Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 363

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.

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