Chapter 436: His Chambers (Established Three Times)

BANG.

Nicholas’s fist hit the obsidian table so hard the surface cracked beneath his knuckles. Every glass on the table jumped. Every person at the table flinched. Except Maddox, whose dragon answered the impact with a growl that rattled Sterling’s teeth.

"He carried her unconscious into Solveil the night she went missing from Greyhall Crossing. Her balcony doors were open. Fourth floor. Impossible to get to unless that person could literally fly."

His chest heaved. His wolf was making a sound that Damon had only heard twice in his life.

"I dismantled Greyhall that night. Room by room. Stone by stone. Solveil knew where she was because he took her and did not send me a single word. I spent that night believing she had been taken. He carried her out of my territory unconscious. Into his kingdom. Into his chambers. And he left me nothing. No message. No envoy. No explanation. Just open doors and a room that smelled like her and an Alpha who stopped his continental war summit to find her."

"We didn’t confirm that with him," Damon said carefully.

Nicholas turned his head slowly to look at his Beta. "I know I’m right and so do you."

"Yes," Damon replied after a moment. "That is my hunch. I also believe it’s not the whole story. Solveil had his people searching alongside ours when she went missing. He put assets on the ground before she vanished, not after. That timeline matters. Whatever happened in Greyhall, I don’t think it started as a plan to take her from you. There’s a gap in the story and the gap is where the truth is."

"I was not in Greyhall when that happened," Beta Draven cut in. "But I can confirm his Master Mage was warding Lunaris on his order when Renwick and I returned. He had apparently arrived there to find her missing. So he brought in his healers and mages to help Lunaris and left for Greyhall. That’s not a man setting up an abduction. That’s a man who got caught in something and made a bad call. The bad call needs answering. But it’s not the same as theft."

Kael held up one hand like a traffic cop who just realized the carriages are full of idiots. The only thing stopping a pileup is his palm and insurance doesn’t cover stupidity. "Solveil’s a complicated man who did a complicated thing for complicated reasons and we’ll unpack it when I have the energy to care. But it’s a problem for after we deal with the problem Maddox is about to bring up in three, two—"

"That doesn’t answer my question." Maddox gritted, his voice braided between dragon and man.

"Right on schedule," Kael commented with the satisfaction of a meteorologist who had been right, was still right, and couldn’t give a flying fuck who was offended by the forecast.

"Why the FUCK is my wife not in this room?" Maddox asked, not seeming to have heard Kael whatsoever.

"Funny you ask that," Kael replied. "He thinks he has a wolf now and it’s her fault. She cannot leave him in good conscience because she is the reason he has a wolf and an innocent man is in pain because of her."

The war room was quiet.

Through the entire eruption and explanation, Blair’s shoulder had not moved from Damon’s arm. The revelation about Guinevere, the cracked table, the migrating glass, none of it had displaced the shoulder. The shoulder was committed. Sterling had been tracking the shoulder through his entire peripheral vision and the tracking was consuming bandwidth his concussion could not afford.

Maddox’s hands were flat on the obsidian table. His jaw was locked. His gold eyes were fixed on a point in the center of the table that did not exist and was receiving the full intensity of a dragon king’s fury because the alternative target was a continent away and the table was here.

Nicholas’s eyes had not moved from Kael’s face.

"She thinks she gave a Luminari king a wolf," Maddox said slowly, testing the sentence the way a man tests ice before stepping onto it.

"That’s what I just said. She believes she gave him a wolf," Kael confirmed.

"And she’s staying with him."

"Until he stabilizes."

"In his chambers."

"In his chambers," Maddox repeated.

"Yes. In his goddamn chambers," Kael stated.

"My wife. Is in his chambers."

"Your wife is in his chambers. I have now said in his chambers three times. Each time it has meant the same thing. I would like to stop saying in his chambers."

"Then give me a different answer."

"I don’t have a different answer. I have the answer. The answer is in his chambers. We’ve established this."

Maddox’s dragon erupted beneath his ribs so loud the obsidian table vibrated. The rumble traveled through the surface and rattled Beta Draven’s water glass and the water glass moved three inches to the left without anyone touching it.

Nicholas said nothing. His silence was worse than Maddox’s dragon because Maddox’s dragon was noise and noise was processing and Nicholas’s silence was a decision being made and decisions made in silence by wolf kings tended to involve movement and movement tended to involve consequences that diplomats spent years cleaning up.

"She sends her apologies to you both," Kael added, "She wanted to thank you both for caring enough to send people for her. And to pass along that she will return as soon as she can."

The apology sat on the obsidian table between the two kings like a flower placed on a landmine.

She was sorry. She was always sorry. She was the most apologetic woman on two continents and the apologies were always sincere and the sincerity was the part that made it impossible to be angry at her so the anger had nowhere to go.

"How sure are we that she gave him a wolf?" Maddox asked, and the question landed on the table with the weight of a man who needed the answer to be wrong.

"How sure are we," Nicholas echoed from the opposite end, and the echo carried a different weight because Nicholas was a wolf king and the idea of a Luminari male receiving a wolf through a bite from his mate was impossible.

Kael looked at both of them. Then at the table. Then he raised both hands, palms out, and redirected.

"I’m a dragon, not a wolf. This is outside my jurisdiction." His eyes found Beta Draven with the smooth precision of a man passing a flaming baton to the only runner qualified to carry it. "One of the Betas. Have at it."