Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 91

Chapter 91: Dice Roll In The Doorway

FUCKS GIVEN BY LUX NASH: Plenty, actually, which should terrify everyone.

MISSION STATUS: FAILED.

FIELD STATUS: All protocols abandoned.

WITNESSES: Estimated five hundred present at the Unity Gala.

RESPONSIBLE PARTIES: The Dragon King, Kael Ashenvale, & the Lunaris Princess.

In eight hours, every protocol established in this briefing will become irrelevant. The events that follow are classified. The signs were visible, but no one was watching.

But before we get there, let’s rewind to where it started.

Lux Nash had three rules. One: never lie about a prognosis. Two: never soften a diagnosis for the comfort of people who can’t handle it. Three: always bring wine, because delivering bad news sober was a waste of everyone’s time.

She stood at the head of the war room table in a kingdom that had once tried to arrest her, now leading a meeting with a piece of chalk in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. She had been up for three days with Jaxon trying to crack this.

She had drawn two circles on the table, one inside the other, with a question mark at the center.

"This," she said, tapping the outer circle with her chalk, "is your king’s brain."

Griffin leaned forward. "That’s a circle."

"Correct." She didn’t look at him. "Outer ring equals primary block. It’s gone. Buried it in a ditch and pissed on the grave. You’re welcome."

Jaxon pinched the bridge of his nose.

She tapped the inner circle.

"This is the secondary structure. The one I’ve been mapping for the last seventy-two hours. And I want everyone in this room to hear me clearly when I say this." She paused. Sipped her wine. Set it down. "It is the most sophisticated piece of dark magic I have ever encountered. In any text. On any continent. In any language I read, and I read eleven."

Griffin mouthed "eleven" to Ryker. Ryker did not mouth anything back.

"Twelve if you count bullshit," Lux continued. "There is no documented method for cracking this. I am still hunting. But I want the expectations in this room calibrated to reality instead of wishful thinking, because wishful thinking kills kings and I didn’t come here to lose a patient."

Sterling’s arms had been crossed so long that blood flow was now a theoretical concept.

"Define ’hunting.’"

"Reading," she answered flatly like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Now, that being said, the pattern I personally believe it’s following is called a Mirrorlock. Everything that I am about to tell you is based off my theory. Take it or leave it."

She pointed at the question mark.

"Mirrorlocks are a spell inside a spell inside a spell, each layer guarding something at the center. We don’t know what it is until we get there. Crack a single layer on its own, it grows two more layers. So you crack all of them at once or you don’t crack it at all."

The room absorbed that.

"Mirrorlocks are solvable," she added. "Not easy but possible. But, Mirrorlocks always have a failsafe that is designed to protect the true goal of the caster. A puzzle at the center of the Mirrorlock that I can’t see but could activate if the goal is threatened. If it activates, then we have a mousetrap-glued-to-a-landmine-duct-taped-to-your-king’s-prefrontal-cortex. Touch the cheese, lose the king."

Griffin raised his hand.

Ryker closed his eyes.

"Is it like a bomb?"

"Yes, Griffin. It is like a bomb. A very complicated, invisible bomb inside the skull of the most important man on this continent. Thank you for making that accessible for the group."

Griffin lowered his hand, satisfied.

Blair, seated beside Guinevere, crossed one leg over the other. "What does the failsafe do?"

"That is the question I can’t answer yet, and that is the question that should keep every person in this room awake tonight." Lux picked up her wine again. "Right now, it’s blocking three weeks of memory and a matebond. We aren’t sure if it’s because the matebond was activated in those three weeks, or if that is a coincidence."

Jaxon spoke for the first time. "The primary structure was designed for him to be hostile towards her, which would indicate that being the overarching goal of the dark magic."

"Or," Kael commented. "That is a clever little decoy, intentionally pulling us from what it’s actually trying to accomplish. You said the primary and secondary were cast by different casters, correct?"

"Correct," Lux confirmed. "It’s plausible that it is a decoy. Or that these two spells were unrelated and a bad case of timing. The first caster could’ve had a different goal than the second caster. We can’t know for sure until we crack it."

Kael let out a breath. "Either way, we mitigate risk. Her exposure to him is a variable we can manage."

Ryker looked at the ceiling. The ceiling had no answers.

Lux snapped the chalk in half. She placed one half on the left side of the circle and one on the right.

"Left side. We stay cautious. We feed him the story we’ve been feeding him, that we’re working on unblocking the memories, that the cause is still under investigation."

"Right side." She tapped the other half. "We tell him everything. It may or may not trigger the failsafe."

"If the failsafe is tied to the matebond," Jaxon added. "Then revealing it would trigger a cascade. Worst case, it spreads."

"Spreads where?" Blair’s voice was sharp.

"Into adjacent neural architecture," Jaxon replied. "Motor function. Decision-making. Identity. The dark magic is already sitting inside the structures that house memory and emotional processing. If the failsafe fires, it could eat into everything next to it."

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