Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 65

Chapter 65: Mate-Bombed Mid-Arson

Later, when they asked her how she set a man on fire without meaning to, she wouldn’t have an answer. But the screaming would still be in her ears.

The guard on the left smiled, and that was how Guinevere knew the evening had just been downgraded from dangerous to catastrophic. Guards who smiled at half-dead women in hallways were never delivering good news.

Guinevere reached for Maddox’s flame, pulling at something she had no technique for pulling, grabbing at a door she had never opened with hands that did not know the handle.

Nothing happened. Her stomach dropped. Noted. Wonderful. She had taken a king’s flame, survived a fever coma to keep it, and the thing wouldn’t even flicker when she needed it. Ten out of ten, would accept mystical dragon fire again.

The guard on the right moved first.

His hand closed around her throat before she had finished processing the failure. The grip was practiced, thumb on one side of the windpipe, four fingers on the other, the hold of a man who had done this to women before and knew the exact pressure that separated cooperation from unconsciousness.

Her boots left the ground. Her spine hit the stone wall behind her. Stars burst across her vision.

She called for her wolf.

The response was sluggish. Distant. Her wolf pressed forward, then stopped, the shift gathering at the edges of her body without breaking through.

She tried again. Harder. The shift stuttered, started, stalled. Her body was ready. Her wolf was willing. But the connection between the two would not fire.

She had shifted mid-freefall. FREEFALL. And now, pinned to a wall with a hand on her throat and a genuine reason to grow claws, her body decided this was the moment for a mechanical failure. Incredible. Truly.

"Who sent you?" she choked out through his grip.

The guard holding her leaned closer. "Nobody you’ll live long enough to thank. Stop fighting. Pass out. That’s all we need."

Three out of ten in delivery. She’d heard better threats from Cassian.

"She’s stalling," the other said. "Squeeze harder."

Stalling was the stupidest thing she’d heard all week. The rebuttal was right there. Fully formed. Devastating. Trapped behind a crushed windpipe. The injustice was staggering.

"I am squeezing. She won’t drop."

"Then squeeze until she does. We were told she folds fast."

His hand tightened brutally around her neck as her boots kicked uselessly against the stone. Black spots danced across her vision.

"We’re allowed to break her in before handover, right?"

Guinevere’s eyes widened. Disgust and terror flooded her as she tried to twist away, but the hand around her throat only squeezed harder. She wanted to scream, to vomit, to disappear but all she could do was choke on nothing.

Tears began to fall as black crept into the edges of her vision. Her fingers clawed at the hand around her neck with the coordination of a woman losing oxygen by the second.

Then, on the other side of the corridor she saw a blurred figure.

Kael. Standing. Watching. His iron eyes surged to Drakencrest gold.

When she blinked, he was gone.

Noted. Adding being murdered and orgasming to the list of things she’d now hallucinated while seeing this man.

That’s when her body ignited.

Gold fire erupted from her skin with no warning and no permission. The blaze tore outward from her chest, down her arms, across her hands, and into the man crushing her windpipe with the indiscriminate fury of a thing that had been caged and had decided on its own that the cage was finished.

His fingers released instantly and she fell to the floor coughing.

The scream that came out of him was inhuman. Gold fire ate through his gloves, his sleeves, his armor, spreading across his body with a speed that said it was hungry and had found exactly what it wanted. He staggered backward, arms flailing, flames crawling up his neck and into his hair.

He ran. The sound of his boots on stone was frantic and uneven, punctuated by screams that bounced off the corridor walls and came back louder. He hit one wall, then another, then the floor, rolling, and the fire did not care. It burned brighter with every attempt to smother it.

Guinevere gasped for air, her throat raw. Gold runes she had never seen before were glowing in the walls. The Keep had hidden runes. Of course it did. They were synchronized to a fire she couldn’t control, pouring out of a body that wouldn’t shift, in a corridor that smelled like burning flesh.

"Make it stop!" The second guard had his blade drawn, his eyes wide, his body pressed against the far wall. "Whatever you’re doing, stop it!"

She tried. She had no idea how. Stopping something she had never started was the opposite of a skill she possessed. She stared at her hands and willed the fire down, and the fire ignored her completely.

Get up. He is coming for us.

Can we shift?

No. I’m stuck.

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