Nicholas Shadowfell had not slept.

It had been eighteen hours since Renwick Lunaris looked him in the face, and took Maddox Drakencrest’s offer.

Damon, his Beta, was walking next to him, when the first thing happened. Terror flooded into his chest so hard his hand flew to his sternum and he stumbled.

Damon froze mid-step. "Nick?"

What came after was worse. Nicholas hunched over, grunting, his ribs on fire. Left side, cracking in a sequence too even. Then his hand seized.

Before he could process it, pressure closed around his throat. Tightening.

The kind of slow that meant whoever was doing this wanted her to feel every second. Nicholas felt every second too.

He looked up at Damon, his eyes glowing wolf-gold.

"She’s being hurt." His voice was wrecked.

"Drakencrest is hurting her?"

"Someone is." Nicholas spat blood onto the cobblestones. "Lunaris is going to wish he’d taken my offer."

✦✦✦

Guinevere surfaced just enough to hear and not enough to move.

"She’s been out for over a day, Aldric. Talk to me."

"Kael was thorough, I’ll give him that, Your Majesty. But the fact that she is breathing at all is not something I would have bet on when you carried her in yesterday."

The word ’yesterday’ pulled her back to the surface faster than the pain had. She kept her eyes closed, not fully awake. She had lost a day. Possibly more. Her last clear memory was a red dragon dropping through the canopy.

"Kael’s thoroughness is not going to be a problem for much longer."

"On the bright side, her healing is faster than anything I’ve seen from a wolf. She’s recovering at the rate of a high-blood female who is fully marked with male dragon venom. Given there are no fang marks on her neck, and she grew up on a non-dragon continent, that’s the part I find interesting."

"Her father is Renwick Lunaris. Wolf king who wouldn’t mate with a non-wolf. No dragon blood."

"With respect, Your Majesty, one of those parents lied. If I were placing bets, the girl has dragon blood, and it didn’t come from her mother."

"Who else has access to her bloodwork?"

"Just me."

"Nobody hears about this."

"Understood."

Footsteps. A door closing. Silence.

✦✦✦

Someone was holding an ice pack to her ribs, and someone was very much underneath her, and these two facts arrived gently, like a courtesy her subconscious was extending before the rest of the information showed up.

Makes sense, was the full extent of her analysis, because she was very tired and not yet in the business of asking follow-up questions.

The skin wasn’t just against her cheek, though. It was against her stomach and along the tops of her thighs where they pressed between his, and his arm lay across her back like he had been holding her for hours and had forgotten he was doing it.

She should have been alarmed by all of this. Against all evidence, she was good with it. Her body had settled into him like poured concrete and was not interested in being disturbed.

Then her brain caught up.

Her eyes flew open, but the moment she tried to move, her ribs went from sore to screaming. A broken noise tore out of her that she didn’t recognize.

"Hey. Easy. It’s me. Maddox."

She knew who Maddox was. King Drakencrest. What she had not known, until approximately four seconds ago, was that they were apparently on a half-naked, first name basis.

Then he pressed his lips to the top of her head, which was not something she had authorized. She waited for the part where it bothered her. It did not arrive.

The back of his hand drifted to her hair, tracing slow, absent circles against her scalp while his other arm stayed carefully around her, holding the ice pack in place and high enough to avoid the worst of her ribs.

Muscle by muscle, without her permission and without her understanding why, her body relaxed into him.

He kissed her hair again, confirming the first time wasn’t a glitch in the matrix. He was doing it on a cycle, every thirty seconds or so, automatic and unhurried, like his mouth had developed a habit his brain had not caught up to yet and no one was going to be the one to tell him.

She decided she didn’t mind. That was as far as her assessment was willing to go. The rest was confusion wrapped in cognitive dissonance, wrapped in a thin layer of exhaustion she could not shake.

Low in his chest, under her ear, something rumbled. His dragon. A deep vibration that was not quite a growl and not quite a purr, and her wolf, battered and still half-asleep inside her, stirred.

"I won’t let anything happen to you, Guinevere." His voice was quiet, directly above her head. "You’re mine."

He pressed another kiss into her hair. Then another. Guinevere breathed him in.

"Hang on." He sat up, adjusting her without putting her down, so she was sitting in his lap. He grabbed a cup of water from his nightstand and tipped it to her lips before she could move her hand to take it.

She drank it greedily.

Then he leaned in and kissed the side of her jaw. She stared at him. He didn’t explain himself. He had kissed the worst of the bruising like it was a thing he was trying to apologize for in a language she had not learned yet.

The man had no shame, and she almost laughed. It was kind of adorable.

"Thank you for taking care of me."

He looked at her with an expression she didn’t recognize. His throat bobbed once. Then he schooled his face with efficiency.

"Of course."

His gold eyes were softer than she remembered them. Softer than any king had a right to have his eyes be.

"You are sore."

Guinevere’s lips twitched. "I feel great."

His laughter filled the room. Real laughter, warm and unguarded, and he leaned down pressing his lips to her forehead. It occurred to her, that he had kissed almost every part of her head by now except for her mouth. She was not going to examine what she thought about that. Not yet.

"Will you let me take care of you, Gwen?"

Gwen. Very few people called her that. He had shortened her name offhand, easy, like it was something that already belonged to him.

He got out of the bed with her still in his arms, like she weighed nothing.

"Was that question rhetorical?"

He stopped mid-step and looked down at her like she had just come back from the dead with a follow-up question.

"Yes."

The bathing chamber registered about two seconds after he set her down. Steam. A full tub. The fact she was on his counter, in very little clothing and he was standing in between her legs. Her inhale was audible.

His hands went to a small pair of shears resting on the shelf behind her.

She blinked at the scissors. Then at him. Her eyes widened.

He caught the look and kissed her shoulder.

"It will hurt you to take this off the normal way. Your arms can’t lift over your head yet. I checked with my sister. She confirmed there is no hook on this one."

Her cheeks heated.

He registered what he had just said and paused. Considered it. Then shrugged one shoulder with the faintest trace of self-aware chagrin.

"I am aware that sounded weird. It was weird. We are moving forward."

A laugh almost escaped her. She caught it in her throat and held it there because her ribs would have punished her for it.

He cut the bralette off with quick, careful motions, his knuckles never once brushing her skin, the shears moving with the precision of a man who had probably used them on battlefield dressings more than lingerie. The fabric fell away. Cool air met her bare skin. She did not stop him.

He moved to her thong next. The same careful efficiency. The same refusal to touch her where he did not need to.

She was fully bare in front of him.

His pupils dilated and his hands made a small, careful fist at his sides before relaxing again.

She flushed an even darker shade of scarlet if that were possible, but did not cover herself with her hands, because her right hand was in a splint and the left could only do so much dignity management on its own.

Then he lifted her off the counter with the same impossible gentleness he had used at every other part of this process, carried her the three steps to the tub, and lowered her into the water.

The heat hit every bruise and every wrapped rib at once and every muscle in her body that had been clenched let go.

Fabric hit the floor somewhere else. Before she had fully processed what was happening, he stepped into the tub behind her, lowered himself down and pulled her gently back against his chest.

Skin to skin. All of it this time.

Her brain reported this as a thing that should have alarmed her. Her body reported back that it was not interested in alarm right now. It felt natural. It made no sense that it felt natural, except that the bath felt too damn good, and that this man was her fated mate, and even though she couldn’t feel the matebond yet, her body seemed to have gotten the memo.

All of which was very reasonable and very logical and did absolutely nothing to distract from the fact that he was very, VERY hard against her lower back.

Her face, which had already been burning, went several degrees hotter.

"Your blush is so cute."

He pressed a kiss to her shoulder, then to the shell of her ear.

She could not come up with a single response to that. Instead she locked her fingers over the hand he had resting low on her stomach. Her non-broken hand. A small, wordless thing.

They sat like that for a while. Steam rising. His thumb drawing slow, aimless circles on her stomach, his chin resting on top of her head.

"What are you thinking?"

She swallowed, feeling entirely too shy for someone who had been naked in his lap for the last twenty minutes.

"That you smell good."

His laugh came out low and stunned and delighted all at once, rumbling against her back. It was the kind of laugh a man gave when a woman had just said something he had not been expecting and was not sure what to do with.

"Gwen."

"Mm."

"You are going to be the death of me."

Twelve floors below where they were, Kael Ashenvale was making a guard’s life miserable.

"Princess? No. Duchess? No. Mate? You flinched. That’s a yes. Whose mate? Yours? No, you’re not important enough. No offense." He considered it. "Some offense."

He leaned back against the wall, thoroughly pleased with himself.

"High General Stormvale’s? That’s another flinch, thank you. Now. Here’s the fun part. Did Ryker know his mate was a glowing white wolf? Or was that a grand reveal two days ago?"