Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 37

Chapter 37: I Flew, Commander

The strange thing about dying was how small the world got.

Then the instinct arrived, the one every living thing recognizes, where the body tells the soul that they are about to pass.

She wanted to tell him she was sorry for doing it here, in his arms, where he would have to feel it happen and carry the memory of it for the rest of his very long life.

Somewhere far away, her muscles were shaking from holding her own body weight, which for a wolf should’ve been nothing. A sword clattered on the ground and one of Maddox’s arms came up to support her.

Air rushed past them with the sensation of being heavier. Maddox must have made a large jump.

Then she heard wings.

"You can open them."

She couldn’t.

Reality shrank until there was nothing left but his heartbeat and her breathing and the narrowing distance between each exhale.

And her last conscious thought was if this was the last thing she heard, then at least the world had gotten that part right.

✦✦✦

"Gwen. Baby. Stay with me."

She didn’t respond.

Maddox’s arms tightened around her. His dragon was fully recharged, thrumming under his skin with a heat and a fury that had no outlet, and the only reason he was riding instead of flying was to hold her.

Maddox: Sterling. I ordered Ryker and our army to return home. You are supposed to be in Drakencrest.

Sterling: Good to see you too.

Maddox: How the fuck are you here?

Sterling: I flew, Commander.

Maddox: How did Kael get his hands on my wife?

Sterling: He picked her up and carried her.

Maddox snorted internally. Sterling was about as informative as expected.

Unbeknownst to Maddox, Sterling just had the most stressful fourteen hours of his entire dragon life.

He had calculated the odds of finding her alive at nine percent.

The fact that he had wound up in the right place, at the right time, made him thank gods he did not believe in.

✦✦✦

Guinevere hadn’t moved.

Maddox held her against his chest with one arm locked beneath her and the other braced across her back. His chin rested on top of her head. Her white hair whipped behind them in the wind, catching the sunset, and he could smell vanilla and snow.

At her scent, his dragon rumbled in his chest, wanting to pin her down mid-air and fuck the fever out of her. Maddox clenched his jaw so hard he tasted blood. Not now. Not like this.

Three minutes into the flight, her breathing had gone shallow, each exhale faint and warm against his collarbone, but the rest of her body had not loosened at all. Arms still locked around his neck, fingers threaded through the hair at his nape, legs cinched around his waist with a strength that should have faded when consciousness did but hadn’t.

The hold was pure instinct, maintained by a wolf who had decided that this man was where they lived and was not releasing him for anything.

Heat drained from her body into his at every point of contact, and the relief that came with it was so profound it carried through in waves he could feel in his own chest.

Sterling banked east. The treeline dropped away beneath them, replaced by open valley, the terrain falling in cascading ridges of snow and dark stone.

The air thinned, temperature dropping, and she audibly groaned in relief. The sound was so obscene it had no business coming out of an unconscious woman. Two of Sterling’s scales rippled. Maddox’s hand went to her hair, pressing her face harder into his neck, as if burying the sound at the source would stop his body from responding to it. It did not.

Ten minutes passed in silence. Fifteen. The only sounds were Sterling’s wingbeats and the wind and the faint rhythm of her breathing against his throat.

Maddox’s dragon bristled under his skin. He turned his head.

Behind them, rising from the direction of Cinderfall Keep, a line of shadows cut across sunset. Wings. Dozens of them. The formation was tight, disciplined, moving at pursuit speed, and the distance between their position and Sterling’s tail was closing rapidly.

Maddox: We have company. Forty in the first wave.

Sterling was fast, but forty dragons in pursuit formation could run rotations, fresh wings replacing tired ones, and a black dragon carrying two passengers could only outrun that math for so long.

Sterling: Formation?

Maddox: V-pattern. Kael is at the lead. And he brought friends.

Maddox narrowed his eyes against the wind. The shapes on the dragons were wrong. Standard dragon riders sat low, hugging the neck, distributing weight for aerodynamics. These figures sat upright. Stiff. The air around their silhouettes was blurry, displaced not by wind but by something artificial.

Maddox: Dark fae are riding on dragons. I have never seen this configuration.

Sterling: Since when does Kael have Fae?

Fae on dragonback. Armed, trained, and augmenting dragon fire with something that smelled like burnt ozone and old blood. This was not a skirmish Kael had thrown together. This was a configuration that took months to develop, which meant Kael had been planning this war long before he walked into that throne room in chains and smiled.

Maddox: Apparently a while.

The first column of fire came from the lead dragon, passing thirty feet to their right, close enough that the displaced air rocked Maddox sideways and his arm cinched tighter around Guinevere.

"If you sleep through this too, Gwen, I am going to take it personally."

She made a sound against his neck, still unconscious. He pressed his lips to her temple.

Sterling dove. Maddox went light on his back, gravity pulling wrong, as the wind roared past them. He leveled out ten feet above the canopy, using the trees as visual cover.

A second column hit the forest behind them. Fire blossomed across the snow in a molten orange apocalypse, hissing on contact.

Not enough. Never enough. Mine.

Maddox: They are gaining. The fae are augmenting their range.

Sterling: How much time do we have, Commander?

Maddox: At this trajectory, four minutes before they close to striking distance. Three if the fae accelerate the volley rotation.

Maddox: I am putting her on your back.

Sterling: Understood.

Maddox: Don’t let anything happen to her, Sterling.

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