction," Kael cut in. "I wasn’t touching her either, Solveil. I can absorb her and have been all week. We’ve been over this."

Landon’s mouth curved in amusement, and Kael’s blood pressure rose proportionally.

"Yes, you have done well with what you have, Young Light Bearer."

"You—" Kael stopped, unsure where he was going to go with that. He had no evidence. He had no proof. What he had was a full-body, bone-deep, dick-to-skull certainty that this golden bastard had called his dick small before and that the insult had left a mark on his goddamn soul.

"Think of it like a candle versus the sun. Yours is small in comparison," Landon clarified for the group. "I meant it as praise, Young Light Bearer."

Kael stared at him for four full seconds. Then he looked down at his hands like he had discovered a new superpower that he didn’t quite understand.

Guinevere went still.

A searing pain cracked through her skull like thunder.

All four men grabbed their skulls at the same second.

She was in her father’s hall. Nicholas was claiming she was his fated mate. Maddox was also claiming it. Chests of gold were brought in. Then an urn was tossed across the hall.

WHOOSH.

The runes ignited across her skin.

Maddox flipped her in one motion, cradling her bridal style against his chest.

Landon moved in a blur of light and got a hand on her, and the excess light didn’t just drain into him, it pulled, vacuumed out of her in one clean draw. The relief was instant and total. Guinevere’s whole body went slack with it.

That was the thing Kael couldn’t do. He could soak up a flood. He couldn’t reach in and suction the pressure out like that. And at this precise moment, for the sake of the woman going limp with relief in his brother’s arms, Kael was going to set the candle comment aside and bury it somewhere he’d dig it back up later.

"I can’t pull it from her like that, Maddox. He’s right," Kael confessed, hating every word but it was the truth.

"Why is her head hurting her so badly?" Maddox asked.

"It’s the dark construct still in her. I have a team of mages working on it, Drakencrest." Landon surged light into her, a small amount in comparison to what he had just pulled from her.

Guinevere’s eyes glowed in response, white flaring behind the green. She could feel him inside of her in a way that felt entirely too intimate for the setting they were in.

Her face flushed.

Maddox’s dragon growled.

No one moved.

"I sense it," Landon said after a long moment. "But my Master Mage has been mapping it and I want him to look at it." His tone held no ego, just the truth. "Follow me."

He turned and moved quickly towards the doors.

Maddox followed him, holding Guinevere in his arms.

That’s when she heard something that, if she didn’t know any better, sounded an awful lot like moaning.

She had just participated in a fivesome and four men were unconscious on the evidence of it, so clearly her mind was in the gutter and renting permanently. She chose not to say anything.

Kael stopped.

He exchanged a look with Maddox. The look very clearly said: I don’t like her being in here alone, because Solveil has some kinky shit going on in his own Citadel, clearly. Maddox returned one that said: agreed.

Nicholas had the identical thought, his Alpha ears catching the moans with devastating clarity.

Landon stopped mid-step. His own brand-new wolf hearing picked up something strange, something layered and wrong and multiplying, and his face began the slow work of not understanding it.

Then he heard a man yell "Electra" and he moved in a blur.

BANG.

The doors flew open with the force of a king’s fury after hearing his little sister’s name being moaned only for the king’s soul to be ripped out through his eye sockets by the visual on the other side.

Yes, Landon Solveil’s soul briefly vacated his body.

His eyes swept a room that contained a full-scale orgy he had not authorized, scheduled, or imagined possible under his own roof. The scene took a moment to resolve. A nightmare come true.

Then he clocked his cousin, mid-bounce, riding a dragon commander while the commander’s free hand was violating his sister, who was passed out cold against his side with a glowing straw drink untouched beside her.

He blinked once. It was still there. His sister was being fingered while passed out by a foreign military commander who was simultaneously balls-deep in his cousin.

The sentence didn’t survive rational thought because rational thought had evacuated.

"WHAT THE FUCK!"