Ryker looked at Sterling. Sterling looked back. The unspoken conversation was short: you go. No, you go. I’m not going. I’m not going either. Someone should go. Not me.

Kael threw a feint. Maddox didn’t bite. Maddox threw the same feint. Kael didn’t bite. They reset. Tried again. Same feint. Same non-reaction. Somewhere their father’s ghost was either laughing or taking credit.

"You hit like our father."

"You fight like you take a piss sitting down."

"Stop aiming for my face."

"Stop having a face worth aiming at."

"I hope that hurt."

"It didn’t."

"You’re limping."

"Stylistic choice."

In unison, they grabbed each other, falling to the floor, and rolled.

"I’m going to kill you."

"You’ve been saying that for twenty minutes. I’m still here."

"I’m building to it."

"Build faster."

"Stay the fuck down."

"Make me."

"I’ve made you. Twice."

"And yet I keep getting up. Must be frustrating."

"You have no idea."

"Are they always like this?" a visiting lady whispered.

"Last time involved a table, four chairs, and a chandelier," an elder answered from across the hall. "The chandelier lost."

From the floor, both heads snapped to the elder simultaneously. "That was fifteen years ago," they said together.

Their heads snapped back to each other, wearing matching looks of hatred. They separated, stood, and resumed circling like the interruption had been a commercial break. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

"Private room. Both of you." Ryker’s voice carried across the gallery from somewhere behind Maddox.

Somewhere in front of him, Kael still had teeth. One of those problems was getting solved first.

Kael swung first. Maddox caught it. Maddox swung second. Kael didn’t catch it. The scoreboard updated.

"I just pardoned you. This is how you repay me?"

"You tackled my mate. We’re even, little brother."

"She’s MY mate."

"Does she know that? Before you TACKLED her and marked her."

"You punched your king."

"You headbutted your Fourth."

"You deserved it."

"So did you."

Kael drove his shoulder into Maddox’s ribs. They hit a display case together. More pottery died. A candelabra fell between them. Both caught it. Both pulled. The candelabra snapped in half.

They found their feet at the same time, each clutching their half. The circling continued.

Ryker inserted himself between and shoved them apart with both arms.

"Enough." His voice carried the specific exhaustion of a High General who had been managing one crisis per hour since sundown. "Kael. Take a walk. Come back when your face stops bleeding."

"I’m staying." Kael wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. His feet were planted. His jaw was set. "I’m staying right here."

"Kael—"

"I said I’m staying, Ryker. I’m not leaving her."

The words landed with enough weight to bend the silence around them. His brother refused to leave her. In front of Maddox. After lying to him. After punching him. After Maddox had marked her. The audacity was so total it almost circled back to admirable. Almost. It didn’t make it.

Ryker looked at Sterling. Sterling looked at the most consulted advisor in the Keep: the ceiling.

Maddox turned.

Blair was on the ground beside Guinevere, hands hovering over her face, her bruised throat still purple from the chain. Griffin was crouched on her other side, already sliding his arms under her back and knees, preparing to lift.

"No." The growl that left Maddox’s chest made every dragon in the gallery go still. "Don’t touch her."

Griffin froze mid-lift. His arms stayed where they were, suspended beneath a woman he was suddenly terrified to hold. His eyes went to Ryker for instruction. Ryker gave him none. Griffin slowly retracted his arms, palms up, performing the universal gesture of a large man who valued his limbs and planned to keep all four of them attached.

Maddox crossed the distance in three strides and gathered her off the stone himself. One arm under her knees, one cradling her back, the motion so precise and fast that his body had clearly rehearsed this in a life he couldn’t remember. Her head fell against the crook of his neck, white hair spilling over his arm, still glowing faintly.

He stood. Turned to face the hall. Five hundred people. Zero sound.

"War room. Now."

The people it was meant for knew who they were. He walked through the crowd carrying an unconscious princess in crimson, then paused and turned his head towards a cluster of elders who had been frozen in place since the headbutt.

"Deal with this."

He meant the crowd. The chaos. The overturned tables, shattered glass, and the lords who were already composing the letters they would send by morning. All of it. Every last piece of wreckage this evening had produced.

They didn’t argue. Every one of them would rather be anywhere in the Keep that wasn’t a war room with Maddox right now. Cassia pivoted towards the nearest cluster of guests with the diplomatic smile of a woman who would rather manage five hundred panicking nobles than spend one more minute in the blast radius of the Dragon King’s evening.

That’s when Maddox clocked how everyone was looking at him. Ryker. Sterling. Blair. Kael. Jaxon. Lux. Griffin. All of them watching him like a man who had risen from the dead and they were relieved he was alive.

"WHAT?" he snapped, thoroughly annoyed.

Nobody answered, but every single one of them started moving toward the war room at the exact same time, like a herd that had rehearsed the retreat.

"Are you bringing her too?" Sterling asked, his confusion genuine enough to be insulting.

Maddox stopped walking. Everyone froze behind him. He turned his head slowly. Looked at Sterling the way a king looks at a man who has just used his last good question on the worst possible sentence.

"Where exactly would I put her, Sterling? On a shelf? In a cupboard? Perhaps I’ll leave the unconscious woman I just marked in a hallway and hope for the best. Maybe prop her against a pillar with a note that says ’back in ten.’ Does that sound like a plan to you?"

Sterling’s jaw tightened. He wisely chose silence. The man who had made Guinevere stutter was learning, in real time, which battles to abandon.

Ryker pinched the bridge of his nose. The gesture was becoming a permanent fixture of his evening, a reflex so practiced it had likely developed its own muscle memory sometime around the nursery rhyme.

"Maddox," Blair said carefully, matching his stride, her voice landing in the specific register she used when she was about to say something reasonable that he was going to hate. "Why don’t you let her lie down somewhere comfortable while we—"

"No." He adjusted Guinevere against his chest, pulling her closer until her breath was warm against his collarbone. "She’s mine. Nobody is taking her from me. She goes where I go."

Blair opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at Ryker for backup. Ryker shook his head once, the minimal motion of a man conserving energy for the war room and choosing to spend zero of it on an argument he had already calculated would fail.

They followed him through the corridors in silence. Ryker first, then Sterling, then Kael with blood still running from his nose, then Jaxon and Lux, then Blair and Griffin. Single file. Measured steps. The exact formation of people walking behind a man they were afraid to reason with and too loyal to abandon.

The procession moved through the Keep with all the warmth and energy of a funeral march, save for the bride being alive, the groom being homicidal, and one of the groomsmen having just been punched in the face by the groom.

Twice.