Chapter 451: Candle Scandal. Young Dragon Couldn’t Handle.

"Yes, Young Light Bearer. Think of it like a candle versus the sun. Yours is small," Landon explained in a way that was unclear if he was fucking with the young dragon or being completely genuine.

If he was genuine, Kael’s light was being evaluated by an expert and found adorable. If he was fucking with him, Landon Solveil had a sense of humor, which was worse because it made him harder to hate.

Kael stared at him for four full seconds. "Small."

"I meant it as praise, Young Light Bearer."

"Small." Kael repeated it again. "He called my light small, Maddox."

"I heard, Kael."

"And then he said candle to a fire dragon. He compared me to a CANDLE. And he called himself the sun," Kael reported to the one person whose outrage he trusted to match his own.

The solidarity did not arrive.

"Yes. We’ve established this."

Maddox’s voice carried the emotional investment of reading a receipt. He had dismissed the insult, which normally would have been kind of funny, because he had a bigger problem standing in a pool holding his wife.

"Small," Kael said a third time, testing the word again.

"Yes, Kael. Small. That’s what he fucking said," Maddox snapped, completely over this.

"Nothing about me is small, Solveil," Kael called across the water. "Now, bring her here so I can absorb her light."

Landon didn’t move or seem bothered in the slightest.

The demand sat between them. Landon regarded it the way a man regards a fly on a surface he has already decided is not his problem. The fly could stay. The fly could leave. The fly was not changing anything about the pool.

Kael was the fly. The realization arrived and was immediately rejected.

Guinevere broke the surface. The bleeding had stopped and the color had come back to her face. She took in the scene of two murderous dragons kneeling at the edge of the pool and a wolf king whose eyes were headlights.

At the moment, all four men were having big feelings. She knew this because four matebonds were firehosing those feelings into her at the same time. Maddox’s was hot. Nicholas’s was deep. Kael’s was very loud. Landon’s was new and uncertain and running at a frequency she hadn’t tuned yet.

It was a lot. Understatement. The combined output was drowning her while she stood in a pool, which was irony only the gods could appreciate.

"Wolf girl. Come." Kael whistled, the exact pitch Damon reserved for Brennan when he wandered too far and needed to be reminded he was not, in fact, the main character.

She did not come.

Instead, she went right back under, leaving the young dragon to process that in real time.

Kael watched the ripples close over the spot where her head had been. The whistle would have worked on Brennan or Griffin just fine. Brennan would have come running. Griffin would have come sprinting. But his emotional support wolf decided his whistle could go fuck itself and issued a death certificate of his authority.

"Did she just go under the water to avoid me?" He turned to Maddox, scandalized, betrayed, and delighted in the way only Kael could layer all three at once because Kael Ashenvale was the most complicated man in any courtyard on any continent. "Big trouble, wolf girl. Big, big trouble."

The threat was delivered at a volume that the bottom of the pool could absolutely hear and chose to ignore. It was also an empty threat because the woman it was aimed at could go underwater, mark three kings, and start a prison book club, and Kael Ashenvale would still be standing at the edge of whatever body of water she’d disappeared into.

Nicholas turned his head slowly towards Kael. "You called her ’wolf girl’ and whistled at her, Ashenvale."

"Yes. That’s her name. The whistle was heard. This is a DELAYED response. She’ll come."

"Delayed response." Nicholas tasted the phrase. "Yeah, no. You whistled. She submerged. The response was immediate. The response was no."

"Nobody asked you for your opinion, Biscuit."

While the shore debated linguistics, Landon stood in the center of the pool. He was holding the hand of Guinevere, who was still submerged, with the territorial certainty of a king holding a toy during a game he invented where the rules only protected him. Finders Keepers 2.0.

He took one unhurried step backward into deeper water for good measure, bringing her with him.

The center of the pool was base. Obviously. Everyone else could get fucked.

It was not, in fact, base.

"However shall we be able to reach her?" Kael flung an arm at the pool from his kneeling position on the stone. "Well boys, he went past five feet, nothing we can do, pack it in. I guess that means we can’t get her and should just GIVE UP."

"You think holding MY wife like a lifeguard is going to save you?" Maddox called across the pool. "I AM the lifeguard, Solveil. And your pool privileges are REVOKED."

Kael rubbed his temple. "Buddy. I love you. That was a four."

"It started strong. ’I am the lifeguard’ had potential. But your threat was a pool ban," Nicholas agreed, co-signing the critique without taking his eyes off the water.

Maddox did not seem to hear either of them. "Take one more step, Solveil. I dare you."

Nicholas and Kael exchanged the look. The look that transcended species and language, used since the dawn of time, when two men watched a third set himself on fire and called it strategy.

Landon took another step like he had been dared to.

From the pool, Landon’s voice carried across the surface. "The water helps her, Drakencrest."

"The water helps YOU," Kael corrected. "The water is YOUR water. Everything in this kingdom is YOURS. The stone is yours. The light is yours. The pool is yours. I went to prison here and the PRISON was yours."

"You volunteered for prison, Young Light Bearer."

"I VOLUNTEERED because YOUR Commander arrested MY mate. And now you’re committing aquatic wife theft."

"She’s healing."

"This is the lowest point of my life and I went to prison today."

"You went where?" Landon called from across the pool.

"TO PRISON."

"Sorry, repeat that one more time."

"I went" CLAP. "To prison." CLAP.

"You went to..."

"PRISON, Solveil. PRISON. Four walls. GANGS."

The word ’gangs’ echoed off the trees. The young dragon left out book club, a card table, a man with a tax problem, a woman with a purse, the soup, or any of the other things prison had to offer.

"Kael, stop announcing you went to goddamn prison," Maddox cut in, deciding that if he heard the word prison one more time he was going to push the young dragon into the pool himself. "Get in the pool and go get her."

"YOU get in the pool, Maddox. I have dry clothes on."

Guinevere surfaced again at that moment. Four men froze on the exact same heartbeat. Whatever the gold water was doing to her scent just pulled rank on every man in the courtyard. It was stronger than it had ever been before.