Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King novel Chapter 99

Chapter 99: Half A Second. Both Choices Were Her.

Maddox rotated mid-air, arms still locked around Guinevere.

His back hit stone twenty feet from where they’d been standing, breaking her fall. Both decisions, the rotation and the grip, had been made in the same half-second and neither had been optional.

His ears rang with a pitch that swallowed every other sound. Every person in the ballroom was on the floor. Flat. Pinned. The gold in the hall flickered to darkness, like a snuffed candle except for one woman who was currently on top of Maddox and probably had no idea she was still lit.

"Are you okay, baby?" Maddox pressed his mouth to her ear and kissed it. "I won’t let anything hurt you."

She didn’t answer. Her hands found his arms where they were locked around her and held on like they were the only architecture left standing.

The pressure hit next, heavier than gravity, pressing five hundred bodies into the stone like a god had put its palm on the room and pushed. His ribs groaned and not from Guinevere. His arms were lead, but still around her.

Then out of his peripheral vision, he saw the silhouette of the body. It was still vertical. It had never fallen.

Dead men don’t stand. That was a rule. Biology, gravity, and every god who had ever bothered writing the laws of the physical world had agreed on this.

It stood there holding its own head like a man adjusting a helmet. The fingers found the gaping neck, pressed down, and shoved until bone met bone with a grinding crunch that made three people gag. When the eyes opened, they were solid black and looking directly at Guinevere.

A long, midnight-black tongue slid out of its mouth, split at the tip, flicking and tasting the air. A few women screamed. Either from the reattachment or the tongue. Maddox wasn’t sure. He also wasn’t judging. He wanted to scream too.

Maddox rolled, pinning Guinevere beneath him so his body covered hers. The pressure increased. The temperature dropped. Fast. The kind of cold that has nothing to do with weather and everything to do with what just entered the room.

Sound came from the mouth. Multiple voices overlapped, speaking the same words at the same time.

"More of us. In this hall. In your walls."

"Wonderful. A nursery rhyme," Kael muttered from somewhere to his left.

The voices chanted louder.

"Kingdoms burn and kingdoms fall. Who’s the traitor in the hall? One is lying. One pretends. Three will break before the end."

The smile stretched wider than natural.

"All five have started your clock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock."

The face glitched in jerky motions.

"Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick."

What happened next was instinct. Collective. Simultaneous. From the floor, Maddox forced his arm up, against the weight of whatever was pressing down on them.

He was not alone. Ryker, Sterling, Kael, all of his men, and dragon lords did the same in unison.

Flames of different colors hit the thing from at least twenty-five different angles.

Dozens of shrieks poured out of the body at once. Overlapping. Clawing over each other like rats in a burning wall. The sounds were the sounds of whatever had been living inside that shell being evicted by force.

Then the screaming stopped. All at once. The body fell. It should have been cremated. It wasn’t.

The weight vanished from the room. Every chest expanded at the same time. Five hundred simultaneous gasps that sounded like a hall learning how to breathe again.

Maddox pressed a kiss to her forehead. "Stay here, baby. Don’t move."

He pushed himself up and took inventory. The room was wreckage. Lords groaning. Elders on the floor. Guards scrambling for weapons that had been pinned to the stone seconds ago.

"Mages on guard until Jaxon arrives. No one touches it. Guards on every exit. This hall is sealed until further notice."

The body lay where it fell. The head was still attached, which felt like a personal insult given the effort Maddox had put into removing it. Smoke curled from the remains in thin black threads that moved against the air currents instead of with them.

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