Chapter 363: One Hell Of A Pill

Guinevere’s hand flew to her mouth.

Maddox had been bracing for tears. For the kind of collapse that would make sense. That’s what he was expecting.

What he got was silence.

Her eyes went wide. Her mouth stayed behind her hand. Her breathing continued at the same rate and rhythm it had been at before the sentence landed, which was more alarming than any sob because it meant the information had hit something inside her that was deeper than the crying place and the crying place couldn’t reach it.

She was numb.

The numbness was the part that scared him because Guinevere Lunaris had cried in a tree pool, cried in a marketplace, cried in a corridor, cried in his shower, cried in his arms, and cried on a marble counter. She cried at matebond surges and Alpha commands and the memory of her mother and being separated from men she loved by ten feet of hallway. She was a woman who felt everything at full volume and the volume had just been turned to zero and the zero was worse than any scream.

"How?" Her voice came out flat. Distant. The voice of a woman asking a question from behind glass.

"Your brother confronted your father on the stairwell of your tower. Your father turned it against him. Two wounds. Cassian bled out on the stairs."

She didn’t move. Her hand stayed over her mouth. Her eyes were dry and open and looking at a point somewhere past his shoulder that didn’t exist in this room.

"Did he suffer?"

The question gutted him. She asked it the way a person asks about the weather, detached, clinical, the voice of a woman who had sent her grief somewhere she couldn’t feel it and was now operating on the version of herself that functioned when the real one had clocked out.

"A little," Maddox said quietly. "But it could have been worse."

Guinevere was quiet for a long time. Maddox’s thumb traced circles on her waist through the silk robe. The rhythm hadn’t changed but the pressure had, deeper, slower, the way a man traces when his brain is working behind the movement and the movement is just keeping his hands busy while the rest of him catches up.

"Guinevere." His voice had shifted. The softness from the comfort was still there but something heavier had moved in underneath it, the way storm clouds slide behind a sunset without killing the color. "There’s something I need to tell you."

Her stomach dropped before the sentence finished because there was more.

She adjusted the ice on her cheek. The cold was doing its job. The swelling had a ceiling now. Her lip had stopped dripping. The bruise was going to be spectacular tomorrow and she was going to deal with that tomorrow because tonight had already maxed out her capacity for problems.

"Okay," she said.

"When we arrived in Lunaris to find you, your brother was in a standoff with your father. Blades drawn. Maria was involved. The Beta was involved. The old healer was on the floor asleep or something."

"Asleep on the floor," she repeated.

"He woke up. It was a whole thing."

Her brain filed that under revisit when sane and moved on.

"There was a confrontation between your brother and your father about Maria." Maddox paused. His jaw worked once. "Your brother was protecting someone. He took the blame for something he didn’t do."

"What was he protecting?"

"Maria and Draven."

The name landed like a stone in still water. Draven. The Beta she trusted and whose son she grew up with.

"They were having an affair," Maddox said. It came out flat. The tone of a man delivering intelligence he had already processed and was now handing over as a finished product rather than raw material.

Her mouth opened. Closed. The math assembled itself with the slow, grinding inevitability of gears turning in a machine she didn’t want to understand. Maria and Draven. The woman her father married after her mother died and the Beta who had been at his side for over two decades.

"Maria was pregnant," she said.

"Draven’s."

Her hand pressed the ice harder against her cheek. The cold bit through the cloth and into the bone and she welcomed it because the sensation was something to focus on that wasn’t this.

"Cassian knew?"

"Cassian knew everything. He was covering for both of them. Your father set up a situation designed to force the truth out, and it worked."

She was quiet for a long time. The ice shifted against her skin. Water dripped down her jaw and she didn’t wipe it.

"My brother was protecting them." She said it to herself more than to him. Turning the sentence over. Examining the shape of it. Cassian, who had ordered her lashes. Cassian, who had burned in front of her. Cassian, who had been cruel and broken and furious and had still chosen, in the end, to stand between two people he cared about and the man who would kill them for it.

The complexity of that made her chest ache in a place she didn’t have a name for.

Her eyes closed. One second. Two. When they opened, they were still dry and the glass was still there.

"What happened to Maria?"

"Your father sentenced her. Gave her until he returned. A head start."

Her jaw tightened behind her hand. The ice dripped. The silence stretched.

"And Draven?"

"Your father stabbed him."

"Is he alive?"

"Jaxon and Lux got to him. Yes. He’s alive and in Drakencrest because I cut a deal."

The questions kept coming. One after another. Steady. Methodical. The cadence of a woman building a picture from pieces she was picking up off the floor and examining without flinching because flinching required feeling and she had temporarily suspended that service.

Her eyes sharpened. The glass cracked by a degree. "What deal?"

Maddox held her gaze. The circles on her waist had stopped.

"I cut a deal to take Maria and Draven if he survives. Moved them to Drakencrest under blood oath. They can never disclose Lunaris intelligence to anyone outside of our kingdom. In exchange, the alliance holds. The fleet commitment. The gold. All of it stays intact."

She processed that. He could feel the processing through their matebond, a rapid, silent calculation that moved through her chest like current through wire.

"You saved Maria."

"I made a deal that included her because you bled for her and I was going to make damn sure that sacrifice wasn’t wasted."

Her hand came down from her mouth. Her fingers found his. The grip was tight and immediate and carried the specific pressure of a woman who had just heard something that mattered more than she could say right now and the grip was the receipt.

"What does the deal cost us?"