Dexmon: Serena. Baby. Please. Answer me. I’ll tell you everything.

Silence.

Dexmon: A woman I have never met picked my lock, took my pants, and tried to bite my neck.

Dexmon: The necklace. She stole it. I didn’t give it to her. I didn’t even know it was your mother’s.

He stopped mid-step, considered it, then kept moving.

Dexmon: I realize that sounds bad. I’ve seen you wear it every day. It never came up and I’m sorry for not asking you.

He turned a corner, following her scent like it was his only truth. Five seconds went by. Still nothing from her.

Dexmon: She was naked, wearing your necklace in my bed and touching me while I was asleep. I didn’t know. I woke up hard because I thought it was you.

Aegon: NO. STOP.

He ignored his wolf and followed the scent of her tears down the corridor.

Dexmon: Because of the dream, I was hard. Not her. I was dreaming about us.

Aegon: STOP MINDLINKING. EVERY WORD YOU SAY IS A CRIME.

He made it two corridors before he heard the footsteps behind him.

Fast. Barefoot. Gaining.

Because some reflex at the base of his skull required him to confirm, personally, that this specific combination of circumstances was real, he glanced behind him.

"Oh, for the love of every god."

Guinevere was ten paces away. She had, at some point in the sixty seconds between the portal and now, lost the infantry tunic and was entirely nude again.

Aegon: She lost the shirt.

Dex: I am aware, Aegon.

A door to his left opened.

Queen Bellatrix stepped out into the corridor with a cup of morning tea in her hand and the expression of a woman whose servants had, seven seconds earlier, informed her that something extraordinary was occurring near the solarium and that she ought to come see.

She took in the scene. Lifted her cup. Took a sip.

On the one hand, Serena Frostborne had two mates. On the other hand, a nude woman was currently pursuing her only son through a public corridor. The mathematics of her feelings were, for the first time in months, not entirely straightforward.

"Mother."

"Darling."

"Do something."

"I am observing, Dexmon."

"MOTHER."

She gave him a faint, unreadable smile and returned to her tea.

From the opposite end of the corridor, a voice rang out.

"AND DOWN THE STRETCH THEY COME."

Thor Crushturn was standing at the mouth of the gallery with a visible, aggressive erection tenting the front of his training suit that he was making absolutely no attempt to conceal.

He had positioned himself like he had arrived at a sporting event, and he was already narrating.

"THE PRINCE TAKES THE OUTSIDE LANE. THE CHALLENGER ROUNDS THE TURN, FULLY NUDE, STRONG FORM."

"Thor," Dex clipped. "Shut the fuck up."

"A FORMAL THREAT FROM THE MONARCH, FOLKS, WHICH SUGGESTS WE ARE ABOUT TO SEE AN UPSET."

Thor continued falling in behind him at a trot, goblet sloshing, providing commentary at a volume that was drawing servants.

Guinevere lunged.

She came off her back foot with the precise athletic instinct she had developed in the last hour of her life, hair in her face, arms extended, mouth open, and she went for Dex’s neck with the explicit intent to mark him.

Dex caught the movement in his peripheral vision one half-second before her teeth would have landed.

He moved in a blur of Alpha speed.

"What is wrong with you..."

He stepped inside her reach, turned under her outstretched arm, and caught her by the shoulders at a distance of approximately twenty inches from his neck. She hung in his grip for a moment, teeth still bared, eyes bright.

He let go, stepped back, then looked at the two guards posted at the corridor intersection.

They had been at parade rest. Their eyes were fixed at a point somewhere slightly above his head, and their faces held a careful blankness.

"Arrest her."

The guards did not move.

"I said arrest her."

The guard on the left, a young man named Corin who would, years later, tell this story to his grandchildren and have none of them believe him, cleared his throat with care.

"Your Highness, forgive me, ah, is this a, ah, a sexual thing, or—"

"WHAT."

"I only ask, Your Highness, because if this is a private, ah, recreational matter between yourself and the lady, we were instructed in the last standards review that we are not to intervene in, ah—"

"CORIN. SHE IS TRYING TO MARK ME. THIS IS NOT A RECREATIONAL MATTER. INTERVENE."

"Yes, Your Highness."

Corin did not intervene.

The other guard, Matthias, glanced sideways at Corin. Dex realized they both were trying to determine whether this was the kind of order that had a follow-up test attached to it.

"INTERVENE, CORIN. INTERVENE, MATTHIAS. THIS IS A DIRECT ORDER FROM YOUR COMMANDER AND PRINCE OF DRAKENFELL."

"Yes, Your Highness," they said in unison.

They did not move.

Guinevere lunged again.

Fin came around the far corner at a dead run.

He saw, in the span of one second: his nude cousin launching herself at the Prince of Drakenfell’s neck.

Dex dodged out of the way.

"Guinevere."

She turned her head to look at him.

"Finnick, darling, hello."

"You said those other times were accidents."

"Shadowclaw," Dex said, voice strained from holding her back. "What is the goddamn number?"

From the gallery at the east end, a large, armored shape appeared at speed.

Hale Ironholt had been on the upper floor when the shouting reached him. He came down the gallery stair in three strides, and rounded the corner into the corridor.

His brain did one thing. It identified a threat. It committed. He tackled.

The impact was the sound of a crate of masonry being dropped from a second-floor window. Guinevere, Hale, and a decorative urn on a side table went down in a single mass. The urn did not survive.

Hale pinned her shoulders to the floor with both hands.

Guinevere, beneath him, went entirely still. Then she opened her eyes. Wide. With focus.

"Oh," she said. "Hello."

"Stay down," Hale ordered, breathing hard, eyes still tracking for secondary threats. "You are under detainment. Do not move. Do not—"

Guinevere turned her head, and tried to bite his wrist.

Hale jerked his hand back just in time, her teeth clicking together on air an inch from the soft skin under his thumb. "SHE IS BITING."

"She bit the prince too," Corin offered helpfully from ten feet away.

"SHE DID NOT BITE ME."

A door to his immediate left opened.

Elara stepped into the corridor. She took in the scene. Her mate was on top of a nude woman holding her wrist above her head.

He was breathing hard and the woman was arching up into him.

The color drained out of Elara’s face.

Hale saw it.

He saw it the way a man saw a sword coming, and he understood, with the terrible clean clarity of a Beta who had spent months learning her face, exactly what she had just pattern-matched this to.

"Elara. I can explain." 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

Guinevere, beneath him, chose this moment, because this was the moment Guinevere Ashford had been born to choose.

"He is taking advantage of me," she wailed. "Please, lady, please, he would not let me up, I was only running, I was only running, and he—"

He looked back down at the nude woman beneath him. Then he looked up at his mate.

"Elara. I promise you. On my honor. On the pack. This is not what is happening, she attacked the prince with her mouth, she just tried to bite my wrist, she is under arrest."

Elara took one step forward, then slapped Hale across the face, hard, the full crack of a palm.

He had been hit harder. He had never been hurt worse.

Hale’s face was still turned from the impact.

He did not look up for a full second.

"ELARA."

She turned. She ran.

Her red hair whipped behind her as she went and her slippers hit the stone.

Hale: Elara.

Silence.

Hale: Kitten. Please. Let me explain.

Guinevere, whose wrist was still pinned above her head, tilted her chin up with a small, unbothered smile, and said, "Tricky situation."

Hale looked down at her.

For the first time all morning, something behind his eyes, something in the mountain-quiet architecture of him, went from contained to something else.

"Corin."

"Sir."

"Restrain the prisoner. I do not care which of you."

"Yes, sir," they said, in perfect unison.

Hale stood. Corin moved left. Matthias moved left. They collided shoulders, separated, and then both gestured for the other to go first, like two men trying to exit through the same door at a funeral.

Guinevere came in low this time, arms locking around Dex’s torso, and her teeth went for the tendon at the side of his throat with the fixed, committed intent of a woman who had now tried this enough times to adjust her technique.

Her body climbed up his with the unsettling grace of a creature that had been built specifically for this and nothing else.

Dex, who had, at this point, achieved a kind of transcendent exhaustion, simply reached up with both hands, took her by the ribs, and peeled her off of him like removing a barnacle from a ship. He set her down three feet away. He released her. He stepped back.

"You know," she said thoughtfully, "this rejection is actually doing something for me. I think I like it. Stubborn and a little dumb. Adorable."

Behind her, Matthias mouthed what the fuck to himself.

A door opposite them opened.

Corin: We need to restrain her.

Matthias: You grab her.

Corin: I am absolutely not grabbing her. She bit the prince.

Matthias: She bit the PRINCE.

Corin: On the neck.

Matthias: That is treason.

Corin: Is it treason or is it a mating attempt?

Matthias: Those are the same thing if it is unwanted.

Corin: Just grab her.

Neither of them grabbed her.

Through the matebond, Dex felt another wave of Serena’s grief.

His boots hit the stone at speed.

Dex: I am coming, baby. I am coming. Please.