Chapter 48: Big-Dicking In Another King’s War Room

Nicholas had been feeling her die for thirty hours.

The pain was brutal, but the worst of it wasn’t the pain. It was her fear and adrenaline flooding into his chest without context like a fist closing around his lungs at random intervals.

Her anguish was his anguish, and he was powerless to help her. If she were his actual mate, he would have been able to do something. But instead, he was sailing across an ocean to try to rescue a woman he’d only met once. He knew in his bones this was the right thing to do, and he had already decided there was no length he wouldn’t go for her.

So when he stated that she was in pain to the dragon king, and Maddox didn’t even blink, Nicholas knew he was being lied to.

"Her agony reached me across an ocean," Nicholas continued. "So excruciating it forced me out of my shift."

Across the table, Maddox held his expression perfectly still, leaning back in his chair, and took a slow sip of whiskey, as if Nicholas had spoken about the weather.

It was a performance, a convincing one. Because behind it, Maddox Drakencrest was unraveling.

He had thought Nicholas was mistaken about having a fated matebond with Guinevere. It was just a negotiating tool deployed by a king who wanted leverage, or an honest miscalculation of proximity and adrenaline in a crowded throne room.

But the man sitting across from him had felt her merge with flame. That meant it was real.

His dragon rumbled low in his chest. Deep. Territorial.

Ours. Mate. Break it with the wolf.

Maddox silently agreed with every word. But he gave Nicholas no reaction.

"She merged with my flame," Maddox said. "It’s one of the most painful things a mate can undergo. I was in battle when it happened. Had I known she was going to attempt it, I would have put a stop to it." He paused, choosing his words carefully. "It will take a few days for the pain to fully dissipate."

Nicholas took a sip of his whiskey. He held the glass at his lips for a half-second longer than necessary, studying Maddox over the rim with a quiet patience.

He set the glass down.

"I believe you on the flame merge. But that is also not the only pain she’s been in."

Maddox’s expression held perfectly still.

"Her hand and ribs were broken. The day after the auction, her fear hit me first, then the pain. Right hand. Three ribs on the left side. And something happened to her neck, I’m assuming strangulation." Nicholas’s amber eyes locked onto Maddox’s gold.

The silence that followed was the kind that filled rooms from the floor up.

Maddox held Nicholas’s gaze. Every muscle in his body was engaged in the act of holding still, because the information Nicholas had just delivered was a blade, and the blade was pointed at him, and the accusation beneath it was clear.

Nicholas thought it was Maddox.

The realization landed, and with it came a fury so cold it bypassed heat entirely. The wolf king across the table had sailed thousands of miles because he believed Guinevere’s husband was hurting her. He had walked into a room full of dragons because he thought the man who bought her at auction was the man breaking her bones.

Maddox could correct him. He could explain the hand around her throat that had left bruises Maddox had kissed in the dark while she slept. He could give Nicholas the full picture and watch the accusation evaporate and be replaced by something more complicated and less useful.

He did none of those things.

"My wife’s safety is my responsibility. I take it seriously."

"That is a politician’s answer, Drakencrest. I asked a soldier’s question."

"You asked a question about a woman who belongs to my house, carries my flame, and sleeps in my bed. The answer I gave you is the answer you are going to receive."

Nicholas leaned forward. His amber eyes had gone full wolf, the gold bleeding outward until the whites were nearly gone.

"If I discover that the injuries I felt through our matebond came from you, or from anyone under your command, there will be no ocean wide enough to make that conversation diplomatic."

"Our matebond." Maddox repeated the words. "You sailed here on the strength of a matebond with my wife, who wears my mark because biology gave you a thread. I have the chain, Shadowfell. The thread is yours to manage."

Nicholas’s glass cracked in his hand. The whiskey ran through the fractures and pooled on the table. He did not look at it.

"A thread." His voice was very quiet. "Can you tell what she’s feeling right now, in this moment, Drakencrest? Because I can."

The question landed where Nicholas intended it to land: directly on the matebond that had gone dark.

Maddox had felt nothing since the fae took her. The absence sat behind his sternum, a void where her heartbeat used to be, and Nicholas Shadowfell had just pressed his thumb into it in front of witnesses and asked him to defend it.

He did not answer. The refusal to answer was its own answer, and everyone in the room knew it.

"I’ll save you the trouble," Nicholas said. "She had a panic attack yesterday. I felt it in my ribs, and lungs. She was running for her life. This morning it was absolute terror. She’s in distress and I can’t tell why."

Maddox’s throat bobbed. The only tell he gave.

Nicholas dropped his voice low. "Her wolf is dying. If the wolf dies, the person dies with it. My wolf feels hers fading."

He stood slowly, and placed both hands on the table, leaning forward. "If she were in this Keep, my wolf would have also sensed it. She’s not here. Am I wrong, Drakencrest?"

The room recalibrated. Ryker’s arms uncrossed by an inch. Sterling’s chin lifted a fraction. Both of them watching Maddox for the signal that determined whether this conversation continued with whiskey or with fire.

Maddox did not give it. He held Nicholas’s gaze across the table, across the cracked glass and the pooling whiskey and the silence that was doing more damage than any word either of them had spoken.

Nicholas was right. His wolf had entered the Keep and scanned for hers and found nothing. The absence was data, and the wolf king had just laid it on the table beside the broken glass with the quiet confidence of a man who had been solving this equation since he walked through the door.

Maddox could lie. He could say she was in the healing ward, sedated, behind silver-laced walls that suppressed wolf signatures.

He chose a different door.

"No. You are correct. She is not in this Keep."

Nicholas’s expression did not change. The confirmation landed on a conclusion he had already reached, and the only thing it added was the weight of hearing it spoken aloud by the man responsible.

"Where?"

"Taken. During a battle. Fae portals opened across the field, and she was pulled through one before my men could reach her."

"How long ago?"

"Twelve hours."

Nicholas absorbed the number. Twelve hours. Twelve hours of his matebond feeding him her fear, her fever, her panic, her tears, while the man across the table poured whiskey and played dumb and tried to manage the conversation into a shape that concealed it.

"In battle." He repeated it slowly, eyes darkening. "Why would she be in battle?"

"We were ambushed."

Nicholas inhaled through his nose sharply and didn’t say what he wanted to.

Maddox understood, because it was the thing he was feeling too. He didn’t want her in battle either.

"Do you know her location?"

"We’ve narrowed it down and are working on it."

"Working on it?"

"Yes."

Nicholas tasted the word the way a man tastes poison he has been handed politely. "The seizures. Was that before or after?"

"How do you know she was seizing?" Ryker asked, genuinely perplexed.

Nicholas’s eyes narrowed. "Because I felt her body convulse through the matebond for eleven minutes straight while I was on a ship in the middle of the ocean with nothing to do except count the seconds and memorize the pattern. It happened three times."

Maddox stared at him. The dragon in his chest was snarling, territorial fury pressing against the inside of his ribs, demanding that he remove the wolf, burn the claim, reassert dominance over a situation that had slipped past dominance three sentences ago.

The strategist and husband in him was doing different math.

"How close do you need to be to sense her?"

"I can determine intensity," Nicholas answered. "The closer I am, the louder the signal. It operates on proximity."

Maddox’s dragon hated every syllable of what he was about to say.

Sterling looked at Maddox. The look carried the specific weight of a man who had already done the math and was waiting for his Commander to arrive at the same answer.

Maddox arrived.

"You join the strike team. You guide. Sterling commands. My men extract her."

Nicholas inclined his head. "Done."

"You do not approach her or speak to her. When she is out and safe, my physician examines her first."

"And after?"

"After is mine to decide."

Nicholas held his gaze for three seconds. Then he nodded once. This was the best offer he would receive from the worst possible negotiating position, and he knew it.

"When do we leave?"

"Within the hour," Maddox said.

"Then I suggest we stop talking and start moving, Drakencrest. Because the matebond just told me her fever is climbing again, and whatever was helping her stopped."

He walked out, his Beta following.

The war chamber held three men and the silence that follows conversations where both sides won exactly enough to guarantee the next conversation would be worse.

Ryker spoke first. "I hate him."

Sterling considered. "He’s effective."

Maddox stood at the head of the cracked table.

"Get her back. Before the wolf does it for us."