Maddox burst through the double doors. He shoved past Jaxon and Aldric, ignoring their glowing hands, and dropped to his knees beside the bed.
"Baby." His hand found her face. "Wake up for me."
She didn’t wake up.
Her hair was luminous white, bright enough that looking directly at it made his eyes water. It seemed to be getting brighter by the second.
The heat radiating off of her felt like an oven door opened in his face.
He pulled her off the bed and into his arms like she weighed nothing. His skin lit gold immediately, matching her glow. His dragon rumbled as his body began drinking the heat inside of her.
That’s when he knew this wasn’t that. Sure, he still pulled merge heat from her. But this was something else. A warning.
"She’s burning up." He pressed his palm to her forehead and his jaw tightened. "This is past my flame. What is wrong with her?"
"We were trying to determine that before you shoved past us like a battering ram with separation anxiety," Aldric said, his voice carrying the measured irritation of a man who had been elbowed aside by his own king while performing medicine. "Hands on her sternum, magic in her chest, diagnostic in progress, and then six-foot-five of concerned husband bulldozed the procedure. If you’d like to hold her and panic, I can accommodate that."
"How long has she been like this?" Maddox asked, ignoring every word Aldric had just said with the practiced ease of a king who had been ignoring medical professionals since childhood.
"She was warm a few minutes ago," Blair answered from the chair, her voice steady but her eyes tracking the white glow with an intensity that said she’d been watching it escalate and hadn’t liked the trajectory. "But it’s been getting worse. Fast."
"It’s more than my flame." Maddox’s arms tightened around her. "I’m touching her but the heat is staying in her. It’s building. Why is it building?"
At that moment, Kael, who had been propped against the headboard in unusual silence throughout the entire commotion, went rigid.
His eyes widened. The grey in his face shifted as something that was decidedly neither sleep nor delirium crossed his expression.
"What the hell is that?"
"What?" The word came from five mouths at the same time, which was both efficient and deeply unhelpful.
Aldric pinched the bridge of his nose. "One at a time. Or, ideally, none at a time, so I can work."
Kael moved, wincing as he did. He dragged himself across the bed towards the end where Maddox was holding Guinevere.
He reached for her hair.
Maddox yanked Guinevere away from his brother so fast it sounded like MINE had been violently ejected from his soul at Mach speed.
"I am literally trying to help, you possessive psychopath." Kael’s hand was still extended, hovering in the air where Guinevere’s head had been a quarter-second ago.
Blair, from her chair, stared at the interaction and thought: thank fuck Maddox didn’t walk in ten minutes ago.
Maddox stared at him with gold-slit eyes wearing the expression of a man whose dragon was telling him to bite his brother for reaching.
"What." he snapped.
Then the king part of him caught up with the dragon part, and he lowered Guinevere inches without putting her down.
"Your bedside manner is really something," Kael commented. "Have you considered a career in diplomacy? You’d be terrible at it."
Kael reached again. His fingers brushed the white strands aside from her neck.
The second his skin made contact, heat and light poured out of Guinevere and into Kael in a rush so immediate and so visible that every person in the room saw it happen.


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