Chapter 426: No Cure For This Shit

Landon turned his head towards the corridor. The two Kingsguard officers who had followed him were standing in the wreckage of the door frame. The intake officer was behind them, pressed against the corridor wall, holding his keys in a hand that had stopped working.

"WHO PUT THESE ON HER?"

The question was aimed at the officers but it hit every person in the room. Blair flinched against Damon’s chest. Beta Draven’s jaw tightened. Briggs held his satchel tighter. Brennan’s hands were raised like he was under arrest.

"None of us in here. But I have a list for you," Kael stated.

Landon turned to look at him, eyes burning.

Kael was still holding Guinevere from behind. His arms had tightened when Landon grabbed her arms and his dragon was rumbling beneath his ribs with the sustained, low-frequency warning of an engine that was deciding whether to idle or redline.

The intake officer stumbled forward. This was his first day on the job. First hour on the job, actually, because his shift started thirty minutes ago. He thought intake would be easy. He was wrong. His hands were shaking. The key found the cuffs on the third attempt because the first two attempts were derailed by the fact that the King of Light was staring at him with eyes that contained two occupants and both of them were composing his obituary.

The cuffs opened.

The sensation hit Guinevere like a balloon bursting behind her eardrums. The pressure that had been building in her skull for hours, the one she had been living with since the warded cuffs went on, the one she hadn’t noticed was as bad as it was because it had been building all day, released in a single violent pop that whited out her vision and buckled her knees.

Landon felt it at the same second. His whole body seized. The pop traveled through his hands where they were still holding her arms and up his arms and into his chest and the braided voice let out a sound that was half relief and half rage because the relief confirmed what the rage had been screaming since he woke up. She had been suppressed. Dimmed. Cuffed with wards that choked the connection between them to a whisper and every second those cuffs had been on was a second he was going to make someone answer for. ℯ𝐥.𝒄ℴ𝓶

Kael felt it too. The pop hit him through every point of contact with her body. The flood of light that had been bottlenecked by the wards broke free and slammed into him with a force that knocked his head back. His arms clamped down. His runes blazed white. More blood ran from her nose and he wiped it with his sleeve without letting go.

Both men had her.

Landon’s hands on her arms. Kael’s arms around her waist. The light pouring out of her splitting into two streams, one into each of them, finding two vessels and filling both simultaneously.

Guinevere felt it.

A matebond was humming in her chest between Mr. Sun and herself and she was going to need a moment to process that. You’d think she’d be used to it by now. She knew it was coming. But, alas, it was still a large pill to swallow.

She could feel King Solveil’s fury, his fear, and his relief, all three hitting her at once through a connection she had never felt before and could already tell was going to be loud.

Kael’s dragon rumbled louder. The warning upgraded from idle to redline because a man was holding his mate’s arms and the matebond he could feel between them was a frequency his dragon recognized and rejected simultaneously. He also knew it was coming. He didn’t like it.

Landon’s head turned.

His molten eyes found Kael’s grey ones. The assessment was immediate. Total. The eyes of a king looking at a man who was touching something that belonged to him and the assessment producing a conclusion that lived entirely in the gold and had nothing to do with the amber.

Something growled under Landon’s ribs.

The sound was wrong. Landon Solveil was Luminari. The Luminari did not growl. The Luminari did not rumble. The Luminari radiated and glowed and burned with the quiet, solar certainty of a species that had never needed to make noise because the light said everything.

This was noise. This was a growl that came from a place Landon had never accessed and did not recognize and could not control. It vibrated through his chest and into his throat and aimed itself at the dragon holding the woman whose arms he was refusing to release. ℯ𝕝.

"Let go of her," Kael said.

His voice was steady. Flat. The voice of a man who had been possessive since the day he was born and was very good at it and was currently looking at a glowing king who was growling at him from two feet away and was choosing to be unimpressed.

Landon’s mouth opened. The voice that came out was less him and more the other. The braided tone tilted toward the deeper register, the one that had been demanding and commanding since his eyes first snapped open, the one that had no interest in diplomacy or introductions or the concept of sharing.

"No."

Guinevere took a deep breath. She was standing between two men who were both holding her while she was pretending to not feel a matebond with one of them and her ears kept popping.

Her nose had stopped bleeding but the evidence was on her jumpsuit and on Kael’s sleeve. Her heartbeat was slamming so hard she could feel it in her teeth. And the brand new humming in her chest, the one connected to the golden king whose hands were still locked around her arms, was vibrating at a volume that Kael could clearly feel because she could feel his reaction to it through their matebond as well.

White runes ignited across Landon’s forearms.

The lines crawled from his arms to his elbows in real time, threading through his golden skin in a pattern that matched Guinevere’s and matched Kael’s and matched the two kings sitting in a Keep on another continent who had caught the same goddamn rash.

Kael shot Blair a look that said see, Blair? For life. Those are permanent. They glow. They spread.