Chapter 68: Swallow It Down Was The WRONG Advice, Gwen

"Qualifications can suck a dick and kiss my ass."

The level of fucks given by Guinevere Lunaris was dropping by the second. It was at this point in the night that she was in a closet surrounded by dead bodies.

To get there, we need to rewind six hours, when she was still with the competent wolf king.

Unwelcome Development #1: Accidental Dry Hump To Floor Collapse

"My wolf." His breath was ragged. "Guinevere. Run. Please."

She didn’t panic like he expected.

"Nicholas, look at me," she whispered, cupping his face with both her hands.

She waited until she had his eyes.

"Take a deep breath. You’re not going to hurt me."

She was misunderstanding what was happening by a continent. He would have laughed at how adorable she was being if he wasn’t having an internal crisis.

"Just close your eyes for a second, and swallow him down. He’s probably just reacting to all the wards." She spoke in the same tone she used on the four-year-old boy to calm him down.

Nicholas closed his eyes at how catastrophically wrong she was.

"Guinevere. My wolf wants you. Right here. Right now... " he gritted. "I need you to get away from me."

His hips started moving into her involuntarily.

Mate. Mate. Mate. Mate.

His eyes were closed, but he could feel her ’oh shit’ through their matebond.

His arm wrapped around her back pulling her off the floor slightly angling her into him and his hips moved faster. He couldn’t stop.

Her wolf surged to meet his. He felt it.

He could feel her fighting her wolf for control. Fighting. Failing. Her breathing was hard in his ear. This would look very bad for her if anyone saw.

Her hips rutted back. Once. Twice.

"That’s it. Flood me with your scent." Nicholas’s voice was no longer his own.

The last thread of her control snapped, and she began grinding back into him.

Fuck. They were full on dry humping and neither could stop. The sound of fabric rubbing on fabric filled the empty hall.

Wolves don’t mark more than once. But he realized his fangs were out after they were in her neck.

She started to orgasm, bringing him over the edge in his pants. Something he would take to the grave.

Even after he released her neck, their bodies were still humping. He couldn’t stop. Neither could she.

The floor rumbled. Guinevere was barely aware.

BOOM.

They were blasted apart and she was ripped from his arms.

Guinevere’s eyes were closed, consciousness almost gone. The floor beneath her vanished. Then she fell until her spine hit the hard stone on the level below, knocking the wind from her lungs.

Debris rained down on her. A chunk of masonry the size of her fist glanced off her temple and everything went black.

When she opened her eyes, she wasn’t sure how long she’d been laying there or where she was. Her mind was foggy, memories coming back in fragments.

The bath tub. Emma’s thighs. Nicholas finding her. One second he gave her a sword. The next, she woke up here.

Her fingers found the bruise on her temple.

She wasn’t sure how or why the floor had collapsed outside of a siege. And she couldn’t shake the feeling that something important had happened in between that she wasn’t remembering.

"Nicholas." Her voice came out broken. She coughed. Dust swallowed everything. Thick. Choking.

"NICHOLAS." She tried again but the word bounced off the stone and came back to her unchanged. She was reaching for him like he was north and the weight of that sat wrong in her chest.

"M-M-Maddox?"

Nothing. She hadn’t been able to feel Maddox through their matebond since he stormed out.

That’s when she realized her legs were pinned. The pressure was even, which meant one slab.

"MADDOX," she sobbed, trying one more time. Nothing.

Then she saw a figure crouched over her. Kael. His expression was caught between fury and worry, like he couldn’t decide whether to save her or scream at her for needing saving.

She closed her eyes again. When she opened them, he was gone.

"Focus, Guinevere. You’re still alive," she said to no one. "Talking to oneself in times of crisis is completely normal."

She twisted onto her side, pressed both palms against the slab, and pushed with everything she had. It slid sideways off her shins. The relief was instant and blinding, the specific euphoria of a body part that had been crushed remembering what not-crushed felt like.

"See. You did it. Now get out of this because you are not a crybaby."

She crawled out through loose rubble that cut her palms, until she was clear, pressed her forehead to the stone floor and breathed. Alive for the tenth time this week by a margin she was no longer comfortable calling luck.

Then she stood and dusted herself off.

"I am not panicking or losing my mind. I am trapped in a small room with rubble all around me, and I need to verbally process the environment to get out of it."

Light was coming from the top of a large pile of rubble. She climbed with shaking hands.

"You survived a volcano, Gwen. This is nothing."

As soon as she was at the top, she squeezed through the opening, then fell down the rubble to the other side. The floor met her like an old friend. It had been generous enough to let her live now twice.

She stood. Looted a sword off a body. Decided not to think about that. Picked a direction.

Panic had won the last few rounds. But this round was hers. Her breathing stayed controlled as she moved. She was no longer verbally processing what was happening. Progress.

Blair Drakencrest came around a corner at the exact moment Guinevere did, and they nearly killed each other.

Blair’s sword came up. Guinevere’s came up too. Both froze.

Guinevere had never been so relieved to see someone who was also clearly having the worst night of her life.

"Oh thank the gods." Blair lowered her blade. Her black hair was wild, her gold eyes were bright with adrenaline, and there was a cut on her cheekbone.

"Where’s Maddox?"

Blair’s eyebrows rose. "I was going to ask you the same thing. We need to get to the throne room. If Maddox is anywhere, that’s where he’ll set up command."

Unwelcome Development #2: He Has A WHAT

Guinevere blinked. "Maddox has a throne room?"

"He’s the High King of Velkaris, Gwen. Yes. It’s the largest room in the Keep."

A throne. In a room. That she had never been told about. The universe was not even being subtle anymore.

The laugh that almost escaped her throat was the wrong shape for laughing and the right shape for something else entirely. He hadn’t mentioned it because the seat beside his had never been hers.

"Gwen?" Blair’s voice softened. "What’s wrong?"

"Nothing. I’m fine."

"You are very much the opposite of fine. Your face just did four things in two seconds and three of them were heartbreaking."

Guinevere opened her mouth. The truth was right there, sitting on her tongue.

Concubines know about throne rooms. I am nothing more than a mistress a king purchased at an auction who had the delusion to believe she was something more even though I knew better. And I let myself fall for a man ignoring every blaring red flag because I didn’t want to see it.

Tears pressed behind her eyes. She wiped them before they fell and swallowed the lump in her throat.

"I’m just a stupid, naive woman who thought this was real."

Blair’s face cycled through shock, confusion, and fury, landing on a promise to destroy whoever did this.

"Gwen, what the fuck are you talking ab—"

Footsteps. Two men rounded the corner with speed. Before either could react, one drove his shoulder into Blair, slamming her into the wall. The second came for Guinevere with a blade she didn’t see until it was already swinging.

All of her technique went out the window and it was in the gods’ hands now. She closed her eyes and swung high. Brief resistance traveled up her arms, then air. A wet sound filled the hall.

Unwelcome Development #3: Bad Head

Her legs gave out before she opened her eyes. She hit the stone floor, sword clattering out of her grip, and something heavy and warm landed in her lap.

She opened her eyes.

A head was sitting in her lap. This was not in the plan. There had been no plan, but if there had been one, this would not have been in it.

It was looking at her. With its eyes. Its open, blinking, very much processing eyes that had not yet received the information that they were no longer connected to a body.

The body was still standing. Upright. Shoulders square. Then it dropped with the delayed confusion of a puppet whose strings had been cut mid-sentence. The head in her lap watched it go.

Guinevere screamed.

The high-pitched sound hit every wall in the corridor, bounced through two adjacent halls, and reached a register that made Blair flinch mid-fight.

The head blinked again.

She screamed again. Louder. Her hands flew up beside her face, palms out, refusing to touch the thing in her lap but also refusing to move because moving meant the head would roll and that was somehow worse.

Blair ducked under the second attacker’s arm and made a decision. If closing your eyes and swinging worked for Guinevere, it was good enough for her. She flailed her sword left to right blindly.

The man pursuing her hadn’t seen anything like it and didn’t see it coming. She kept swinging for ten full seconds before she peeked.

She opened one eye. The man was in two pieces. She screamed.

The corridor was now hosting a duet of screaming women and two dead men, and the acoustics were doing their best to share it with the entire Keep.

Then Blair saw the head in Guinevere’s lap. Screamed again. Kicked it: instinctive, panicked, and surprisingly well-aimed.

The head rolled across the stone floor and came to rest against the far wall, eyes still open, still blinking, expression still baffled by the evening’s developments.

That was when Guinevere noticed the crown. A thin circlet of dark iron sat on the severed head’s brow. The kind of crown that belonged to a minor lord or a house commander.

It blinked a third time.

She screamed a third time. Blair joined her.

They screamed together. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

Blair was the first of the two to run out of air and come to terms with what they’d just done. She grabbed Guinevere, still mid-scream, by both shoulders and smacked her across the face.

Effective. Guinevere’s mouth closed mid-scream.

"Focus." Blair’s voice was shaking, which undermined the authority of the command considerably.

"It blinked at me."

"It blinked at me too, Gwen. We’re having a GREAT evening."

"Why is it still blinking?"

"I don’t know, Gwen. I didn’t study head biology."

More footsteps.

They looked at the two dead men on the floor. Then at the supply closet six feet to their left.