Chapter 452: I’m Not Getting In. (He Got In.)

Guinevere was unaware that four men had frozen at the exact moment she had surfaced. All she knew was the pressure behind her ears started building again. She went back under immediately because that had helped with the pressure a moment ago.

Nicholas broke first.

His wolf surged up his spine and took the decision out of his hands, and the Alpha King of Nyros crossed the luminous grass at a speed that had no business belonging to anything on two legs and launched himself into the gold pool fully dressed, cloak and all, with the single-minded focus of a missile that had locked onto warmth.

The splash that followed was Alpha sized. Gold water went up and out in every direction.

Kael took the wave full in the mouth. He spat gold water. A second wave hit Maddox square in the chest. Both brothers, still kneeling at the edge, were now soaked through and holding precisely nothing. Both stared at the pool where a wolf king had just vanished with his entire outfit on.

"He went in with his BOOTS ON. Who does that?"

"A goddamn wolf, Kael." Maddox rose off his knees, already working the buckle of his cloak, because he was going in too and he intended to do it like a person with a functioning upbringing.

Kael swiveled between them. "Is this HAPPENING? Is this a POOL now? Are we having a POOL DAY? Should I get TOWELS? Do they HAVE towels here or do they just GLOW DRY?"

In the pool, Nicholas’s body ignited. Every visible inch of the wolf king lit up at once, runes flaring to life across his hands and throat and streaming up out of his soaked collar. His spine went rigid. His chest ballooned. His eyes blew wide as the pool reached into him and hit whatever it had hit in Guinevere a minute before.

From the dry stone, Kael watched it land the way a man watches a neighbor stroll backward onto the business end of a rake.

"For fuck’s sake. Another glower," he snapped. "Everyone is glowing. The pool is glowing. The king is glowing. The wolf is glowing. My mate is glowing. I am the ONLY individual at this entire event who is NOT in a pool and NOT glowing, and somehow I am the one having the worst night of anybody present."

Maddox removed his cloak. He folded it along its seam. He laid it on the stone. He pulled off his boots and stood them side by side like a man arriving somewhere with an appointment. He drew his shirt over his head, folded that too, and set it on the cloak in a tidy stack.

"Naturally. Folding is important," Kael narrated as if anyone was listening, "The most Maddox thing that has ever happened in the history of Maddox. She’s only in a POOL with TWO men and a pair of FLOATING BOOTS. No rush."

Maddox stepped in.

The water climbed to his waist, and his dragon let out a sound that started as a growl and finished, treacherously, as something closer to a purr, because the gold felt extraordinary and the beast had opinions about that it refused to keep private.

He looked down. "What the..."

Across his ribs, bruises were fading in real time, the aches lifting out of him one by one. The relief was deeply inconvenient. The dragon was supposed to be furious. The dragon now felt wonderful, and the two states were not cooperating.

His body detonated gold. Runes started crawling up his bare chest in bright rivers.

"Your dragon just PURRED, Maddox," Kael called from shore.

"Shut up, Kael."

"I’m not getting in."

"Then don’t."

Maddox’s eyes were locked onto Guinevere, who was still under the water enjoying the only quiet left in the kingdom, oblivious to the fact that Nicholas was closing the distance from the left and Maddox from the right.

"Fine." Kael yanked his cloak off his shoulders. He folded it along the seam. He stood his boots side by side on the stone, the exact tidy choreography he’d mocked sixty seconds prior.

Then he launched himself into the gold with zero ceremony. The runes caught him the instant he went under and flared up his arms when he surfaced.

The pressure behind Guinevere’s ears had faded again. So she surfaced, feeling much better.

The scent was worse than it had been even a moment ago. It was intensified by four matebonds all firing at point-blank range, enhanced by a closeness nobody had drawn up and the pool had made impossible to avoid.

Four men stiffened for the second time.

The stiffening was identical. Synchronized down to the locked shoulders and the held breath. Four grown predators standing in a glowing spring, hit by the same biological event at the same instant, like someone had pulled one lever wired to all of them.

Every glow in the pool jumped three degrees brighter. Nicholas’s wolf made a low sound that had nothing civilized left in it. Maddox’s dragon, which had been purring, which had been growling, which had been running its mouth all night, went completely silent, and the silence was worse.

Guinevere looked around at them, genuinely lost. She found something written across all four that she had no word for. Her four matebonds were also producing something intense that she hadn’t felt from them before.

"Honey. Stop doing that," Kael gritted, breaking free first.

She blinked a few times.

"Going under was helping with the pressure," she explained to him, leaving off the fact that it also was helpful to manage four matebond firehoses pouring into her at the same time.

In the same breath, Maddox and Nicholas came unfrozen and reached.

"Guinevere." Landon’s voice dropped, strained thin and pulled tight around the edges. "I am fighting the urge to—"

His wolf surged before the sentence found its end. His fangs sank into one side of her throat in a blur too fast to track, there and buried before a single man in the water registered motion.

Nicholas moved on the same heartbeat and closed his teeth over the other side.