Chapter 100: First Date Is Going BEAUTIFULLY
The Crown of Velkaris does not run. It walks. It commands. It delegates. Maddox told the Crown of Velkaris to go fuck itself and covered thirty feet in under two seconds.
He dropped to his knees beside Guinevere. One hand found the small of her back, while the other tilted her chin up so he could see her face. Blood was still running from her nose, much worse than he thought.
He was about to pick her up when she jerked away from him violently. It took him a moment to understand, she was stifling dry heaves, trying to not be sick in front of five hundred people. He couldn’t blame her there. Dignity in the middle of a crisis. She would have made an excellent dragon if she weren’t already the most frustrating wolf on the continent.
The sound she made on the next one went through him like a blade he couldn’t pull out. His dragon threw itself against his ribs in panic. The beast that had been purring against her minutes ago was now clawing to get to the surface because she was hurting.
His eyes went to Kael over her head. The look on his face was a question wrapped in a threat: how long have you known, how bad is it?
Kael met his stare and didn’t flinch. "Every time she’s near dark magic."
Maddox’s jaw was set and his eyes said murder. "Have you exposed her before?"
The question was calm. The homicide behind it was not.
"Yes," Kael answered without a single layer of performance around it. Just a man standing in front of his brother and choosing, for once, to be exactly where he was.
Growth looked terrible on his brother. Maddox preferred the version he could justify punching.
He swallowed the rage and shifted his focus back to her, gathering her hair in one fist to hold it away from her face. It was longer than he’d realized. Heavier too. The white strands were still glowing faintly and managed to be beautiful while the rest of the evening was a dumpster fire.
"Jaxon. Off Blair. On her. Now."
As soon as she stopped fighting dry heaves, Maddox scooped her off her hands and knees, rotated her mid-lift so her legs draped over one arm and her back settled against the other. The whole thing took less than a second and she looked like she had opinions about it.
"Commander—"
"Yeah, no. You lost Commander privileges." He kissed the top of her head. Public. Deliberate. In front of every lord, elder, guard, and servant still conscious in this hall. The political implications could get in line behind the personal ones.
Jaxon’s hands hovered over her sternum. Violet light sank into her skin. What came back out was black and fought every inch of the way.
"She’s the only one who absorbed it." He extracted a thread that twisted between his fingers like something alive.
Five hundred people clean. One woman soaked in it. Of course she was the exception. This woman could not be normal about a single goddamn thing.
Jaxon pulled another thread. She bit down on a sound that Maddox felt in his own teeth.
"This isn’t fae." Another thread. "And it isn’t mage." Another. His jaw tightened. "Or any of the thirteen types of dark magic for that matter."
Maddox’s arms tightened around her. "Don’t be scared," he said against her ear. "We’ll get it sorted."
"It’s okay, Maddox. I’m not scared," she said softly.
She wasn’t scared. Noted. Heartbeat at a full gallop. Death grip on his forearms. Breathing shallow enough to fog glass. All of that was her resting state. And he wasn’t a dragon and the man on the floor still had his head and their first date was going beautifully. He was going to plan a second date so boring it would make Sterling look exciting.
He let her have it because correcting a bleeding woman’s self-assessment in public was a level of stupid even he wouldn’t attempt tonight.
"Lux is on her way." Jaxon pulled the last visible thread, dissolved it, and sat back on his heels. "If this falls outside her expertise, we are in territory where expertise stops existing."
Comforting. His mage, who read dead languages for fun, had just told him, in the most academic way possible, that they were fucked. The evening continued to deliver.
Jaxon’s eyes lingered on Maddox then moved back to her for a second. Maddox glanced up to see Blair gripping Kael’s arm. Both of them were watching. They hated each other. Ryker and Sterling’s eyes were also on him. Every single one of them was looking at him the way people look at a man who has just done something significant and doesn’t know it yet.
Maddox then clocked his elders huddled together, staring like he was the most interesting thing in Velkaris. The second he looked back, every single one found something fascinating in a different direction. He had seen better acting from Griffin.
The room was hiding something. His mate was bleeding something. His brother knew something. His elders had done something. And the man he had killed tonight had known her title before Maddox had known her name. Every thread in this room led back to the woman in his arms, and the Dragon King, who had built his reign on knowing everything before everyone, was the last man in his own hall to learn that the ground beneath him had been moving for days.
"Someone want to tell me what the hell I’m missing? Whoever speaks first gets to keep their position."
The question sat in the center of the room like a lit fuse. No one touched it.
The strings concluded the show must go on and resumed the waltz that had been interrupted by treason.
Guests began migrating to adjacent ballrooms with fresh drinks like they were switching theaters at a festival. Twenty minutes ago a dead man sang a nursery rhyme from a severed head. Now a lord was flagging a server for a refill.
But the silence from his people was louder than the music. They all looked guilty.
He was about to make the silence more uncomfortable than it already was when the doors opened.
Lux entered with the stride of a woman who had taken ninety seconds to look presentable. Hair in place. Coat straight. Wine glass back in hand. She looked like herself. Unlike her colleague, who looked like he had been assembled by a blind man in a dark room.
"Oh shit." Her eyes immediately landed on Guinevere. "I feel it from here."
That was what made Maddox table the what-the-hell-is-going-on question, because he’d interacted with this woman enough to know that response was not normal.
