Chapter 361: Red Eyes Tell No Lies

Aldric took one look at Guinevere’s face and his hands were already glowing. Then he gave the Dragon King one look that lasted two seconds and contained no words and an entire verdict. The look said what did you do with the specific disappointment of a healer who had been patching this family together since before Maddox could walk and had hoped to retire before the injuries started coming from inside the house.

Maddox received the look. Absorbed it. Added it to the pile he was building in his chest next to the bruise and the blood and the sound of her head hitting stone.

Aldric didn’t press. He was a healer and a wise man and wisdom meant knowing when a king’s red eyes were doing more punishment than any question could deliver.

His glowing hands found Guinevere’s cheekbone. He worked in silence. Guinevere sat in Maddox’s lap and let the healer do what healers do and said nothing because saying thank you felt too small and saying anything else felt too big.

When Aldric pulled his hands away, the damage was reduced but present. A bruise the color of a storm cloud still sat high on her cheekbone. A faint line marked where her lip had opened. Proof that lingered because magic could accelerate healing but it couldn’t erase that something had happened.

Aldric gathered his things. He paused at the door and looked at Maddox one more time. The second look was different from the first. Softer. The look of a man who had known this king since childhood and understood that the red eyes and the shaking hands and the woman choosing to stay in his lap were the penance and the prescription and there was nothing Aldric could add to either.

The door closed behind him.

Maddox retrieved the ice from the tray outside the door. He settled back into the chair. Guinevere in his lap. Ice against the bruise that was still there.

His hand was steady enough to hold it. Barely. The tremor had downgraded from earthquake to a fine vibration in his fingertips that hummed against the cloth-wrapped ice.

Then his eyes found the bruise again.

The half-healed version was almost worse than the fresh one because the fresh one had been shock and the half-healed one was reality. This was what it looked like after magic had done its best. This was the version that was going to be on her face tomorrow. This was the mark he had left on the woman he loved and it was going to yellow and green and heal and disappear and he was never going to stop seeing it.

His face crumbled.

The collapse was quieter this time. No sobs. Just his jaw working once, twice, his eyes filling again, his breath catching in his chest at a depth that said his lungs were fighting his ribs and his ribs were fighting his spine and every organ in his body was engaged in a civil war that his brain couldn’t mediate.

She felt it through their matebond before she saw it on his face. The tightening in his chest. The shortness. The way his breathing went from uneven to absent for one second, two, three, before his body forced an inhale that sounded like it had been dragged up through gravel.

She recognized it because she had felt it in her own body before. She never had a name for it. She just knew the shape of it, the way you know the shape of a room you’ve been locked inside.

She didn’t say that. Right now, the man in the chair needed the woman in his lap and everything else could get in line.

Her hand found his. The one holding the ice. She turned her head, pressing her bruised cheek deeper into the cold, and kissed his knuckles.

That broke him again.

A wet sound escaped his throat. His eyes squeezed shut and the tears that had been pooling spilled in two clean lines down his face. He tried to pull his hand away, tried to remove the weapon from the scene of the crime, and she held it there against her cheek with both of hers.

"Maddox." Her voice was steady in the way that walls are steady when someone is leaning on them. "Look at me."

He opened his eyes.

"It’s okay." She held his gaze. "Breathe."

His chest expanded. Held. Released. The exhale shuddered through him. His lungs were learning how to work again, one breath at a time, with a woman’s green eyes as the instruction manual.

"Maddox, I am accident prone," she said with the matter-of-fact delivery. "I stepped in between a dragon and a wolf mid-swing. I jumped off a building and found myself in a high-speed chase with the law. I headbutted a man twice my size and disobeyed an Alpha command."

Maddox opened his mouth.

"No," she said, cutting him off before the first syllable landed. "It doesn’t excuse it. I know that. I’m aware. But I already forgave you. And I don’t care if that’s dumb or wrong or backwards. It’s what I am doing. And I will say it as many times as you need to hear it until it sticks."

She gave his hand a squeeze. The ice shifted against her cheek. His jaw worked.

He opened his mouth again.

"I don’t care if I’m the one who isn’t supposed to be doing the comforting right now," she continued, steamrolling whatever he was about to say with the casual authority of a woman who had decided the agenda and the agenda was final. "I heard it. Rejected it. Moved on. Next item."

Maddox opened his mouth a third time.

Nothing came out.

He was looking at her with an expression that lived somewhere between awe and devastation because this was a version of her she hadn’t shown him yet. He had seen her fierce with other people. This was the first time she had aimed it at him and she was doing it to protect him from himself.

He raised her gently. One hand under her jaw, careful, avoiding the bruise with the precision of a man mapping territory he had just damaged and was never going to touch carelessly again. He pressed his lips to her forehead. Long. The kiss lasted three full seconds and contained everything his mouth couldn’t say because his voice was in pieces and the pieces were scattered across the floor.

When he lowered her, she gave his hand another squeeze. She was going to continue doing this until the tremor stopped or the ice melted or both.

Her brain was doing something unexpected. It was choosing to talk. She was usually the listener. But the silence in this room was the kind that would eat him alive if she left it empty and she had decided, from her position on his lap, that filling it was her job tonight.

"I might be losing my mind," she began. "I woke up in a brown room with seven men living in it." She paused, considering her words. "Which there is nothing wrong with. Very progressive. I support that. Though I am a bit confused on why and how Kael and Nicholas were living together but that is another conversation."

Maddox blinked at her. His mouth twitched. It was too early to call it a smile. It was in the neighborhood of a smile. It was a smile’s first cousin who lived three doors down and had been invited but hadn’t committed.

"When I kept flashing into new places," she swallowed, and Maddox swallowed too, mirroring her, listening, "I wound up in a room identical to this. And I thought I was losing my mind."

She took a breath.

"I had a dagger with me and I fell on it. I didn’t even use it and had a literal stab wound from it. That’s the one the Luminari healer helped treat."