Chapter 267: Don’t Worry Dex. I’ll Protect You.
There are places men go to fall apart. Riven Nightspire’s was a clearing with an oak tree, a dead woman’s initials.
Riven Nightspire stood in a moonlit clearing holding a bouquet of roses.
His composure evaporated. His lips parted. His grip on the bouquet tightened, and the stems bent in his fist.
"Seraphine?"
The name came out fractured. The name of a woman he had loved since childhood, spoken aloud in the only place he ever allowed himself to say it, to a white wolf who should not have been standing where she was standing because the woman she belonged to had been dead for six years.
Serena, locked inside her wolf, held perfectly still. Her gold eyes watched him from ten feet away.
Riven approached slowly. His steps were careful, deliberate, the approach of a man who understood that white wolves were sacred and this moment was a knife’s edge and one wrong movement would shatter it.
He reached the old oak at the clearing’s edge. The trunk was wide, gnarled, older than anything else in the forest. Carved into the bark at chest height, weathered by decades but still legible, were two sets of initials.
SS. RN.
He placed the roses against the base of the tree, arranging them with a precision that said he had done this before. Many times.
"Twenty-three years," he said quietly, as if confirming the number for himself. "I have never missed this day. Every year since you left, I come here. I bring flowers. I sit. I talk to a tree that cannot hear me and a woman who is not here."
He straightened. Turned back to the white wolf who was watching him with gold eyes that held the weight of everything she could not say.
"I gave you my word I would protect her, Seraphine." His voice was steady, but the steadiness was costing him. "And I will. I’ve been trying. There is a great deal in play, more than you would believe, more than I can say aloud even to a ghost in a clearing."
He exhaled.
"But I will protect her. That is the one promise I have kept, and I will keep it until the earth takes me back."
He paused. The pause lasted longer than any of his famous tactical silences, because this one was carrying something heavier than strategy.
"I’m sorry I didn’t protect her when she left Frostborne. I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I’m sorry I spent years coming to this clearing instead of finding your daughter and making sure she was safe." His voice dropped. "That failure is mine. I own it. And I will spend the rest of my life correcting it."
Serena lowered herself to the ground and lay flat, her chin resting on her paws, her gold eyes level with the forest floor. The posture of a creature who understood that the man standing in front of her was bleeding in a way that no healer could touch, and that the kindest thing she could offer was stillness.
She watched him. He told her about Serena’s two marks, about the Drakenfell prince and the Shadowclaw king, and his voice carried the specific exasperation of a man who had watched his niece collect complications the way other women collected jewelry.
He told her that Remus was growing into the heir Nightspire needed. That the boy had his mother’s patience and his father’s instincts and was going to be a better king than Riven had ever been, and the pride in his voice when he said it was the most honest sound Serena had ever heard from him.
She would never tell him this was her. This moment belonged to him and her mother. This was sacred ground, and Serena Frostborne would protect it.
"She has your eyes, Seraphine," he said. "And your particular gift for making powerful men act like fools." A sound escaped him that was trying to be a laugh. "She is going to be magnificent. She already is."
He stood. Looked at the white wolf one last time.
"Thank you for coming."
Serena closed her eyes.
White light flashed. One second she was lying in a clearing in Nightspire, and the next the ground beneath her was different. Drakenfell’s eastern forest.
The moon was high. Hours had passed, or minutes, or days. She had no way to measure the gap between where she had been and where she was.
Then a voice she had never heard before cut through the forest like a blade.
Aegon: Aurelia. Where are you. Answer. Now.
The command was absolute. It carried the weight of a wolf who had woken up to find his mate gone.
Serena reached for Aurelia. The space where her wolf’s voice should have been was silent. Present, breathing, alive, but silent. Aurelia was there the way sleep is there: inhabiting the body without participating in it.
Aegon: AURELIA.
A black wolf exploded from the tree line.
He hit her so fast she didn’t see him coming. Six hundred pounds of Aegon, airborne, tackling her with a force that should have been violent but landed as something else entirely.
Then he licked her. Everywhere. Her face, her ears, her scruff, her muzzle. A comprehensive, obsessive, full-body assessment conducted entirely with his tongue.
He licked like a wolf who had spent the last however-many-hours tearing through a forest looking for a white wolf who had vanished from his side while he slept and was now communicating, through sheer volume of saliva, that this was unacceptable and would never happen again.
Serena had never been licked before.
The sensation was strange. Warm, wet, thorough, and weirdly comforting in a way she could not rationalize and was not going to examine too closely. Part of her wanted it to stop. A different part, a part she was choosing to ignore, leaned into it.
His gold eyes flashed. Wolf gold to Dexmon’s gold, back to wolf gold. Serena caught a glimpse of it from beneath him before his head moved and she lost the angle.
Whatever that was, she would ask later.
Aegon huffed. A sharp, annoyed exhale through his nostrils that communicated, with the clarity of a wolf who had perfected the art of nonverbal protest.
He held her down for one more second. Then stepped back.
Aegon: Shift.
White light detonated. The pain hit, grinding and structural and absolute, the pathways forced open by magic that refused to accept limitations. She shifted back into human form, landing on her hands and knees in the dirt, panting, hair falling around her face, every nerve ending on fire.
Graceful, it was not.
Dexmon scooped her off the ground before her second exhale.
He moved so fast her brain didn’t register the transition between kneeling in dirt and being vertical with her legs wrapped around his waist. His arms were locked beneath her and he was kissing her before she could form a sentence.
Her forehead. Her temple. Her cheek. The bridge of her nose. Her jaw. The spot beneath her ear that made her pulse jump. Every kiss was a checkpoint, a verification, the systematic confirmation of a man who needed to touch every part of her face to believe she was real.
"Baby, I couldn’t find you." His voice was wrecked. The composed, cocky, razor-smart voice of Dexmon Drakenfell was gone, replaced by something raw and unguarded. His hand moved to her forehead, checking her temperature. "Are you okay?"
"Yes, I’m sorry, Dex. I have no idea what happened."
He was already walking back toward the castle, his arms locked around her. His lips found a new spot on her every few steps. Each kiss was fast, light, compulsive, the kisses of a man who was reassuring himself through repetition.
"D-D-Dex?"
She had no idea where the stutter came from. The word just broke apart in her mouth, syllables stumbling over each other like they had forgotten the choreography.
He didn’t stop walking. "What is it, baby?"
She breathed him in. The fact that she inhale the scent of the man who had been searching for her and feel safe again, was a gift she was never going to stop being grateful for.
"Do you trust me?"
He inhaled. Long. Slow.
When he answered, his voice came out resigned. "Yes, Serena. Why do I have a feeling I am not going to like what comes after that."
✦✦✦
The gold portal opened in Maelor’s study because it was the only anchor point Serena had in Nightspire, a room she had visited in visions and through Hyran’s research sessions, a fixed location her magic could lock onto and hold.
She had not expected Dexmon to insist on coming.
She had expected an argument, a negotiation, a series of strategic objections delivered in the voice of a Crown Prince who understood the diplomatic implications of showing up uninvited in a foreign king’s castle at three in the morning.
Instead, he had said: "You’re insane if you think I am letting you portal alone to Nightspire in the middle of the night after vanishing for three hours."
Fair.
He pulled her back against his chest as they stepped through, his chin resting on the top of her head, his arms locked around her shoulders from behind. The gesture of a man who was going where she went and had decided to make the transit comfortable.
He kissed the top of her head once. "Ten minutes, Serena. If we can’t find him or anything strange happens, we leave."
She reached back and gave his hand a squeeze. "Don’t worry, Dex. I won’t let anything happen to you."
She fully meant it. Every word. She would step between him and any threat in this castle without hesitation.
Behind her, Dex’s face went through a journey.
The journey started at surprise, traveled through a confusion so specific it had its own weather system, and arrived at a destination that was equal parts love and exasperation. His mate had just offered to protect him, and meant it, and he could feel through the matebond that she meant it, and he didn’t know whether to laugh or propose to her a second time.
"Serena. I don’t need..."
She was already moving. Her hand found his, and she pulled him forward through Maelor’s study toward the corridor, her grip firm, her pace certain, her white hair catching the low candlelight as she led the Crown Prince of Drakenfell through a foreign castle like she owned it.
Dex followed. Because the woman pulling his hand was the woman he would follow into any room, any kingdom, any war, even when she was leading him somewhere he hadn’t agreed to go, even when the ten-minute clock was already ticking, even when every tactical instinct he possessed was screaming that this was a terrible idea.
Aegon: She is protecting us.
Dex: I noticed.
Aegon: I find it deeply attractive and profoundly insulting at the same time.
