Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 371

Chapter 371: Damn. Wait. How.

Kael looked at Brennan the way a man looks at his dog when it solves a puzzle that was supposed to be above its skill level. Damn. Wait. How. That’s suspicious. Now I’m a little offended.

"He’s correct." He turned his token between his fingers. "We came to that conclusion. One caster did a sloppy job with the first layer. Quick, blunt, designed to create immediate hostility. A second caster did something astronomically more complicated with the Mirrorlock. Different skill levels. Different objectives. The first was a hired hand. Amateur Hour. The second had motivation and was a professional."

Ryker gave a nod and slid a token into the pile.

"I’m not the magic guy. The Mirrorlock’s goal was to block their matebond. Solveil said he healed Guinevere and Maddox on Diplomat Row. Their matebond was unblocked. Twelve hours later their matebond was blocked again, except this time it wasn’t just Maddox. It was all—" He stopped mid-sentence, choosing his words carefully. "All the matebonds were blocked. Poof. Memories gone too. The whole point of a failsafe is that it triggers when the first plan failed."

Ryker set another token down flat, pressing it into the obsidian with his thumb.

Kael looked at Blair. Blair looked back. The siblings held the stare for two seconds, and the exchange carried the mutual understanding that whatever they were about to untangle was going to get worse before it got anywhere near better.

"That tracks," Kael said. "Maddox was receiving the symptoms from whatever was inside Guinevere’s mind so everyone assumed it was in Maddox. Logical assumption. Wrong assumption. It was inside her."

He placed his token in the center beside Blair’s.

"Which means whoever built this understood how a dragon matebond functions. The flame recognition. The sensory bridge. The instinct architecture. The dragon shift even. They knew how to sever every thread connecting a mated pair without killing either half." His eyes swept the table. "That’s a very short list of people on any continent. And most of them are dead."

Silence held the room like a closed fist as the words ’most of them are dead’ echoed in everyone’s minds. Comforting, really.

"So to summarize," Brennan said. "We’re looking for a dark caster who understands dragon matebonds, Failsafe and Mirrorlock architecture, AND had access to Maddox at the right time."

"Yes," Kael said.

"And this person is alive?"

The question hung there, and every person in the room felt the specific gravity of being hunted by someone they couldn’t identify, couldn’t locate, and couldn’t outthink, because outthinking requires understanding the opponent’s architecture, and this opponent had already proven they understood theirs first. The caster knew how dragon matebonds worked. Knew Mirrorlock construction. That wasn’t a criminal. That was an engineer who had been inside the machine, and the machine was Maddox, and the machine was Guinevere, and neither of them had ever felt the hands.

"Presumably alive," Kael replied.

More silence followed. The kind that suggested the comfort level in the room was somewhere between "spider you lost track of" and "the stove might still be on but your house is an hour away."

Blair slid another token into the center of the table.

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