Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 46

Chapter 46: Don’t Cry. Fuck.

Her gasp woke him.

Kael’s eyes opened to a woman with her hand clamped over her mouth, her body rigid against his.

"Good mor—"

She launched off him, her back hitting the opposite wall of the cave, arms wrapped around herself. She glanced down. Undergarments. Then she looked back at him. Briefs gone, everything visible.

Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened. No sound came out.

Then the tears started.

They came fast and silent, the kind that didn’t ask permission, spilling down both cheeks in lines that caught the dim light from the cave mouth. Her hand stayed over her mouth. Her shoulders shook. Her breathing fractured into short, shallow pulls that weren’t getting oxygen anywhere useful.

Kael sat up. He had managed wars, rebellions, a fae mutiny, and one memorable assassination attempt involving a poisoned harp. He had never managed a crying woman.

"Okay. That’s... happening." He pushed himself to sitting. "Let me—"

A sob broke through her hand. Loud. Raw. The sound of a heart breaking in real time.

"—explain. I was going to say explain. Can you—"

She crumpled and her forehead dropped to her knees. The sobs came harder, each one shaking her frame, her white hair falling around her in a curtain that hid everything except the sound.

"Right. So. This looks significantly worse than it is. I need you to understand that before—"

Her crying intensified. Every word he said was making it worse, which was a new experience for a man whose words had historically been his most reliable weapon.

He tried silence. That was also bad. The silence let her fill the cave with the kind of grief that made the stone walls feel too close.

"I have talked my way out of a treason hearing, two coups, and a very aggressive customs inspection in the southern reach. This should be within my range." He paused. "It is apparently outside of my range."

She lifted her head. Her face was red, wet, destroyed.

"What am I going to tell Maddox?"

The words came out broken. Fractured across hiccups and sobs and the specific kind of panic that lived in the chest of a woman who had woken up half naked beside a man who was not her mate and had arrived at the worst conclusion available.

Her breathing went from bad to worse. Shallow, rapid, her chest rising and falling in a rhythm that was headed toward hyperventilation with the momentum of a body that had already decided to panic and was committed to the decision.

"Nothing happened."

She couldn’t hear him. The panic had her. Her hands were shaking against her knees, her fingers white where they gripped, and each inhale was shorter than the last.

"Listen to me. You jumped through a fae portal. It opened into open sky over a mountain range I have never seen in my life. You were in freefall at fifteen hundred feet. I shifted, dove after you, and caught you in my claws."

He waited. She was still hyperventilating, but her eyes had found his face.

"Your fever was killing you. The gold flame inside you was eating you alive because the body that should have been absorbing the heat was five hundred miles away fighting a war I started. The only reason you are breathing this morning is because I pulled that fever into my own body through skin contact. That’s it. That is the entire story."

Her mouth opened. Closed. Her breathing was still too fast, still too shallow, but the rhythm had shifted by a fraction.

"I swear on my dragon that I did not touch you. You are a wolf, so you might not understand the significance of that oath. I will tell you: a dragon shifter who swears on his dragon is not lying." His iron eyes held hers without blinking.

She stared at him, tears still falling and chest still heaving.

He reached for his briefs. Found them wadded against the cave wall where he had kicked them in the night. He pulled them on without ceremony, then picked up the remains of her fire suit and tossed it to her.

It landed in her lap. She grabbed it with both hands and pulled it on so fast she nearly tore what was left of the seams. Her fingers fumbled with the zipper three times before it caught. Her entire body was shaking, the tremor running from her hands through her arms and into her shoulders.

He stayed on his side of the cave, giving her every inch of distance the stone allowed.

"Is Maddox the only person you’ve been with?"

A hiccup. Her face crumpled. She didn’t answer, but the answer was written across her expression in a font large enough to read from orbit.

He exhaled. Something in his chest shifted, and it was the thing he had been ignoring since the mountain.

He moved to her slowly, then dropped to one knee in front of her. His iron eyes were level with her green ones.

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