Chapter 66: Don’t Look At The Competent Wolf King

The moment Nicholas’s hand closed around hers, he knew Maddox hadn’t told her.

She jolted the second their skin made contact, and her shock flooded into him through their matebond. If the Keep weren’t under siege, he would have laughed.

For three seconds, neither of them moved.

Then she looked away and pulled her hand free. The separation cost something she was going to pretend she did not feel.

"We need to move." Her voice was steady. The rest of her was a catastrophe.

The second she let go, his wolf started howling in his mind, demanding he shove her against the stone, and fuck her until the only word left in her vocabulary was his name. He locked his jaw and let the king version of himself take over before he did something unforgivable.

"The Keep is under attack," he said. "Wolf mindlink is down. I sent Damon and my men to find Maddox."

She should have been frightened but she wasn’t. She didn’t even blink, which made all of Nicholas’s protective instincts fire at once.

"I won’t let anything happen to you, Guinevere. Stay behind me."

They made it forty feet before she heard crying. The sound was small. High-pitched. Coming from a storage alcove to their left, wedged between two supply shelves.

Guinevere stopped.

A boy, maybe four years old, was sitting on the stone floor with his knees pulled to his chest. His face was red and wet, his breath hitching in a broken rhythm that was past crying. He saw Guinevere and launched. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

She picked him up without thinking, one arm beneath him, his face pressing into her neck with the desperate trust of a child who was finished being brave.

"Hey. I’ve got you. You’re okay." Her voice dropped into the register she used with children, warm and certain. "Can you tell me your name?"

"Torin." The boy hiccuped against her collarbone and held on tighter.

"Torin. Good. That’s a strong name." She shifted his weight to her hip. "Torin, what’s your family name?"

"Wagner."

She paused as her brain cycled through the Keep’s staff roster.

"Is your mother Sera? Works in the lower kitchens?"

He nodded against her neck.

"And your father is a warrior. Third company, eastern garrison."

Another nod. Smaller this time, because his body was starting to give up on adrenaline and lean into the safety her arms were offering.

Nicholas watched this from four feet away and something unfamiliar flooded into his chest that he didn’t have a name for.

She had been in this Keep for less than two weeks. The staff numbered in the thousands. She knew his parents by name and unit assignment. The specificity of that alone told him that she paid attention to the people everyone else looked through.

But it was more than the names. It was the second-nature way she comforted this child. That was what a true luna looked like, and exactly what he didn’t know he was looking for until now.

He kept it to himself and turned his attention back to the corridor before his face gave him away.

"Which direction, Guinevere?"

Guinevere looked left, then right. Left was a stairwell. Right eventually led to a dead end. She knew that, but her instincts said go right. They were never wrong.

"This way," she called over her shoulder.

Gold light traced the outline of a doorway at the end of the hall.

She walked towards it with Torin on her hip and the stone parted like it had been waiting for her, revealing a passage behind the dead end.

Nicholas stared at the opening. Then at her. Then at the opening.

"Does this happen often? Walls opening for you on command?" His tone was deadpan, and also, unmistakably amused.

"First time."

"Convincing."

Runes ignited as they descended, lighting the passage for thirty yards before it opened into a service hall that she had never seen. Not that anyone had ever shown her a map of the keep.

Why would a foreign princess need a map of a keep? Maddox hadn’t announced their wedding officially. Outside of the elders who were there and a handful of warriors, no one knew.

A foreign princess by day. Mistress and secret wife by night. Lower than a concubine. Mapless.

Every red flag had been there from the start. The more she thought about it, the more it weighed on her, and none of it was helpful for the current situation.

"Guinevere?" Nicholas’s voice was soft.

She turned, meeting his eyes. The expression on his face tipped her off to what he was thinking.

He was feeling the turmoil she was hiding. Because he was her fated mate and could feel her just like Maddox could.

Nicholas opened his mouth like he wanted to say something else, but didn’t.

She looked away. Swallowed. Then glanced down at Torin, who had fallen asleep on her shoulder. His breathing was even, his fist curled in the collar of her zip suit. The trust of a child who had decided this woman was safe and had stopped processing the rest.

"Right turn coming up here," she said softly.

They continued down the service corridor in silence, turning right at the end to find seven servants huddled together. Guinevere recognized five of them.

"Maren. Dalla. Take the back passage, it’s clear." She tipped her chin behind her.

"Thank you, Princess."

She gave them a warm, but unmistakably sad smile back.

"Nicholas, could you—"

She stopped mid-question, because Nicholas had already moved to check the corridor ahead on his own. They were on the same wavelength.

He found two hostiles. The kills were clean, efficient, the work of a king who had defended his own Keep against siege and was applying that experience to a Keep that was asking nothing of him and receiving everything.

He came back wiping the blade. "Clear for sixty yards."

They moved.

Every time they hit a dead end, gold runes lit a new doorway, and the stone parted. The Keep was showing off with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever and the dramatic timing of a theater kid, and she was rolling with it.

Four hidden tunnels later, they came across a group of healers and stablehands. They had armed themselves with pitchforks and were guarding the infirmary.

Nicholas took command of them and they responded to his authority with an instinct that transcended species.

"You three, hold this corridor. Nothing passes." He pointed at the three largest men. They inflated like he’d just knighted them. One of them was holding a pitchfork backwards. Nicholas corrected it without comment.

"You two, take the east flank and watch for movement. The rest of you, stay in front of the infirmary. If anything comes through that door, you hit it until it stops moving and then you hit it again."

One of the stable hands nodded so hard Guinevere thought his neck might give out.

Nicholas had assigned defensive positions in a Keep he had never studied, using men he had never trained, with ease. He did not appear to find this remarkable. Guinevere found it deeply, inconveniently remarkable.

Three more groups, two more corridors, Nicholas taking charge like this was his Keep. People responded.

Don’t look at the competent king. Don’t look at the competent king. Don’t think about the competent king.

She looked at the competent king. He was still competent.

She swallowed, seeing all of it, and kept going. She was running an evacuation, a fever, and an emotional crisis, all simultaneously, and refused to drop a single plate, even the ones that were on fire.

"Lira." Guinevere flagged a woman running toward them, wild-eyed, from a side hall. "Lira, wait."

The woman skidded to a halt, chest heaving, tears streaking through the soot on her face.

"I was looking for Torin, my sister’s boy. He was in the upper ward when it started and I can’t find him."

Guinevere shifted the sleeping child from her left shoulder to her right. Lira’s relief was instant and total.

"He’s fine. He’s been asleep for half an hour. Tell Sera he was brave."

"Thank you, Princess." Lira took the boy with hands that were shaking so badly she nearly dropped him.

She disappeared down the passage with Torin still sleeping against her chest.

Nicholas watched her go. Then he looked at Guinevere.

Her fever was climbing. He could see it in the flush spreading across her collarbones, in the slight tremor in her hands, in the way she was distributing her weight to compensate for legs that wanted to buckle.

She caught him looking and straightened. "I’m fine."

"I didn’t say anything."

"You were about to."

He had been. He closed his mouth and kept walking. But she had no idea how not-fine he was.

An unwanted image flashed through Nicholas’s mind before he could stop it: that same fevered flush racing down her throat and across her breasts while his mouth was on her heat. He shook his head once, pushing the thought away.

She turned left. Nicholas covered her flank without being told. They moved like they had done this together for years or knew each other in a past life. Partnerships that worked this well took practice. Training. Time. They had none of those things and all of the results. The ease of it was offensive.

The only reason Nicholas was with her doing this was because this wasn’t his keep. She knew that.

Maddox probably would work with her like this too. Though she had never seen him lead, there was no question he was a good king based on how his people respected him.

They just hadn’t had the opportunity to work together, so she hadn’t seen him in action. Maddox clearly didn’t want her by his side yet. Keyword yet. It still stung.

She swallowed the emotions down. Stupid. Unhelpful. The sooner she accepted the reality of what this was, the better.

She hadn’t been able to feel Maddox through their matebond since he stormed from their chambers.

Either the wards were blocking her or he was.