Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 89

Chapter 89: There’s Nothing Quite Like Being Seen

There is a specific distance a woman walks after saying goodbye to a man she doesn’t want to lose before the composure gives out.

Four corridors. Two staircases. One door she didn’t remember opening.

She found herself in a sitting room. Two chairs. A cold hearth. An unused fireplace. The kind of room that existed in every castle for no clear purpose because an architect a thousand years ago needed to fill a corner.

She closed the door behind her and let the tears fall. She wasn’t sure how long it had been. She stared at a dusty mantel seeing nothing.

The mantel stared back with the indifference of furniture that had witnessed centuries of people having emotional breakdowns in this room because they thought it was private.

The tears had no right to be there. Nicholas was doing what a king was supposed to do, and the grief sitting behind her ribs was unearned, selfish, and wrong.

Maybe it was the wolf in her. Maybe it was the homesickness that had been building since the day she arrived, the ache for a place that spoke her language even when that place had never been kind to her.

Missing a place that hurt you was a particular brand of stupid that only wolves understood, and her wolf understood it fluently.

"Guinevere," Kael said in the doorway.

She startled at her name, but did not turn. "This isn’t the best time right now, Kael."

Of all the people in this Keep, the man who found her secret crying room was Kael Ashenvale.

Kael entered the room fully, because of course he did. He closed the door behind him softly.

Boundaries were a concept he understood intellectually and ignored intentionally.

"Guinevere, look at me."

He said it the way he said most things. Like a command wrapped in a suggestion dipped in audacity.

Looking at him would mean showing him her face, and her face was currently committing treason against her dignity.

She kept her face toward the cold hearth.

"Is it because the wolf king is leaving?"

The question was as subtle as a brick through a window. Classic Kael.

She didn’t answer right away. Her breath came in slow, controlled, the measured cadence of a woman deciding how much truth a room could hold.

"I have never felt less welcome," she said, "than I have since arriving here."

She heard herself say it and immediately wanted to retract it, because saying it out loud gave it a weight she had been carefully avoiding.

Kael took one of the two chairs by the cold hearth and settled into it with ease.

"The day I found you in the forest." His voice shifted into a lower register. "Was that your first day here?"

She nodded, wiping her eyes, not looking at him.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify