Chapter 351: Forgive Me, Dragon, For I Marked Nicholas

Maddox didn’t wait for a response, already kissing down her neck, leaving a trail of sparks in his wake. Every point of contact was a live wire. His chest against hers. His hands on her waist. The water should have grounded it but instead it conducted, turning the shower into a circuit she couldn’t step out of.

His want was bleeding through their matebond, the full uncut version. But having Nicholas in the other room while Maddox kissed her was a contradiction her body couldn’t hold. The want slammed into the guilt and both of them fought for the same square inch of her chest and the guilt was winning.

She couldn’t breathe right. The guilt was a physical object lodged behind her sternum and every kiss Maddox pressed into her skin made it heavier because he was being good to her. He was being so goddamn good to her and she was keeping something from him and the keeping was worse than the thing.

She realized he must have felt it through their matebond because his lips stalled against her pulse.

"What’s wrong?"

Guinevere didn’t answer right away.

She had marked Nicholas Shadowfell. Her wolf’s teeth had broken a dying king’s skin on a corridor floor while witnesses watched. She had a matebond with Nicholas. She had been naked in a tree pool with him. She had kissed him. Multiple times. She had let him hold her hand through a city made of light while being chased by cops.

And she was married to the man currently pressing his mouth to her neck in a shower.

When she tried to tell Kael earlier, he said that Maddox already knew and that he was protecting her. But the ease of that sat wrong in her chest. It was too clean. Too simple. They were interrupted before she could clarify with Kael further.

What if the thing Kael thought she was confessing was a different thing entirely and the actual thing, the Nicholas thing, was still sitting in the dark like a bill that was accumulating interest every second she didn’t pay it?

Maddox pulled back. His hand came up to her jaw, tilting her face toward his. Water ran between his fingers and down her chin.

"What is it? Tell me, baby."

The déjà vu hit so hard her vision doubled.

His leg was between hers. His grip on her jaw. The way his mouth had just been on her neck, slow and deliberate, the exact same angle, the exact same pressure point. His voice at this register saying those exact words in that exact order. His thumb on her jawline and the word baby landing in her chest like it had a key to a room she couldn’t find.

She had been here before with him about something else. She knew it in her bones but she didn’t know with what.

"Look at me, baby." His voice dropped lower. "You can tell me anything."

Her green eyes met his. Wet. Red-rimmed. Terrified in a way that had nothing to do with the shower and everything to do with the sentence forming behind her teeth.

"Maddox, I..." Her voice trailed off. Her eyes moved to the marble wall behind him, then back to his face. She was measuring the cost of the words against the cost of the silence, and both prices were catastrophic and she couldn’t afford either.

She wanted to tell him. She needed to tell him. The alternative was lying to him and carrying the weight in her chest for the rest of her life. This man was someone she wanted to honor, even if it led to him deciding he didn’t want to be with her anymore. They had been married for only a few weeks, so he could easily annul it if he wanted to. The thought of that made her chest cave but it didn’t change the fact that he deserved the truth.

The reason why she brought it up to Kael to begin with was the other part of the equation. The political ramifications. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to Shadowfell or Lunaris because of her. But Maddox didn’t seem hot-headed or impulsive. She felt like she knew him, even if she didn’t have access to the memories. Her instincts here said to tell him. He was a good man and a good king and not the type to make a rash decision and burn two wolf kingdoms to the ground.

"Guinevere. Is it about Solveil?"

She shook her head no.

Maddox waited. Patient. His thumb traced her jawline. The water hit his back and ran off his shoulders and he stood there like a man who would stand in this shower for the rest of his life if that’s how long it took her to say the thing she was choking on.

"Maddox, there’s something you need to know."

He didn’t loosen his grip. But every muscle in his body went rigid beneath his skin. She felt it through their matebond, the brace, the steel doors closing behind his eyes while his hands stayed gentle.

"Nicholas’s heart stopped and I marked him in front of witnesses." The words came out in a rush, tumbling over each other like they had been shoved out of a building. "My wolf did, that is. It was instinct but I also didn’t fight it. And I think that is what saved his life." She swallowed. The water hit her face and she blinked through it. "But I have a matebond with him too."

Maddox didn’t say anything.

He didn’t move. He didn’t let go. He didn’t react in any way that her eyes could measure. But his jaw locked so hard she felt the tension through his hand on her face, and behind his eyes something was being disassembled and rebuilt at the same time.

One second. Two. The shower filled the silence with white noise that wasn’t white enough.

The lack of explosion told her everything. The stillness. The absence of the fury she had been bracing for. Kael had said they already knew. Kael had said it was handled.

They had been talking about two different things.

Whatever Kael thought she was confessing in that chair, whatever he had been covering up and handling and building a story around, it was something else. Something she didn’t even know about. And the thing she had actually been trying to tell him, the Nicholas thing, the matebond thing, the thing that had been eating her alive since the corridor, Kael hadn’t known that was her confession at all.

The miscommunication landed on her like a piano falling from a roof.

"I’m sorry, Maddox." Her voice cracked. Water and tears were indistinguishable on her face and she was grateful for that. "I don’t remember the auction, but if you bought me, you probably wouldn’t have if you’d known that." She took a steadying breath. "I didn’t know—"

Maddox cut her off mid-sentence with a kiss.

It was firm. It was deliberate. It was the kiss of a man shutting a door on a conversation he was choosing to end on his terms.

"No," he said against her mouth. "You’re mine."