Later, when they asked her how she set a man on fire without meaning to, she wouldn’t have an answer. But the screaming would still be in her ears.

The guard on the left smiled, and that was how Guinevere knew the evening had just been downgraded from dangerous to catastrophic. Guards who smiled at half-dead women in hallways were never delivering good news.

Guinevere reached for Maddox’s flame, pulling at something she had no technique for pulling, grabbing at a door she had never opened with hands that did not know the handle.

Nothing happened. Her stomach dropped. Noted. Wonderful. She had taken a king’s flame, survived a fever coma to keep it, and the thing wouldn’t even flicker when she needed it. Ten out of ten, would accept mystical dragon fire again.

The guard on the right moved first.

His hand closed around her throat before she had finished processing the failure. The grip was practiced, thumb on one side of the windpipe, four fingers on the other, the hold of a man who had done this to women before and knew the exact pressure that separated cooperation from unconsciousness.

Her boots left the ground. Her spine hit the stone wall behind her. Stars burst across her vision.

She called for her wolf.

The response was sluggish. Distant. Her wolf pressed forward, then stopped, the shift gathering at the edges of her body without breaking through.

She tried again. Harder. The shift stuttered, started, stalled. Her body was ready. Her wolf was willing. But the connection between the two would not fire.

She had shifted mid-freefall. FREEFALL. And now, pinned to a wall with a hand on her throat and a genuine reason to grow claws, her body decided this was the moment for a mechanical failure. Incredible. Truly.

"Who sent you?" she choked out through his grip.

The guard holding her leaned closer. "Nobody you’ll live long enough to thank. Stop fighting. Pass out. That’s all we need."

Three out of ten in delivery. She’d heard better threats from Cassian.

"She’s stalling," the other said. "Squeeze harder."

Stalling was the stupidest thing she’d heard all week. The rebuttal was right there. Fully formed. Devastating. Trapped behind a crushed windpipe. The injustice was staggering.

"I am squeezing. She won’t drop."

"Then squeeze until she does. We were told she folds fast."

His hand tightened brutally around her neck as her boots kicked uselessly against the stone. Black spots danced across her vision.

"We’re allowed to break her in before handover, right?"

Guinevere’s eyes widened. Disgust and terror flooded her as she tried to twist away, but the hand around her throat only squeezed harder. She wanted to scream, to vomit, to disappear but all she could do was choke on nothing.

Tears began to fall as black crept into the edges of her vision. Her fingers clawed at the hand around her neck with the coordination of a woman losing oxygen by the second.

Then, on the other side of the corridor she saw a blurred figure.

Kael. Standing. Watching. His iron eyes surged to Drakencrest gold.

When she blinked, he was gone.

Noted. Adding being murdered and orgasming to the list of things she’d now hallucinated while seeing this man.

That’s when her body ignited.

Gold fire erupted from her skin with no warning and no permission. The blaze tore outward from her chest, down her arms, across her hands, and into the man crushing her windpipe with the indiscriminate fury of a thing that had been caged and had decided on its own that the cage was finished.

His fingers released instantly and she fell to the floor coughing.

The scream that came out of him was inhuman. Gold fire ate through his gloves, his sleeves, his armor, spreading across his body with a speed that said it was hungry and had found exactly what it wanted. He staggered backward, arms flailing, flames crawling up his neck and into his hair.

He ran. The sound of his boots on stone was frantic and uneven, punctuated by screams that bounced off the corridor walls and came back louder. He hit one wall, then another, then the floor, rolling, and the fire did not care. It burned brighter with every attempt to smother it.

Guinevere gasped for air, her throat raw. Gold runes she had never seen before were glowing in the walls. The Keep had hidden runes. Of course it did. They were synchronized to a fire she couldn’t control, pouring out of a body that wouldn’t shift, in a corridor that smelled like burning flesh. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

"Make it stop!" The second guard had his blade drawn, his eyes wide, his body pressed against the far wall. "Whatever you’re doing, stop it!"

She tried. She had no idea how. Stopping something she had never started was the opposite of a skill she possessed. She stared at her hands and willed the fire down, and the fire ignored her completely.

The burning guard’s screams grew worse. Wet. Guttural. The sound of a man whose lungs were cooking inside his chest. Her stomach turned over and she gagged, pressing her hand to her mouth.

He collapsed next to her, still screaming in gurgles, his body a bloody mass. She stared in horror. It was the most disturbing thing she’d ever seen.

Witnessing death and causing it were two different rooms, and she had just walked through a door she couldn’t walk back through. She’d seen Kael behead dark fae and stabbed one herself. But she had never actually killed someone until now. And watching a man burn alive three feet from her screaming was the most frightening thing she’d seen in her life.

The numbness had started in her fingertips and was eating its way up her arms. Her breathing was cycling in her throat, fast and shallow, each inhale catching before it reached her lungs.

The ringing in her ears drowned out everything except her own pulse, hammering too fast to count.

The second guard’s fear became a decision. His grip shifted on the blade. His eyes went flat. He crossed the distance between them in three steps, steel raised above his head.

Her wolf spoke to her but the words didn’t register.

Get up. He is coming for us.

Then her wolf surged so hard her vision flickered gold. She crawled to the burning guard and grabbed his sword. She watched it happen from a distance, detached, like observing a stranger with her face do something she would never have done.

She rolled.

Steel hit stone where her skull had been a half-second ago. The sound registered after the roll, because her ears were still ringing.

She came up on her boots, sword extended, legs shaking beneath her. The fever was still in her body, running beneath the gold fire like a second illness.

Can we shift?

Her wolf’s voice came back frustrated.

No. I’m stuck.

Guinevere blinked away the tears that had blurred her vision because she was not a coward. Fighting by blade was not her strength, but she knew the basics and she was going to make damn sure she sold the part.

Chin up. Weight centered. Blade angled at forty-five degrees with the point aimed at his throat. The stance of a woman who knew what she was doing, performed by a woman who did not.

The guard hesitated. One second. Two.

That was when Nicholas Shadowfell rounded the corner.

He took one look at the scene. The burning man on the floor, still twitching. The gold runes pulsing in the walls. The guard with a blade. Guinevere, fevered and shaking, holding a sword she barely knew how to use. His assessment took less than a full second and his blade was drawn before it finished.

The guard saw the wolf king and made a choice. His free hand came up, palm flat, and black flame erupted from it in a column that tore through the corridor toward Nicholas.

Guinevere moved before the thought had finished forming.

She was in front of Nicholas in a blur she did not understand, her body covering his.

Gold fire erupted outward, a wall stretching from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall, so dense it turned the air solid. The black fire hit it and shattered. Sparks of gold and black scattered across the stone like broken glass.

The shield held. The corridor was split in two. The guard and the burning man on one side. Guinevere and Nicholas on the other.

Guinevere dropped the blade in her hand, chest heaving. Her hands trembled. Her eyes were wide.

She had no idea how she did it. She had even less idea how to take it down.

"Come with me. Now." Nicholas’s voice was low, urgent, already moving.

His hand closed around hers.

The jolt hit them both at the same time. Contact. Skin on skin. A current that shot from her fingers into his palm and straight into the center of both their chests. Nicholas froze, every muscle in his body locking.

Her wolf surged forward with a force that nearly knocked her off her boots.

Guinevere Lunaris had exactly two thoughts when Nicholas Shadowfell’s skin touched hers. The first was clinical: electrical current, traveling from her fingers through his palm, detonating somewhere behind both their ribs in a place anatomy had no name for.

The second was her wolf, rising with a force that buckled her knees, and a single word that confirmed something she had hoped was a mistake. Something she was afraid to believe.

Mate.