Chapter 360: Four Words Find Their Way Back

The instinct was a steel rod down her spine.

Protect him.

She was still on her knees. Blood was still dripping from her chin. Her cheekbone was screaming. And through all of that, Maddox’s anguish poured into her chest with a force that made the punch feel like a handshake. It was a man’s entire foundation cracking in real time, every load-bearing wall inside him giving way at once, and the collapse was so total that she could feel his heartbeat stuttering.

She pushed herself up.

Maddox’s lungs stopped cooperating. The air that should have been automatic, the kind of breathing a body does without consulting anyone, seized somewhere between his throat and his chest and stayed there. His hands started shaking. Both of them. The tremor began in his fingers and climbed through his wrists and up his forearms and it kept going, multiplying, compounding like interest on a debt he could never repay.

Her bloody hand grabbed his shaking one, gripping with a force that had nothing to do with her body and everything to do with a decision she had made on the floor while three matebonds screamed at her from different directions.

She pulled Maddox behind her.

The movement was small. Three inches. Enough for her body to be between his and the room. Enough for the message to land.

Nicholas took a step forward. Kael took a step forward. Two predators converging on the same target and the target was behind a woman who weighed less than either of their arms and was bleeding from the face.

"I need a moment alone with Maddox," she said.

Her voice was steady. Her cheekbone was purple. Her mouth tasted like copper. Her hand was holding onto a man who was falling apart.

Neither man moved. The air between the four of them was so thick it had a pulse.

Nicholas’s jaw was a locked vault. His wolf was vibrating at a frequency that said he was two seconds from ripping Maddox off that wall and the only thing preventing it was the woman standing in the way with blood on her chin and her hand wrapped around the hand that had put it there.

Kael’s face was a weapon on safety. Every line of him said move and every instinct said now and the only override was Guinevere’s voice still ringing in the air between them.

"Please."

Nicholas’s wolf receded by one degree. Then another. His eyes stayed on Guinevere’s face, on the blood, on the bruise blooming across her cheekbone, and the war inside him was visible in every tendon and every breath. He didn’t want to leave. Leaving meant trusting the man who had just hit her. Leaving meant walking away from his mate while she bled.

But she had asked.

She had said please and she had said it with green eyes that were looking at him the way she had looked at him on the cliffside and in the marketplace and in the tree pool, with a trust so complete it bypassed every argument his wolf was making.

He gave a single nod.

The nod cost him everything. His jaw stayed locked. His hands stayed fisted at his sides. His wolf howled inside his chest as he turned toward the door, the sound of an animal being separated from its mate by her own choice and the choice was worse than force because force he could fight and this he couldn’t.

The hurt he left behind traveled through their matebond like a blade drawn slowly across her ribs. She felt every step he took toward the door as distance she was creating and distance she was paying for and the price was the look on his face when he turned back one final time from the doorway.

Kael was harder.

He stood in the middle of the room looking at her with an expression she had never seen on him because Kael Ashenvale didn’t do vulnerable. Kael did witty and sharp and territorial and annoyingly right about everything. Vulnerability was a language he refused to speak in front of witnesses and right now his mouth was forming words in it anyway.

He looked at Maddox behind her. Looked at the blood on her chin. Looked at her hand holding Maddox’s hand. The hand that had hit her. The hand she was choosing to hold.

His jaw worked once. His eyes burned with something he sealed behind a wall so fast she almost missed it. Almost.

"Kael. Please."

He didn’t nod. He gave her the cold shoulder and stormed out of the room. His hurt hit her through whatever connected them. The kind of ache that lived underneath the surface and would be there tomorrow and the day after and the day after that because Kael Ashenvale didn’t process pain. He composted it.

The room was empty.

Just her and Maddox.

Maddox’s hand was shaking in hers. His whole body was shaking. The tremor had graduated from his arms to his chest to his legs and the man who governed an entire continent was vibrating at a frequency that suggested his skeleton was trying to leave without him.

She turned to face him.

His eyes were on her cheek. On the bruise. On the split lip. On the blood drying under her chin. Every time his gaze touched the damage, his face collapsed a little further inward, like a building being demolished one floor at a time from the inside.

He looked at her and something behind his eyes broke completely.

Not cracked. Not fractured. Broken the way a dam breaks when the water has been building for years and the last drop was a punch that landed on the only face he would burn the world to protect.

His knees gave.

He didn’t sit in the chair so much as the chair caught him. His body folded into it with the graceless surrender of a man whose legs had filed a formal resignation. His elbows hit his knees. His hands found his face. And Maddox Drakencrest, the Dragon King of Velkaris, the man who had unified the greatest military force on two continents, who had flown across an ocean and paid seven hundred and fifty million in gold for the woman standing in front of him, started crying.

The sound was devastating.

It came from somewhere below his lungs, below his ribs, from the basement of a man who had been holding the ceiling up since he was too young to know what ceilings were.

The sobs were raw and ugly and completely uncontrolled and they belonged to a person who had never once in his adult life cried in front of another human being and was doing it now because the alternative was imploding and the woman in front of him deserved to see him choose the version that didn’t involve fire.

Guinevere climbed into his lap.

She wrapped both of her arms around his head, and pulled his face into her neck. His arms locked around her waist with the desperate, crushing strength of a man grabbing a lifeline he didn’t believe he deserved to hold.

"Hey, Maddox," she said softly. "I’m right here. It’s okay. It was an accident."

His shoulders shook harder. The sobs were getting worse instead of better because she was comforting him. She was bleeding from the face and sitting in his lap and comforting him and the backwards math of that was tearing him apart worse than the hit.

"No." His voice was wrecked. Gutted. Barely a word. "It’s not okay. I just... I can’t... fuck." Another sob ripped through him. His arms tightened so hard around her waist she felt her ribs compress. "I’m having a hard time."

She pressed her forehead to his. Close enough that his tears wet her skin and her blood marked his. The distance between them was measured in molecules and shared fluids and the absolute wreckage of two people who had been through more in three weeks than most couples survive in a lifetime.

"I love you, Maddox."