STEP ONE: Subliminal Messaging While Sleeping.

Nothing out of the ordinary. This worked like a charm on her ex Garrett, up until the end. And that wasn’t her fault.

The bed dipped.

Guinevere entered naked.

"Dexmon," she whispered in his ear, "You want Guinevere to ride you."

STEP TWO: Arousal Name Imprinting.

Her fingers wrapped around his thickening length.

Dexmon stirred, and his hips twitched forward into her grip, hardening fully in her hand.

It was working.

He moaned. "Serena..."

"You mean Guinevere. You want to cum for her."

"Serena... fuck... just like that, baby..."

He smiled in his sleep.

Her eye twitched. Fine. She could work with this. Redirect. Recalibrate. She was a professional.

"Guinevere. The womb of destiny." She looked down at his dick. "Hello future prince-maker. Grow strong for mommy."

STEP THREE: Trauma Bonding Memory Implant.

"Remember when we survived the assassination attempt together? You protected me with your body."

She picked up the pace with her hand. The fact he was sleeping through this and he was THAT hard probably meant Serena wasn’t doing it for him anyways.

"Then we made love under the stars. You promised me the next one would be our heir."

He groaned.

"Serena. Baby... come here. I love you so fucking much."

"Guin-eh-VERE," she corrected in his ear, louder than intended. "Not Serena. GUIN-EH-VERE."

He inhaled a deep breath, then stilled.

✦✦✦

One moment Aegon was running through the forest towards a white wolf.

Then the scent hit. It was wrong. Someone’s great-aunt’s guest bedroom.

Dexmon came into vague awareness that he was being jerked off.

Aegon: THAT IS NOT OUR HAND. OR OUR MATE. EJECT.

His eyes snapped open.

A woman was propped up on her side, smiling down at him, completely naked with her hand on his shaft.

Dex screamed. High-pitched. It was not a dignified sound and one he would deny, under oath, for the rest of his natural life, and one which three guards in the corridor would spend the next twenty years quietly impersonating at taverns for money.

He scrambled upright, yanking the sheet up to his waist like a scandalized maiden.

"No need to hide, Dexmon. I’ve already seen it."

He launched backward out of the bed, pulling the sheet with him, hit the floor, rolled, and came up in a crouch with the sheet clutched to his waist.

"WHAT THE FUCK?!"

Guinevere sat up slowly, letting the blankets pool around her hips. The circlet slipped slightly. She adjusted it.

"Good morning."

"Who the fuck are you?" Dex said. "And what are you doing in my bed?"

"Our bed."

"What."

She reached into the nightstand drawer, which she had apparently pre-staged, and produced a leather portfolio with color-coded tabs.

"Before you say anything," she began, flipping to tab two, "I took the liberty of compiling my qualifications. I’m a significantly better fit than the white-haired omega. Sarah or whatever her name is. Pedigree on page one. Political alliances on page three. The family tree is on page four. Hip-to-waist ratio is on page six, which I think you’ll find generous to both of us. Our children will be attractive." 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

Aegon: I have never been this scared in my life.

Dex backed towards the door, sheet trailing behind him like the world’s least regal wedding train. His hand found the handle. He turned it.

The door had been locked. From the inside. By her.

"I can explain that."

"I don’t want you to."

His trousers were not on the chair where he had left them. They were in Guinevere’s hand.

"I thought we could talk first," she said sweetly. She put his trousers down on the mattress, then propped up on all fours on the bed.

She crawled slowly across the mattress on her hands and knees.

Then she purred.

She was, in the most literal and unsettling sense of the word, purring. A low, rolling sound from the back of her throat, the kind of noise a house cat made right before it knocked something off a shelf out of spite. Her shoulders rolled with each step. She meowed.

Dex stared at her.

"Stay the fuck away."

She hissed at him.

"You hissed."

Aegon: I want to leave. SHE’S GETTING CLOSER. MOVE!

Dex grabbed a pillow and threw it at her. She caught it, set it aside with the delicacy of a woman arranging centerpieces, and kept coming.

Then her eyes caught on the base of his throat, and her expression changed.

She lunged.

Dex caught her by the back of the skull at Alpha speed, stopping her mouth exactly one inch from his neck. Her teeth were bared.

She was genuinely, unironically attempting to mark him. To bite a Prince of Drakenfell hard enough to leave a mark she could present to the court at breakfast.

He held her there. She smiled up at him, lips parted, teeth visible.

"Do you understand," Dex said quietly, "what I would do to you if those teeth touched me."

"Promise?" she whispered.

Dex looked at the ceiling. He addressed the gods directly, by name, in the order of seniority he remembered from his tutoring. He asked, in complete sincerity, what he had done to deserve this specific Tuesday.

The ceiling did not answer.

She broke free when he loosened his grip and launched off the bed, which was the first tactical mistake he had made since the war.

Guinevere chased him around the room. Naked.

This was, he would reflect later, the low point. Not any of the previous occasions in his life when something had tried to kill him. The low point was being chased, nude, around a guest suite in Shadowclaw Keep by a woman making cat noises while he held a bed sheet around his waist with one hand and tried to reach the bell pull with the other.

"YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME, DEXMON," she wailed suddenly, and collapsed to her knees in the middle of the rug, clutching her stomach. "NOT WITH THE HEIR."

Dex froze mid-stride.

For exactly one second, his face went the color of chalk. His brain, which had been running a complex threat assessment, simply stopped. The word heir landed in his chest like a stone in a well, and for one terrible heartbeat he ran through every scenario where this was somehow, impossibly, his problem.

Aegon: She has been in the room for eleven minutes. Unless she is an amoeba, that is impossible.

Dex recovered. The color returned to his face. Then it left again, in a different direction, toward a rage so specific and so controlled that his voice came out almost pleasant.

"You walked in here ninety seconds ago."

"The gods work fast," Guinevere said, from the floor, with her hand on a stomach that was visibly, medically, empirically not pregnant.

"I am going to have you tried," Dex said. "I am going to have you tried by three separate kingdoms. I am going to write the charges myself."

Dex’s eyes moved to the nightstand. There was a stack of cream-colored envelopes, hand-calligraphed and sealed with red wax with his name on them.

Prince Dexmon Drakenfell and Lady Guinevere Ashford, crowned at Drakenfell Keep.

"What the fuck ...."

"There are wedding invitations," Guinevere said, and the sentence came out flat, because he had seen them for the first time at that exact moment.

He blinked, processing.

She sprang to her feet, lunging at his neck again.

He sidestepped. She hit the bedpost.

It was at this precise moment that the door opened.

Serena was holding a cup of tea. She had come to see if Dex was awake, because she couldn’t sleep and Fin had sent her. Her eyes moved through the scene in the order a scholar read a difficult sentence.

First, the sheet. Then, Dex. He was frozen, holding both hands up in the universal gesture of a man pleading his innocence to a deity that was not currently in session. His face was doing something between horror and disbelief.

Then, the woman on the floor, entirely nude except for a thin silver chain with a small pendant shaped like a crescent moon.

Serena’s pendant. Her mother’s. The one she had left on her nightstand.

The tea did not survive the motion of her hand flying to her mouth.

Dex saw her eyes fill before he felt it through the matebond, which was the worst part, because it meant his body registered the sight of her before the connection between them could soften the blow.

The tears pooled fast. She blinked once, and they broke loose and slid down both cheeks at the same time, and the matebond went live half a second later with a wave of grief so clean and so undefended that Dex physically staggered back into the dresser behind him.

It was the quiet, specific pain of a woman who had already lived through this and whose body had learned exactly what that felt like, and whose body was telling her, right now, that it was happening again.

"Baby," Dex said. "This is not what it looks like."