Chapter 47: An Alpha Called Her His Mate. In MY Keep.

Maddox’s fist hit the war table so hard the obsidian cracked.

The sound split the chamber. Iron markers jumped. Maps slid. A water pitcher on the far end toppled and shattered against the stone floor, and no one in the room flinched.

He pulled his hand free. Blood ran from his knuckles where the stone had cut. He did not look at it.

"Again."

Sterling stepped forward. The map he unrolled was new, drawn in the last four hours, annotated in his handwriting with an ink color that meant confirmed and another that meant probable.

"The fae portals we’ve catalogued from the battle number thirty-seven. Twenty-two opened and closed within seconds, consistent with individual transit. Fifteen remained open for longer, which suggests group movement or cargo. The exit points we’ve been able to trace converge on a region beneath the Mordhaen mountain range, approximately four hundred miles northwest of Kael’s current stronghold."

"Beneath?" Ryker was standing with his arms crossed, his back against the far wall. The humor was gone. The man who cracked jokes on dragon back and called Maddox out at altitude had left the building during the battle and had yet to return.

"The fae realm exists underneath the surface. Between continents. We have limited intelligence on its geography, but Jaxon’s scrying has identified three possible entry points within our reach."

Jaxon Valerios sat in the corner. He looked exhausted. The scrying had taken everything he had, and the results had given them geography without certainty.

"Three possible," Jaxon said. "Two of them are warded with magic I’ve never encountered. The third is the widest, the least defended, and almost certainly a trap."

"Then we spring the trap," Maddox said. "I will take a strike team through the widest entry point and retrieve her. Full fire. No negotiation."

"You cannot lead the strike team, Commander." Sterling’s voice was flat. "You are the crown. If you enter fae territory and the entry point collapses behind you, Drakencrest loses its king during a civil war with Kael still holding three kingdoms. The continent falls."

"I am aware of the math, Sterling."

"Then you are aware that the math says send me."

The room went quiet. Ryker’s head turned. Griffin Ironreach, posted by the door in his usual position of guard-who-was-technically-present-for-strategic-reasons, looked at Sterling with an expression that was, for Griffin, remarkably serious.

Maddox studied his Third. The guilt was invisible to anyone who did not know where to look for it. Maddox knew where to look. It lived in the angle of Sterling’s jaw, which was set a fraction tighter than usual. In the precision of his briefing, which was thorough past the point of thoroughness and into the territory of a man compensating for a failure he had yet to be punished for. In the fact that he had volunteered for a suicide mission in the same tone he used to order tea.

Sterling had put Gwen on the mountain. Sterling had let her merge with the flame while Maddox was five hundred miles away inside a dampening field.

He was waiting for Maddox to say it. To yell. To break something in his direction. To deliver the words that would match the weight of what he had done.

Maddox had said nothing. The nothing was worse than anything he could have said, and Sterling knew it, and the knowing was eating through his composure.

"The strike team departs in one hour." Maddox’s voice was controlled, but the leash was fraying and the room could hear the fibers splitting. "Sterling leads. Ryker provides air cover from above the entry point. Griffin, you hold the perimeter. Jaxon, I need you to maintain a scrying lock on Sterling’s team from the moment they enter until the moment they return."

"Return with her," Ryker added.

"With her." Maddox repeated it because the alternative did not exist.

The table absorbed that. Ryker’s jaw loosened by a fraction, which was the closest he had come to looking relieved in twelve hours.

"Close-quarters weapons," Sterling said. "The tunnels will be too narrow for dragon form, so we fight on foot."

"On foot." Ryker’s arms uncrossed. "In tunnels against fae with dark magic."

"Yes."

"I hate tunnels."

"Your hatred of tunnels is noted and irrelevant."

Ryker pushed off the wall. "Fine. I’ll hate them from inside while I’m killing things in them."

Maddox pressed both hands flat against the cracked table. He leaned forward, his weight on his arms, his gold eyes moving across every face in the room.

"I want her home, whatever it costs. Whatever it takes. Bring my wife back to me."

The room held. Every man in it understood the weight of what had been said, and every man in it would carry it through a fae tunnel and out the other side if necessary.

Sterling inclined his head. "Commander."

A knock came at the door.

Griffin turned. He opened it six inches, spoke in a low voice to the guard on the other side, then closed it. His expression had shifted.

"Maddox."

The use of the first name was the tell. Griffin used titles in front of the council. He used names when the information was personal.

"A wolf ship just docked in Drakencrest Harbor."

Ryker’s brow lifted. "Wolves here in Velkaris?"

"There’s a man at the gate requesting an audience with the king. He says he’s here for his mate."

The silence that followed had weight enough to bend stone.

Maddox straightened, and his hands lifted off the table. The blood from his knuckles left prints on the obsidian that looked, in the candlelight, like small red moons.

"His mate."

The gold in Maddox’s eyes went from warm to molten. The temperature in the room climbed by three degrees, and the candles on the table burned higher.

"Bring him in."

Sterling’s chin lifted a fraction. "You intend to receive him in the war chamber after he just called your wife his mate."

"I intend to look at the man who sailed across an ocean for a woman who is already mine, and I intend to hear what he has to say, and then I intend to decide whether he leaves this Keep on his ship or in a box." Maddox’s voice had dropped into the register that preceded violence the way thunder preceded lightning. "Bring him in, Griffin."

Nicholas Shadowfell walked into the war chamber of Drakencrest Keep with his Beta behind him.

His eyes swept the room in a single pass.

Maddox was sitting with his second and third. He gestured to the chair at the far end. Whiskey sat in front of it.

"Shadowfell. Long way from Nyros. I’m assuming that’s business, and the pleasure is incidental."

Nicholas sat, and picked up the glass, eyes staying on Maddox.

"Drakencrest. Yes. Guinevere. Where is she?"

The name landed in the room with weight. Ryker, Sterling, and Maddox’s expressions did not change. Three men who had spent the last twelve hours tearing themselves apart over a woman whose name had just been spoken by a man who had no right to speak it with that degree of familiarity.

Maddox took a sip of his whiskey. Set the glass down. The motion was unhurried, the pace of a king who controlled every second of a conversation because every second was a measurement.

"You came all the way here to ask me about my wife?"

Nicholas’s jaw tightened. His wolf surged, visible in the amber flare behind his irises, a flash of gold that pressed against the human mask hard enough to distort it. The word wife had hit him in the chest and the impact was visible to everyone in the room.

He recovered in under a second. The control was impressive.

"She is in pain." Nicholas’s voice was steady. The steadiness was costing him.