He shoved the dragon back. Hard. It was getting confused.
If she were his mate, which was highly unlikely given she was a wolf, the beast would have identified her imdiately. But it hadn’t in over five days.
He didn’t need a mystical explanation for wanting a woman this badly. He pressed a kiss to her ear, then to her neck, moving her hair aside.
That’s when he caught a faint trace of a mark on her neck. Right where her pulse was. Covered by her hair and makeup. It looked like a dragon mark yet not. Dragon-shaped with silver threads woven through it like moonlight on fla.
Rage arrived before logic. His blood went from hot to volcanic in under a second. Every thought in his head emptied except one: WHO. Who touched her. Who put their mouth on her neck. Who was breathing right now that shouldn’t be.
His dragon recoiled, then surged so hard he almost lost control of the beast.
Wrong. Not ours. Erase it.
Maddox pulled back just enough to look at her through gold-slitted eyes.
"What the fuck is that on your neck, Guinevere?" The words ca out as an accusation, a question, and a threat.
Her eyes widened. The glow in her hair stuttered for a second.
The question beca irrelevant because his lips were on it before she had a chance to answer and before he realized what he was doing.
A broken noise escaped her throat, slamming into him. Blood roared south, worse than before. He latched on harder with a bruising suction while his hips rolled once into her. He was two seconds away from losing control and fine with it.
Ryker appeared at his shoulder.
"Commander. A word."
Maddox did not turn his head. His hand stayed on her back. His voice wasn’t entirely his own anymore. The dragon was riding shotgun.
"Busy."
"It’s urgent, Maddox."
"Everything’s urgent. The world is on fire."
Sterling arrived from the opposite side, flanking him with the coordinated precision of two n who had practiced interventions before. "Maddox. We need to pull you out."
"You need to walk away from right now."
Kael materialized behind Guinevere, which was impressive given that Maddox had his hands on every escape route attached to her body. "Maddox. Let her go."
The geotry of a rescue operation disguised as a polite interruption. They were trying to save him from himself. He appreciated the effort. He was going to ignore it completely.
He pulled her fully flush against him, both arms locked around her. All three opened their mouths simultaneously.
"Commander—"
"Maddox—"
"Brother—"
Three n. Three unfinished sentences. One growl that buried all of them.
"Touch her, and we’re going to have a problem." His eyes moved from Ryker to Sterling to Kael with the asured calm of a dragon who was calculating which one to burn first.
Ryker raised both hands. "Maddox, we’re talking to you. It’s not about her."
Guinevere shifted against him. He felt it, the careful, practiced movent of a woman trying to create distance without creating a scene.
"Commander, I should let you get back to your summit."
His arms tightened. The reaction was involuntary, muscular, the reflex of a body that had registered the first sign of retreat and rejected it at a cellular level.
He lowered his mouth to her ear. The words that ca out were quiet enough for her and no one else.
"Please don’t go."
He pressed a kiss to her ear again.
Her entire body went still against his. The stillness was total, the kind that happens when a sentence lands in the exact center of a wound that was already open.
She pulled back just enough to look at him. His arms stayed locked. Her green eyes searched his face, and what lived behind them was so heavy, so saturated with sothing she was holding back, that his breath caught.
She wanted to tell him sothing. He could see it. The words were right there, stacked behind her teeth, pressing forward, and she was holding them in with everything she had.
"What is it?" His voice dropped lower. His hand ca up to her jaw, tilting her face toward his. "Tell , baby."
The word left his mouth without clearance. It echoed between them. He let it. His dragon was purring behind his ribs like a bastard who had planned this entire evening.
She pulled back an inch. His grip held.
"Look at , baby." The word ca on purpose the second ti. "You can tell anything."
She t his eyes.
His thumb traced her jawline. His mouth found her ear, pressing his lips to the curve of it, and then her temple, and then the top of her head where the white hair was glowing.
Each kiss was slow, deliberate, the muscle mory of a man who had done this in another life and was doing it now for the first ti and could feel both truths living in the sa gesture without understanding either.
Five hundred people were watching. He was aware. He was also aware that he would burn this entire ballroom to the foundation before he let her walk away from him right now.
"I want you, Guinevere."
His forehead pressed to hers. His breathing was ragged.
"Maddox." She said his first na with the ease of a woman who had been saying it in private for a very long ti, and the sound of it in her mouth hit him in a place so deep he had no architecture for what he felt.
He wanted it. The familiarity. The comfort. The way the syllables rolled off her tongue with zero hesitation, like his na was a room she had been living in and had just accidentally left the door open.
"What if I told you that telling you would cause sothing really bad to happen. The kind of bad you can’t afford right now."
His thumb stopped on her jaw. His eyes sharpened, the Dragon King arriving behind them like a second shift.
"I’m the Dragon King. I can afford anything."
"You can’t afford this."
"Try ."
"Maddox."
"You keep saying my na like you’ve said it before. I like it. I also like that you think there is sothing bad enough to scare at my own banquet." He leaned in, his lips brushing her ear. "You do realize I am a literal dragon, right?"
Her lips twitched. Then the twitch broke into a laugh so sudden it startled her. She pressed her hand over her mouth, her shoulders shaking, and the laugh kept going, quiet and breathless and entirely too amused for the words he had said.
He did not understand why she was laughing, and he was entirely too pleased with it to care. His dragon preened. His ego, previously on life support, was now sitting upright and asking for a al.
"What did I say?"
She shook her head, her hand still over her mouth, eyes bright with the specific tears that co from laughing when you’re already holding back crying. "You wouldn’t believe if I told you."
"I would believe anything you told right now."
Her laughter faded. The honesty in his voice had done sothing to the air between them, and whatever it was, it stripped the humor out of the room and replaced it with the quiet weight of two people standing too close to a truth that only one knew but couldn’t say.
Ryker wedged his arm between them, broke the seal of their bodies, and lifted her off the stone in one motion.
"Sorry, Commander. Wolf business. Urgent. Very urgent. Borrowing her."
Maddox blinked. She was against him. Then she wasn’t. The transition happened so fast his nervous system filed it as an error and tried to reload. By the ti it caught up, Ryker was moving and Maddox was standing alone in the center of a ballroom with empty arms and a dragon trying to exit his body.
His command hit the ballroom like a detonation.
"STOP."
The word carried the biological frequency of a High Dragon King, the register that bypassed free will and went straight to the spine. Every dragon in the hall went rigid. Drinks froze mid-lift. A server locked in place with a tray balanced on one hand.
Ryker stopped. His arms were still around Guinevere. His boots were welded to the stone. His jaw was clenched hard enough to fracture a molar, fighting the command with everything he had, and everything he had was currently losing.
He set her down.
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