Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 36

Chapter 36: Wrap Your Legs Around Me, Baby

The first thing that registered was his scent. Pine and fire and the specific warmth underneath both that her body had learned to associate with the only safe place she had ever known.

The next thing that registered was it was dark and took a moment for her wolf eyes to adjust.

"Maddox?"

"Fuck."

His mouth was on hers before the word had finished leaving his lips. The kiss was deep and desperate and tasted like relief so total it had a flavor. His lips pulled heat from hers. Literal heat. The burning inside her body migrated toward every point of contact between them, flowing out of her and into him, and the relief was so immediate that a sound escaped her throat that was closer to a sob than a moan.

Her fingers went into his hair. More heat bled from her hands into his scalp, and the sparks that came with skin contact fired between them, and the combined sensation of the pain leaving and the current arriving was so overwhelming that she pressed harder into the kiss because stopping felt like dying.

He pulled away just enough to speak on her lips. "I love you. So goddamn much."

The words landed in the center of her chest and stayed there. She had never said them before, and outside of her mother, she’d never heard them before.

The closest they had come was his body and his hands and the way he held her after, and the vows he had spoken in a language she did not know, and the ring forged from his own scale.

"I love you too, Maddox." She swallowed the lump at the back of her throat. Her eyes were burning. "I missed you."

More emotion came out behind those words without her meaning for it to. Taking his flame was so painful. All of it bled through, and Maddox heard every ounce of it because the matebond, damaged and muffled as it was, carried the weight of what she could not say.

He pressed his forehead to hers, both of them breathing into the space between their mouths, and for three seconds in a dungeon that smelled like iron and old stone, nothing existed except the two of them and the heat flowing out of her and into him and the fact that they were both alive.

"Where are we?"

"Kael’s dungeon. How did you get here, Gwen?"

She opened her mouth to answer. The dungeon door groaned open at the end of the corridor.

Footsteps. Two sets. Heavy. Armored. Moving with the unhurried pace of guards on a routine check.

Maddox’s hand came to the back of her head. His mouth was at her ear, his voice pitched below a whisper.

"Close your eyes. Don’t look until I say, no matter what you hear. Understood?"

Gwen nodded once. She closed her eyes.

"Good girl." He kissed her again. Then his hands moved, lifting her off his lap and setting her against the wall beside him. He guided her head down onto his shoulder, angling her face away from the corridor so she looked unconscious.

The footsteps grew louder. Torchlight bled through her closed eyelids. Keys scraped against iron.

The cell door swung open.

Maddox was beside her one second. The next, he was air.

The heat slammed back into her the instant his skin left hers. Every degree he had pulled from her body returned in a wave that made her muscles lock. Her wolf bristled under her ribs, alert and pacing.

She heard the first guard make a sound. Wet. Short. The kind of sound that happened when air tried to leave lungs that no longer had the architecture to hold it. A body part hit the stone floor, followed by a body, and she didn’t want to know.

The second guard inhaled to shout. The shout became a crack. Then nothing. The specific nothing that followed the end of something alive.

Chains. She heard chains moving. The sound of iron being tested and then the sound of iron losing an argument. A snap. Metal on stone. His wrists were free.

Then his hands were on her.

He pulled her up so fast she did not register the transition between sitting and standing. "Wrap your legs around me, baby."

She did. Her arms locked around his neck. Her legs cinched around his waist. One of his arms came under her, locking her against his chest. The other was free. She could feel the tension in his shoulder that meant it was occupied.

"Keep your eyes closed."

He moved.

The speed of him was beyond anything she had prepared for. Wind displaced against her face as scents blurred past. His boots hit the ground in a rhythm that should not have been possible for a man who had been chained ten seconds ago, each footfall driving forward with the specific force of a dragon king whose body remembered what it was built for and was finished being caged.

A shout echoed ahead of them. "The prisoner is—"

The shout stopped. The sound that replaced it was brief and conclusive.

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