Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 360

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.

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