Chapter 97: The Draconic Shut-The-Fuck-Up Register
There are evenings that change a kingdom. If you had asked anyone at the Unity Gala halfway through the night, they would have told you this was one of them. Dragon fated mates were beyond rare, and they were witnessing history.
By morning, that would be the least eventful part of the evening.
One act of treason. One kill. A nursery rhyme from a dead man’s throat. And two brothers claiming the same woman.
Maddox watched Guinevere’s breathing pick up.
He thought about the glow from her earlier in the night. Before they danced, he saw it. How many times had his flame reached for her without him knowing? How many times had she felt it pull and said nothing this entire week?
She told no one because who would she tell? Him. She could have told him. He was right here. He had been right here for five days asking her to have a drink with him and she had been declining while quietly absorbing his flame in corridors.
He didn’t know whether to be furious or impressed. Both. Furious and impressed. His default setting this evening.
Her eyes left his and found Kael’s across the room. Something passed between them. Fast. Silent. The kind of exchange that required history Maddox wasn’t part of.
Maddox hated it immediately.
His mate. Looking at his brother. For help. For comfort. In a crisis. While holding his flame. In his ballroom. The pettiness that erupted was volcanic.
No. Absolutely not.
That would be corrected tonight.
Then other whispers erupted. The ones that snagged his attention belonged to his elders.
"I told the High General to send her back today," Varro hissed.
Send her back. His elder had just said send her back. About his mate. His mate who was standing in the center of his ballroom holding his flame.
"We all told the High General," Drystan whispered. "He assured us she would not make contact with him."
Heat flooded his chest and kept climbing. Up his throat. Behind his eyes. Into his hands. Contact. They’d been managing her contact with him. Managing her the way you manage a risk. She wasn’t a risk. She was his. The distinction was about to become everyone’s problem.
The growl that came out wasn’t for the room. It was for the men who thought they had the right.
"Cat’s out of the bag now. Get Jaxon. Separate her from him until we get it contained. Now."
"Take a step closer to her and I will kill you," Maddox said in the Draconic register aimed at the elders, but for the entire hall to hear. He didn’t look at them when he said it. All of them froze. Good. Frozen elders were quiet elders.
Her green eyes left Kael and returned to Maddox where they belonged. He hadn’t looked away. Wasn’t going to.
Her throat worked once. Hard. She looked shaken. The woman who had thrown champagne in a lord’s face, screamed twice at a gala, and kneed a man in the groin was now afraid. Outstanding. He’d just scared his own mate with a kill threat she had no context for. Add it to the list. He’d fix that later. No one was touching her tonight outside of himself.
He pulled his eyes off her and found his High General.
Ryker’s eyes were closed, and he was letting out a long breath. Maddox let him. He trusted this man with his life. There was a reason. But when Ryker opened them, the look Maddox gave him said clearly: there better be a good one.
A scream cut through the hall. The crowd scattered around the source. Gold was pouring over a man’s body. His flame had selected one target and was cooking him alive. Either she had the worst aim on the continent or the best instincts. He was betting on the second.
Her hand twitched halfway to cover her mouth before she caught it. Maddox’s eyes zeroed in on that. He understood. She didn’t have control of it and was afraid of hurting someone.
She was standing twenty feet away looking terrified and adorable and completely lost and every protective instinct flared at once. She needed him.
He stopped calling for his flame immediately. But it didn’t stop. Maddox blinked. That was impossible. Then again, for her, that was on brand.
The screaming didn’t stop. One man. Just one. The rest of the hall was wrapped in the same gold and felt nothing. He was the exception. The crowd didn’t care about the distinction. Five hundred people heard screaming and they ran. A woman tripped over her own dress. Tables flipped. Glass broke. A lord knocked a woman into a pillar trying to get past her.
His summit. His lords. Trampling each other. Over one man screaming. The dignity of the dragon houses was on full display tonight and the display was embarrassing.
"STILL."
The Draconic register buried every sound in the room. Five hundred bodies locked. The stampede froze mid-collapse. Overturned chairs hung against tables. A woman stopped mid-fall.
"Breathe, Gwen," Kael said. Gwen. Short name. Crisis voice. His brother had a crisis protocol for this woman. Like he’d been here before.
Her eyes flooded gold. Her head swiveled toward the screaming. Not fast. Slow. The kind of slow that makes a room go quiet for different reasons. She raised her hand and pointed at the man. One finger. Extended. Steady. Her face held nothing.
He’d seen blank faces before. This was different. This was a woman who had left the building and something else was answering the door.
Maddox had also never seen a princess point across a ballroom. That would be trained out of them at an early age. There was something very off.
She flicked her wrist and something ejected from the man’s robes, skipping across the stone floor until it hit Ryker’s boot. An envelope with a wax seal.
Five hundred people watched it happen and nobody breathed. Whatever was in that parchment had just been ripped from a man’s body by a woman whose eyes had turned gold and whose face had gone blank and the room understood, on a level beneath language, that what they were witnessing was not politics.
The screaming stopped like a switch had been flipped.
There were no burns on his skin. It had looked like he was being burned alive. Maddox had seen that enough times to know. But he was fine. Just panting.
Her eyes changed back to green again. She blinked. Confused. Looked at her pointing finger like it belonged to someone else and tucked it against her side. Her face rearranged itself into calm. Quick. Practiced. Cute. He would have laughed if thirty seconds ago her head hadn’t rotated like a possessed doll on a shelf. Jaxon would know what that was. Adding it to the list.
Ryker looked at the parchment. Then at Guinevere. Then at the parchment again. He picked it up. Turned it. A wax seal. His expression traveled from confusion to recognition to fury in under two seconds. That was fast, even for Ryker.
The stampede was forgotten. Five hundred people who had been trampling each other moments ago were now unified by a single purpose: what the fuck was on that parchment. The collective nosiness was biological.
Fear lasted thirty seconds. Gossip lasted generations. Every lord in this room was going to dine on this story for a decade and the main course hadn’t even been served yet.
