Kael had crashed a royal wedding with better planning than this.

A high-pitched scream came from down the cave.

The good news: his dark mage’s magic had found her. The bad news: so had dark fae, a cavern with no visible exit, and no return address. Every choice he’d made in the last hour had been objectively terrible and he was going to keep making them.

✦✦✦

Consciousness returned like a slap. She gasped, choked, and she fell forward, her hands hitting cold stone. She was on the ground. In a cave. Alone.

Not alone.

Demon-insect things were looking at her like she was dinner. Their appearance alone told her everything she needed to know.

She pushed herself up and ran.

It was a labyrinth of dead ends with no light, outside of crystals. She knew they were trying to trap her. The thought was unhelpful and wouldn’t leave.

That’s when everything started to feel small. The walls were too close and the ceiling too low.

Every breath was a sob and every sob echoed and every echo told the things behind her exactly where she was. She bit down on her lip hard enough to taste blood. It didn’t help. The next breath was louder than the last.

Her legs were shaking so badly each step felt like the last one they’d give her. Her knees hit the stone before she caught herself.

Get up. Get up. Her body was not listening to her.

She needed to calm down so she could think clearly but couldn’t.

She knew the drill. Slow breath in. Hold. Release. She’d talked herself down from worse. But her lungs were running their own schedule and every exhale came out shaking and every inhale was too shallow and too fast and the oxygen wasn’t reaching the parts of her brain that made decisions.

Whatever they were, they were right behind her and gaining. The clicking of their feet, the hum of their chanting, the hunger radiating off them like heat from a furnace.

One grabbed her ankle. She hit the ground hard. A scream tore from her throat before she locked it down. She kicked backward and connected with something that screeched.

She was crying now, fast, involuntary tears that blurred the crystal light into streaks. Her hands were shaking too hard to grip anything. She kicked again, blind, and scrambled forward on her elbows.

Then she was up again, stumbling, her legs threatening to buckle with every step.

She turned a corner and ran straight into a chest.

Kael caught her by the shoulder with one arm. His other hand held a blade that was already wet.

"Easy."

She flinched when he touched her, and her hand flew to her mouth. Full body, violent, the flinch of someone who’d been grabbed too many times in the last hour.

"I just killed six of those things for you. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead. Look at me. I’m not them."

She looked at him, then at his hand. The one that had been on her throat in the forest.

He understood.

"I know what I did. And we’re going to have that conversation. Later when we’re not in a cave full of things that want to eat you. Right now I need you to pick the devil you know and breathe."

He let go of her. "In through your nose, out through your mouth. Do it now."

Her chest shuddered as she inhaled. Her exhale was more sob than air.

The chanting grew louder behind her. She looked back at the tunnel. Then at him. Then at the tunnel again. He watched her calculate, deciding the lesser of two horrors. It wasn’t flattering, but he’d take it.

"Behind me. Now. I will handle that. You will handle what’s in front of you. Which is breathing."

He didn’t wait for her to decide, pulling her behind him.

"When they come around that corner, close your eyes. I’ll tell you when to open them."

Guinevere put her face in her hands. She was having a panic attack. A full blown panic attack and she knew it.

"Evening," Kael said as they rounded the corner. "Lovely place. Very atmospheric. Who decorated?"

"The vessel returns," one said. "We will open her veins and drink the old flame from her marrow."

"Graphic. Unnecessary. No." Kael’s blade took its head before the mouth finished closing.

Two more lunged. One snarled, "She carries the old blood. We will harvest—"

"Disgusting, thank you." Both dropped in a single cross-stroke.

A second lunged from the wall. "Her blood sings to us. We will bathe in it. We will wear her skin as a—"

"You will not finish that sentence." Kael’s blade caught it mid-torso, and two halves hit the stone in opposite directions.

"Her flame will birth the new world. Her womb will—"

"Absolutely not." One stroke. Two heads. "What the hell is wrong with you. Don’t answer."

A larger one dropped from above, wings spread.

"Her cunt drips with old magic. We will—"

"I’m going to stop you right there." Two strokes. One body, two halves, significant mess. "For future reference, and I understand there won’t be a future, that is not how you talk about a woman. Any woman. Even one I kidnapped."

The second hissed from the wall. "We will split her open and drink the fire from her spine."

"Revolting. No." Steel met neck. Head met floor.

Three more came from the left. One chittered, "She is fuel. She is food. She is—"

"She is standing behind me and she is going to be fine." Three swings. Three thuds. "Aren’t you, wolf girl? Nod if you can hear me."

She couldn’t nod. She could barely breathe. But she was still standing and that counted.

"I’ll take the silence as agreement." He cleaned his blade on the nearest wing. "We’re leaving. Keep your eyes closed. The interior design has not improved."

He picked her up. She gasped, eyes snapping open and she struggled against him.

"Don’t look at the floor. It’s disgusting," he said with a dry nonchalance, moving as if her weight and her squirming were equally inconsequential. "Also if you could refrain from doing that until we’re out of here that would be great."

Her body was burning up, the flame went into him just as it had on the mountain. This man had hurt her in the forest and was now carrying her. And she was letting him because she was terrified, her legs weren’t working, and she woke up not knowing where she was. The cognitive dissonance alone would require therapy.

Her forehead rested in the crook of his neck and she debated if she should just play unconscious and make a run for it as soon as they were out of this cave. But she needed information and at the moment she had none.

"What are those things?" Her voice came out hoarse. Fitting for someone who was supposed to be dead and very dehydrated.

He glanced down at her, jaw tight. "Dark fae."

The last thing she remembered was Maddox holding her on the back of a dragon.

"I died. I shouldn’t be here," she said, as calmly as someone reading about it in a book.

"No, sweetheart. You merged with flame which is the most painful thing a body can undergo. And you weren’t taken care of after. Ryker is an idiot for letting you do that when he wasn’t there." He considered it. "Then again, he wouldn’t have been able to help you because you merged with Drakencrest flame. I retract that."

Guinevere’s brows furrowed, but she didn’t ask what he meant. She wasn’t sure how much to give away to this man.

"You’ve been having an affair with Ryker’s best friend. That’s a dangerous game in any court. But you don’t strike me as the type to do that. Why were you?"

Kael’s throat bobbed. She felt it against her forehead. Like the question slipped out and he couldn’t take it back.

"Ryker is my friend. Not my mate," she answered.

His steps faltered this time, but he recovered. She realized a second too late she’d said something she shouldn’t have disclosed. A sharp inhale gave her away.

"Are you a concubine to Maddox?"

She didn’t answer. Alarm bells were full on ringing. She’d misstepped and needed to get away from this man even if she burned alive in the process.

"Relax. I won’t make you tell me. I’ll figure it out either way. It just saves us both some time."

He kept running. Another minute went by in silence.

"What is your name?"

She didn’t answer.

"Okay then. I’ll continue calling you wolf girl. I’m going to set you down in ten seconds. Close your eyes again."

She listened to him. Some unholy mix of fear and adrenaline and flame told her to trust him. The lack of options also played a part.

He set her down, just as dark fae rounded the corner.

Kael’s blade came out of his cloak in a motion so fast it left an afterimage in the bioluminescent light. Black blood sprayed across the moss in an arc that caught the blue light and turned purple.

Three fae down in under four seconds. More rounded the corner.

Then everything went dark.

✦✦✦

Gold flame erupted around Kael. It molded to his body like liquid gold, so close it looked painted on. Every movement he made, it followed. Every strike, it flexed. Tighter than any shield he’d ever seen.

Kael froze mid-stride, blade raised, and glanced over his shoulder at the woman behind him.

She was doing it again. Protecting him. The man who had choked her in a forest, dragged her through a portal, and held a blade to her throat in front of two armies.

Her eyes were bright gold. But her palm wasn’t extended. She was doing it in a way he’d never seen before and didn’t know was possible.

His jaw worked once.

"Noted," he said to absolutely no one.

He killed three more before the rest scattered into tunnels too narrow for his shoulders. The cavern emptied in seconds, dark wings folding into crevices, bioluminescent moss the only witness to the carnage staining the floor.

The orb held for two full seconds after the last fae vanished. Then it collapsed, the gold light pulling back into her skin, and she stood in the center of the dead with her hands at her sides and her face holding nothing.

Kael wiped his blade on the wing of the nearest corpse. He studied her across the cavern, breathing hard, his dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and fae blood.

"You are the most confusing woman I have ever encountered."

Her head turned towards a tunnel on the far wall. The motion was smooth and immediate, the instinct of a body that could sense something her conscious mind had no access to.

"Wolf girl? Are you there?"

He snapped two fingers in front of her face.

A portal ripped open inside the tunnel mouth. Smaller than the ones before. Ragged at the edges. The fae who stumbled through it was wounded, one wing shredded, its chest scorched with the unmistakable signature of dragon fire. It had come from the battle.

Guinevere ran through the portal before Kael could take a single step.

She moved in the blur he had seen twice before, the speed that sat between wolf and dragon and belonged to neither, and her body crossed the fifteen feet between her position and the closing portal in a straight line that held zero hesitation and zero self-preservation.

"Oh for fuck’s sake."

Kael sprinted after her.