"Ryker. What an unexpected and frankly unwelcome surprise. I was having a lovely morning."

Kael didn’t look away from Guinevere when he spoke, and kept his grip on her neck tight.

Ryker. One of the Drakencrest king’s men and the literal dragon she fell asleep on last night. That sentence should not have been true. And yet, there it was.

"I can see that. You are choking a woman in the middle of a warded forest you should not have been able to enter. Honestly, the more I look at this picture, the worse it gets for you personally. I want you to know that as a friend."

"We are not friends."

"We have been to three wars together. Opposite sides, but I think that qualifies us as friends on the weekends."

Kael’s hand tightened around her throat. Just enough. Guinevere’s vision started to fray at the corners.

"Who is she," Kael clipped.

"A woman. You can tell because of the hair."

"Ryker."

"Kael."

"Walk me through this. Because from where I’m standing, we have the second in command of the Drakencrest crown personally fetching a woman in the middle of a forest."

Ryker took one step forward.

Kael’s hand tightened further. Guinevere felt something in her throat creak in a way that throats were not supposed to creak.

"Take another step, and I will snap her neck before your boot finishes its arc. I promise you this on the grave of my father."

Ryker stopped. He raised both hands, palms out, in the universal gesture of a man who had been here before and did not wish to be here again.

"Come off it, Kael. You are not going to snap her neck. You have her pinned like a butterfly in a book. That is not the grip of a man who has decided on murder. That is the grip of a man who has decided on something much more interesting and is annoyed I am interrupting. Be a sport. Let the girl go and I’ll pretend I didn’t see any of this. Small favor from me to you. Friends on the weekends."

Kael smiled.

It was a slow smile, and it was not a nice one, and it did something complicated with his eyes.

"You know what, Ryker. You are right. I was not going to snap her neck. I was going to take her with me and spend the next six months figuring out what she is." He paused. "However. Your intervention has clarified something for me. I am definitely keeping her now. And when I figure out who she belongs to, you may pass along a message from me. Their toys should not punch dragons in the face or kick dragons in the testicles."

Ryker’s eyes flicked to Guinevere. His face was lying beautifully. But his free hand was not, slowly curling into a fist.

Guinevere’s limbs were getting heavy.

She could feel it happening in stages. The fight in her arms was going first, sliding out of her fingers like water through a cupped palm. Her legs were still trying to push against the moss but the push was smaller now. The canopy above her was getting darker at the edges and brighter in the middle, a tunnel closing around the sun.

Ryker took another step.

Kael’s smile widened like he could not believe his luck.

"Oh." His voice dropped into something almost tender. "Oh, Ryker. Look at your face. This is your mate, isn’t she. This little hellion is the Drakencrest second’s mate. Which means what I have in my hand is not a toy at all. What I have in my hand is a question that the entire Drakencrest crown is going to answer for me personally. Tell me, Second, what will you do to get her back?"

Kael lifted Guinevere’s chin with his free hand, angling her face toward Ryker, making him look. He then frowned, and for the first time, his grip loosened by half an inch.

"You’re sweating, Stormvale. I can smell it from here. When did this become personal for you?"

Ryker opened his mouth, about to deliver what was probably an iconic line, but her wolf stole the moment.

It tore out of her in a way she had never experienced before. The other three shifts had been chosen. This was not chosen. Her wolf was being strangled to death inside her body at the same time her body was being strangled to death on the outside, and it reached the cliff edge of dying before she did, and it leapt.

The pain was nothing like the other times.

The other times had hurt the way a burn hurts and then ended. This was different. Every bone in her body screamed in a frequency she had not known bones could make. Her ribs broke and reknit mid-motion because the cracked ones from earlier could not take the shift without giving. Her dislocated thumb popped fully out of its socket and then back into the paw it was becoming.

White light exploded outward from her body, turning the forest into a negative image of itself. Kael let go of her throat rapidly, as if he was burned.

Good. She hoped it hurt.

Her wolf was up, then running in a blur.

"GET HER!" Kael’s voice cracked across the pines.

More voices echoed behind her: the mage swearing in a language she did not know, Ryker shouting something she could not parse, the soldiers she had taken down earlier, back on their feet somewhere in the chaos, adding to the noise.

She did not look back, but she heard a shift and the sound of wings with a rush of air.

Her paws thundered across moss and pine needles and over a fallen log and down a slope and through a shallow creek and up the other side. She was essentially a torch running through the trees at the exact moment she needed to disappear because she had not been alive long enough in this form to learn how to dim it.

The forest blurred.

One mile. Maybe more. She did not know how far she had gone when her body hit its limit.

She skidded to a stop at the base of an enormous oak. The world went sideways on her and the shift reversed on its own because her wolf had nothing left to give. She hit the moss on her elbows and knees, fully human again, coughing so hard she could taste copper.

Thirty feet away, a black dragon dropped through the canopy and shifted mid-landing.

Kael rose out of the motion already walking, already smiling, eyes bright with something that was no longer intrigue. It was possession.

"Oh," he said softly. "Oh, kitten. I’m already enjoying every minute of figuring you out."

He lunged for her.

She had approximately zero options and the energy reserves of a damp cloth, and the man lunging at her had the enthusiasm of someone who had just opened a gift.

"GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HER."

A blur hit him from the left side at dragon speed and Kael went sideways.

Guinevere recognized the scent immediately. That was the entire length of her critical analysis before her brain decided it had done enough for one day.

"There he is. I was wondering when you’d show up."

Another blur from the right.

"SHUT UP."

"Who is she? And why would the dragon king be here to fetch her?"

"Put him down." Three words. The calm before the second blur hit.

More blurs, and wings, and the sound of something very large slamming into something very large in the canopy above her.

"This many dragons for one girl. Noted."

The last thing she saw before the dark took her was a flash of gold against the black.