Draconic command should have made everyone stop. It didn’t.

As soon as Ryker put her down, she sprinted without looking back at Maddox. The problem was the ballroom was dark and she was glowing like a beacon. The worst tactical retreat in the history of retreats. Every eye in the room was on her. Including his. Especially his.

A Draconic command was supposed to have a one hundred percent success rate across dragons and wolves. She was the exception. Naturally.

He didn’t want to use it on her at all. It was the equivalent of pulling rank on the person you were trying to impress. Bad form. Terrible optics. He was doing it anyway because this wasn’t right. Something had her rattled.

"Guinevere. Stop. Look at me."

She stopped, muscles locking, then turned to look at him. The crowd parted immediately. And the only thing Maddox could hear was his own pulse and his dragon saying one word on repeat like a war drum that had found its rhythm and refused to stop.

Gold flickered in his vision. Instead of pushing flame, he called for it from her. Something he had never done before but knew what it was in theory. It came.

Her already glowing hair got brighter, her skin mirroring in answer. Her right hand rose. She did not raise it. The motion belonged to the fire, not the woman. When her fingers opened, a single orb of gold flame floated above her palm, rotating slowly.

Maddox stood perfectly still while every assumption he’d made about this woman collapsed in sequence. The heat he’d dismissed. The pull he’d blamed on her avoiding him. His dragon saying ’mine’ and him telling it to shut up. He’d had every piece.

It took five days for him to trust his instincts, but he’d had the answer since diplomat row. He’d been too busy being charming to read it. Outstanding work, Commander.

The ballroom went dead silent. Five hundred people. Zero sound. Every dragon understood what this meant.

Good. At least someone in this room understood. He’d been the last to figure it out and he was the one it was happening to.

Maddox’s dragon slammed against his ribs with bruising force, the beast roaring.

Mine. Take her from here.

Then whispers erupted.

"The Wolf Princess..."

"That’s the Dragon King’s flame."

"I told you."

Her eyes changed from green to gold in answer. Her hair lifted off her body, floating like she was underwater.

Beautiful. Terrifying. The visual equivalent of watching a woman sleepwalk off a cliff and sprout wings halfway down. He was in love. He was also in trouble. Both were accelerating.

That’s when the orb in her palm exploded upward, hitting the ballroom ceiling as a roaring pillar of gold. It looked like she was holding a tall cylinder of Maddox’s flame in her palm.

Externally, he didn’t move. The Dragon King showing shock in front of five hundred nobles was a headline. The Dragon King showing shock to his mate and scaring her was a bigger problem.

But he had called for a spark. She had answered with a pillar. The match-to-forest-fire ratio was concerning.

Someone whispered "gods" and it traveled through the crowd like a ripple.

Half the ballroom stepped back, a few glasses shattering in the process. The other half couldn’t move. The division was roughly split between those who understood what they were seeing and those who were still processing.

By sunrise the knives would be out. Some aimed at her, some at Maddox. They would get over it.

A Thornvale lord whispered to his wife. "The Drakencrest elders look like they swallowed their own teeth."

"They knew."

"Of course they knew. Look at Varro’s face. That’s not surprise. That’s a man watching his cover story die in public."

Maddox ignored the whispers. The elders always looked like that. What had his attention was the ceiling had ignited with a constellation pattern. Runes blazed across the walls and pillars. The floor lit with the same gold runes in answer. He’d never seen his Keep do this.

He met her eyes across thirty feet of stone floor, and the expression on her face was the expression of a woman whose secret had just announced itself to a room full of witnesses and she looked upset. Like this was all her fault and the thing she had been worried about.

Then it clicked.

Scared. She was scared of his flame. Wolves didn’t understand how this worked and she thought something was wrong. Completely out of her depth. Fucking adorable. He would teach her. And he was looking forward to every lesson.

The classroom was his chambers. Enrollment was mandatory. Tuition was a drink she’d been refusing him all week.

Maddox watched his flame spread across the room. Around lords. Around ladies. Around elders who had watched him train with this fire since he was a boy. He wasn’t controlling it. She was. And the level of control she was demonstrating without training or even understanding what she was doing, exceeded anything he’d been able to do. Outstanding. Humbling. He was never telling anyone.

Her expression hadn’t changed. The gap between what she thought was happening and what was actually happening was the funniest and most painful thing he’d witnessed all evening, and the evening had included being ranked last on a scoreboard. The woman casually conducting a king’s flame with the precision of a master, wearing the face of someone who had accidentally knocked over a vase.

He was the Dragon King. She was embarrassing him. He was falling harder for her. All three were happening simultaneously and he was handling none of them well.

Dragon lords went quiet as gold wrapped their skin. The rest of the room went loud.

"They’ve had a flame-bearer in their Keep and they put her in a flight trial," a visiting lord said. "A flight trial. Like she was a recruit."

To be fair, even if she were a flame bearer, she’d need to learn how to ride. But up until right now, she had been a symbolic recruit. A princess from another kingdom would never be put in actual battle.

An Ashwick elder turned to the man beside him. "Wolf. They called her a wolf. Does that look like a wolf to you?" He pointed at the pillar of gold, the glowing runes, the flame wrapped around five hundred people.

Every lord in this room was doing alliance math. Every single woman was doing murder math. Every visiting elder was doing political math. He could see the calculations behind their eyes.

Every single calculation was wrong because every single calculation was missing one variable: she was already his.

"A wolf princess. From Nyros. Holding the Drakencrest flame." A Thornvale elder counted each fact on his fingers. "One of those facts is a lie. My gold is on her being a wolf."

"We saw her shift, you senile relic. That was how she set the record."

"A wolf dragon combination. Who would have thought."

Maddox rolled his eyes at the staggering observation. The elders had thought. The ceiling had thought. Everyone had goddamn thought.

The elders were going to argue about her bloodline for months. They were going to commission studies. Request archives. Hold votes. Subcommittees.

He was going to skip all of it by marking her tonight. Bureaucracy solved.

The decision had been made somewhere between the staircase and the scoreboard and the dance and the glow and it was no longer a question. His lords could argue. His brother could crush every glass in Velkaris. None of it was going to change what was about to happen.

She was his mate. His flame knew it. His dragon knew it. His body knew it. His brain had finally caught up. And the brain was done being last.

Lord Voss was standing very still in the back of the hall, arms crossed.

The lord beside him leaned over. "Wasn’t that the woman you invited to fly with you?"

"Shut up."

"The Dragon King’s fated mate. You invited her to press against you."

"I said shut up."

"Your wife is going to love this story."