Chapter 88: I’d Choose You Every Single Time

There is a specific way a man walks when he is carrying news that will hurt someone he loves. Nicholas was walking that way now.

Guinevere knew the walk, and she could feel it. He didn’t have to say it. His wolf was already mourning through the matebond before his mouth caught up.

"A relay arrived during the summit session. Ship-carried to the harbor, then wolf-run from the coast." His voice was steady. The voice of a man who had practiced this sentence at least twice on the walk here and was now delivering it like a field report because the alternative was delivering it like a man who didn’t want to leave. "Shadowfell’s eastern border has been hit. My people are under attack."

The words landed in her chest before they finished reaching her ears. Her wolf pressed forward, low and anxious, reading the grief through their matebond before her brain could process the language.

"You have to go back." She blinked once, hard, and the burn spread to her lashes, and then her vision blurred, and she was furious at herself for it because the grief she felt was irrational and selfish and she knew it.

Nicholas exhaled. He opened his mouth, then swallowed.

"Of course you do." Her voice held.

She pressed her hands flat against her thighs and held them there until the trembling transferred into her legs where he couldn’t see it. She was going to hold this together if it killed her.

He had a kingdom under siege. His people were bleeding. The weight of what he carried dwarfed the weight of what she was feeling, and she had absolutely zero right to stand here with wet eyes because a man she had known for a few days was doing exactly what a good king was supposed to do.

Her wolf disagreed wholeheartedly.

She swallowed it down. "When do you leave?"

"Right now."

Two words. Her lungs emptied. The air left her body like it had been summoned somewhere else. She looked at the ground because looking at him was going to break her.

"Thank you for coming here." Her voice dropped to something quieter. "For finding me."

The matebond carried her grief into his chest in a wave that his wolf absorbed and his body processed as pain.

"Guinevere. Look at me."

She lifted her chin, wearing a face he had seen in a jungle and a bathing chamber.

"Do you want to stay in Velkaris?"

The question arrived sideways. She blinked.

"At the moment," she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her gloved hand, "the experience hasn’t been ideal."

A laugh broke out of him. Genuine. The kind that started in his chest and reached his eyes, and for one second the king disappeared and the man was standing in his place, looking at a woman who could make him laugh while she was crying.

Her mouth twitched. The tiniest shift at the corner.

The laugh faded. His expression shifted into the one she had seen once in a bathing chamber, the one with the weight behind it, the one that communicated with absolute clarity that what he was about to say was going to be kind and that the kindness was going to cost her.

She braced. Kindness from Nicholas was more dangerous than cruelty from anyone else, and she had no defenses left.

He stepped forward and cupped her face with both hands. His palms were warm.

"I will come back for you." His thumbs traced the wetness beneath her eyes. "The moment Shadowfell’s border is secured, I am on a ship. Do you understand me?"

His voice cracked on the last word. Barely. A fracture so small it would have been invisible to anyone who wasn’t standing six inches from his mouth with his palms on her face. But she heard it. And the sound of Nicholas Shadowfell’s composure breaking, even by a millimeter, landed in her chest like a fist.

She nodded against his palms. The motion was small.

"It is safer for you here, Guinevere." He held her gaze. "Stay. Hold your ground. Give them hell."

He said it like a military order. She was fairly certain he meant it as one. Her wolf received it as a personal mandate and was already drafting a plan.

His mouth curved. The expression contained the specific brand of affection reserved for a woman who could be standing in the wreckage of her own life and still deliver a sentence that made him want to hold her and laugh at the same time.

He pulled her into his arms.

She went. The resistance lasted exactly zero seconds because she was exhausted and he was warm and her wolf settled against his the way a tide settles against a shore. Her forehead pressed into his chest. His chin rested on the top of her head, and her white hair caught the light the way it always did, shifting toward gold at the edges.

He was warm the way a hearth is warm. The kind of warm that made a person realize they had been cold for a very long time and had just stopped noticing.

"Going to your father’s dinner was the most random decision I have ever made." His voice was low, spoken into her hair, meant for her ears and no one else’s. "I almost left twice. Damon had the horses ready."

She was still against his chest.

"I stayed because I caught your scent from the corridor, and my wolf told me to sit down, and I listened because I had never heard him speak with that much certainty." His arms tightened around her. "Best decision I have ever made. I would make it again. Every single time, Guinevere, I would walk into that room if it meant I met you."

Her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt.

He pressed his lips to her forehead. The kiss was slow and deliberate, held for three full seconds, the kind of contact that a man offers when he is leaving and wants to make sure the woman he is leaving remembers what it felt like to be held by someone who would choose every time. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

Then he released her. Stepped back. His amber eyes were steady.

She wiped her eyes one more time. Straightened her shoulders. Lifted her chin.

"Go save your kingdom, Nicholas."

It was the bravest sentence she had ever constructed, and it tasted like swallowing glass, and she delivered it with a straight spine because she would rather die than let him leave with her falling apart as his last image.

"Go remind this one who you are." He held her gaze for one final second.