Chapter 450: My SIZE? Excuse The Fuck Out Of You

Once upon a time, a wolf princess went below to escape four mates whose feelings would not slow. Tantrums? Oh, no, no, no. All four took it well with no drama to show.

Now if you believe that, I’ve a kingdom to bestow.

Maddox’s eyes went gold. Deeper than the gold he wore to a war council, darker than the gold he carried into his own throne room. This was the shade that bent the air around his skull into a shimmer, the heat of a furnace somebody had cracked open without checking who stood in front of it.

"Move."

Landon stayed exactly where the gods had planted him, dripping and luminous, radiating the serene confidence of a king who had never lost a staring contest or a continent.

Across Maddox’s shoulder, Guinevere wriggled, levering herself up toward something that resembled diplomacy. "Maddox, if you would allow me a moment to explain the situation in full—"

Her voice reached him the way weather reaches a mountain. Present. Ignored.

"I am the only thing that can help her light stabilize, Drakencrest." Landon lifted his glowing chin a fraction, calm as a man reading out a closing argument he’d already won. "My mages are working on her dark magic as we speak."

That was the moment Guinevere, upside down and mid-negotiation, finally clocked the other two.

Their scents hit first. Then the sensation of four matebonds coming into her at the same time. Apparently the gods had decided to scaffold the full four-mate experience until right this second, while she was upside down, slung over Maddox’s shoulder.

She stiffened. Then her head turned like a compass finding north.

Kael stood steaming in the luminous grass with the look of a man watching his entire religion get desecrated. Beside him loomed Nicholas, wolf-gold and bristling.

Her whole face bloomed, which was the worst possible reaction for every man in the courtyard except the two she was blooming at, and even they couldn’t enjoy it because she was still upside down over someone else’s shoulder.

"Kael. Nicholas. I didn’t realize—"

Neither king got to hear the end of that statement, because Maddox had run out of patience with a monarch in swim shorts lecturing him about his own wife.

"Enough." He braced her weight across his shoulder, freed his other hand, and drove his palm into the dead center of Landon’s glowing chest.

Guinevere’s runes ignited.

Every line carved into her skin flared white at once, bright enough to throw shadows across the oasis and wash the gold out of the water.

CRACK.

The weight on Maddox’s shoulder vanished. One breath she was a warm, arguing armful of wife, and the next he was gripping a fistful of steam and the memory of her.

Clear across the clearing, at the lip of the glowing pool she had been discussing wolf swim lessons thirty seconds earlier, Guinevere reappeared on her hands and knees in the luminous grass. Her chest heaved. Hair curtained down around her face. She blinked at the gold water like it had reached up and slapped her personally.

Four men moved at once.

Landon reached her first, because the courtyard was his and the distance bent for him the way everything in this kingdom did.

He dropped to the grass at her side and pressed two glowing fingers to the back of her hand, and the white fire bleeding out of her runes reversed course and flowed into him. The light climbed his forearm in bright branching veins, up past the elbow, drinking the overflow straight out of her skin.

Both brothers lunged at the same instant, two sets of hands reaching for the same woman from the same stone lip, knees skidding onto the warm rock.

Landon pulled her into the pool mid-reach.

She went into the gold water in one smooth motion, scooped against the King of Light, and Kael’s fingers closed on nothing.

He stared at his empty hand. Then at the pool. Then at his empty hand again.

"Did he just." His arms went wide. "Did a man in swim shorts just yank her away from me INTO A POOL. And we’re on our KNEES. On the STONE. Like we’re PROPOSING." He gestured at the gap between himself and Maddox, at the twin kneeling silhouettes they currently formed. "What is this shit, Maddox. What is this tableau."

Maddox stayed where he was, both hands empty, both palms flat on the wet stone, processing the mechanics of a theft that had happened directly through his fingers. Side by side at the edge of a pool neither of them had agreed to kneel at, the two brothers watched a glowing king hold their wife in the deep end like a prize he’d gotten his hand on first and had no intention of sharing.

In the water, Guinevere’s nose had started to bleed, a thin dark ribbon against all that gold.

"Go under," Landon told her, low, his glowing arm steady around her.

With zero questions or fucks given, she submerged fully under.

The pressure that had been building behind her eyes since the first CRACK let go all at once. The gold closed over her head warm as a held breath, threading into her skin, pulling the ache out by the roots.

Landon’s eyes met Maddox’s without a shred of ego.

"You take her, you risk her vanishing again. She has no control over it." His glowing arm kept drawing the light down. "Right now I am the ground she is discharging into. My light stabilizes her and I am the strongest light bearer alive. I am equipped to pull the surges from her."

"Wrong. My brother can absorb it," Maddox said with zero hesitation.

"Not like I can, Drakencrest."

"I’ve been draining her light for days, Solveil. That stream earlier was a one-time thing because my tank was full. I told you this."

"You’ve done well with what you have. I would never diminish what you’ve done for her because it was very brave of you, Young Light Bearer," Landon replied. "Your dedication over these past days is something I genuinely admire. Absorbing her surges with a light your size takes real courage."

"My SIZE?"