Guinevere woke drenched.

The sheets were soaked through. Her hair was plastered to her neck and forehead, and heat rolled off her body in waves that had nothing to do with the hearth or the man beside her. It was coming from inside, deep and building, a fever that had no origin and no ceiling.

Her wolf stirred. Restless. Pacing behind her ribs in tight circles.

She tried to sit up. Her arms shook. Sweat dripped off her chin onto the silk and she stared down at the dark spot it made and tried to understand what was happening to her body.

Beside her, Maddox’s eyes opened. His nostrils flared once, and his entire body went rigid.

He knew what this was before she did.

His hand found her hip under the sheets.

"Gwen." His voice was low. Controlled. Deliberately calm. "Look at me."

She turned her head. Her green eyes were glassy. Unfocused. The pupils blown too wide for the dim light.

He moved over her in one fluid motion, his weight settling between her thighs, his forearms bracing on either side of her head. His mouth found hers, and he kissed her slow and deep, his body covering hers completely.

She whimpered against his lips. Her back arched off the bed. The heat was unbearable now, centered low in her core, throbbing in a rhythm that matched her pulse.

And he was the only relief.

His mouth moved to her jaw. Her throat. The curve of her neck where the vein ran close to the surface.

She moaned.

The sound left her mouth and the world changed.

His scent shifted. His hips rolled against hers in a motion that was no longer Maddox’s careful control. This was instinct stripped down to bone. Breeding rhythm. A body that already knew what it wanted and was taking it.

She felt fangs against her throat.

Long. Sharp. Pressing into her skin without breaking it. They dragged slowly down the tendon at the side of her neck, and a growl rolled out of the chest above her that vibrated through the mattress. Low. Possessive.

She opened her eyes.

His were black. No white. Two pits of iron-dark absence staring down at her from a face that was Maddox’s and was no longer Maddox’s at the same time.

The voice that came out of his mouth was wrong. A voice she had heard once in a forest with a hand around her throat.

"Are you hot, little wolf?"

Guinevere screamed.

Her hand flew to her mouth. The scream tore through the room and bounced off the stone walls and the sound was so raw it hurt her own ears. She scrambled backward on the bed, spine hitting the headboard, knees pulling to her chest.

Maddox jerked back.

Eyes wide. His hands hovered in the air between them, palms open, fingers spread.

"Gwen? What’s wrong?"

She could not speak. Her hand was clamped over her mouth and her body was shaking.

He reached for her.

She flinched away from him so hard her shoulder blade cracked against the wood. The sound that escaped through her fingers was small and broken and gutted. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

"I would never hurt you." His voice cracked on the last word. "Gwen. Hey. Baby...I would never."

She was staring at him, through him, past him. Her eyes were seeing the room and seeing another room at the same time, and the terror on her face was the kind that came from the inside, a hallucination laid over reality with surgical precision.

"Look at me. It’s me."

He tried to touch her hand. She pulled it away. Her breathing was shallow and rapid and the shaking was getting worse.

Through the matebond, he reached for her.

Nothing.

The channel was dead. Flat. Empty. Where her emotions should have been bleeding into his was a wall of black static that tasted like ash on the back of his tongue. It felt like it was being blocked.

His dragon surged. Hard. All the way to the surface. His pupils went to slits and his canines dropped a fraction of an inch and the growl that rose in his chest was territorial in a way that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with the fact that his mate was in danger in his own bed and he could not reach her.

"Baby, I am never going to hurt you." He kept his voice as steady as he could. "Hey. Talk to me. What are you seeing?"

Her eyes flickered.

Green to black. Just the edges. A ring of ink bleeding inward from the outside of her irises, eating the color.

His blood went cold and his dragon growled one word. Kael.

Dark threads became visible in the dim light. They moved when she breathed, tightening, and the black at the edges of her eyes deepened by a fraction.

Kael: Who is she, little brother? Someone worth losing sleep over, clearly.

The voice came through the mindlink. Uninvited. Impossible. The Keep’s wards had been rebuilt after the throne room massacre. Kael should not have been able to reach a mindlink inside these walls unless he was close enough to touch the stone.

Maddox’s jaw locked.

Maddox: Ryker. Sterling. Aldric. My chambers. Now. Kael has breached the mindlink. Dark magic on Gwen. He is in proximity.

He did not wait for a response. His focus stayed on Gwen, whose body was doing things he had never seen a body do. Her muscles were tensing in patterns that were involuntary, her arms pulling in small, jerking motions toward the edge of the bed. Toward the nightstand. The tendons in her neck stood taut. Sweat rolled down her temples.

She sobbed. Twice. The second one was cut off so abruptly, it sounded like someone covered her mouth.

"Hey... Gwen. I’m here. Hang on"

The bedroom door swung open. Blair stood in the threshold in a white nightgown, holding a ceremonial blade from the hallway in her right hand.

Her eyes were black from corner to corner.

"Blair?" Maddox’s voice dropped. "Blair. Put the blade down."

She did not respond. Her face held zero expression. She walked forward, and the walk was wrong, too smooth, too even, the gait of a body being operated by a hand that was not hers.

Maddox turned back to Guinevere and his blood turned to ice. In the second he was looking at Blair, Guinevere cleared the bed and grabbed his blade.

The one from the drawer of his nightstand. The one he kept there for proximity defense. It was in her left hand, and she was holding it to her own throat with the edge against the artery.

Her hand trembled. Her eyes were fully black.

"Gwen, drop it," he commanded in the draconic equivalent of an Alpha command.

It should have worked instantly.

It didn’t.