Chapter 164: His Bear Rug Was Bigger. Naturally.

Kael’s quarters looked exactly the way they had last night, which was to say they looked like a furniture store had been murdered by a library.

Blair sank into a brown leather chair.

She had complained about the brown in here last night, and now, Maddox couldn’t unsee it. Brown leather. Brown curtains. Brown lampshades. Brown sheets, brown wall hangings, brown vase, brown nightstands. Even the candles were brown.

It all matched perfectly. Maddox was more of a black guy, but he could respect it. The man had good taste.

He made eye contact with the bear rug. His bear rug was bigger than Kael’s. Naturally. But Kael’s wasn’t THAT bad. Blair was just finding things to complain about.

He laid Guinevere on the far side of Kael’s bed, because the guest room mattress was bare and soaked.

"You are carrying her like a stuffed animal," Blair commented.

"I am not," Maddox snapped.

She wordlessly got up, crossed the room, took a pillow from under Kael’s head, and put it under Guinevere’s. Kael didn’t stir. Blair didn’t care.

"He has four pillows total in here and only one is good," Blair said, settling back into her chair. "The other three are decorative. He thinks they ’tie the room together.’ They do the opposite."

The old healer shuffled to Kael’s bedside with the unhurried gait of a man who had been walking toward dying people for a century and saw no reason to rush now. He looked down at Kael with the expression of a master carpenter staring at a table that had been left in the rain, used as a beer pong surface, and possibly set on fire.

Kael was grey. Less grey than he’d apparently been when Blair arrived, but grey enough that Maddox’s chest tightened at the sight. The blood transfusion had brought some color back to his lips. His breathing was shallow. His brow was still furrowed even unconscious, the face of a man who could be annoying in his sleep.

The healer placed his palm on Kael’s sternum and pushed white light into him.

Kael’s eyes flew open.

"WOOOAH there, buddy." He grabbed the old man’s wrist. "Buy me a drink first."

"Release my hand, young dragon."

"I will when you stop glowing inside me. I have personal boundaries. They’re flexible but they exist."

"Your boundaries are noted. Release my hand."

Kael released the hand. The healer resumed. The white light sank deeper, spreading through Kael’s chest in threads that pulsed twice before settling into a steady glow.

Kael squinted at the old man. "Who are you? You’re glowing. Why are you glowing?" He spotted Guinevere. "Why is she in MY bed and not yours?"

"My bed is a biohazard," Maddox said.

"Your bed has been a biohazard since you were seventeen. That’s never stopped you before."

"Long story."

"I love long stories. I’m bedridden. I’ve got nothing but time and shades of brown."

Blair’s eyes cut to Kael at shades of brown , the look of a woman hearing her own insult repeated back to her without credit.

The old healer’s hand paused over Kael’s sternum, and his milky eyes tracked downward to the ring on Kael’s finger, the one that had been glowing on Diplomat Row, the one Maddox had seen pulse when Guinevere’s white light had detonated.

"That ring," the healer said. "Where did you get it?"

Kael glanced down at his hand. The humor left his face in stages, peeling back like paint to reveal something underneath that he kept in a locked room and rarely opened.

"It was my father’s battle ring. Lost up until Wolf Girl found it yesterday," Kael replied, with zero emotion in his voice. Just facts.

The old healer studied the ring, then Kael, then the ring again. "Do you know what it is?"

"It’s a ring."

"It’s a Luminari soul anchor." The healer’s voice shifted from conversational to something older, something that belonged in a classroom or a temple. "Forged in living light. I’ve seen four in three hundred years, and three of those were in museums. They’re given by Luminari to those they love as a final gift. A piece of their light, held in metal, dormant until activated."

Kael’s throat worked. He said nothing, which was the loudest thing Kael Ashenvale had ever done in a room.

"You are very lucky," the old man continued, "that the wolf princess activated it when she did."

"What do you mean, activated it?"

"King Solveil mentioned something to me before I came here this morning." The healer removed his hand from Kael’s chest and straightened. "Her light fully awakened after the gold veil."

Maddox’s jaw tightened. The gold veil. The cylinder of flame Guinevere had detonated around herself and Kael on Diplomat Row while they were surrounded.

"That is how those rings activate," the old healer said. "Only once in a Luminari’s life, when their light activates. And only to save a life. The distinction matters, young dragon, because light summoned to defeat, to destroy, to win, that will never trigger a soul anchor. It must be the other thing." He paused. "Love in its purest form. The kind that has no strategy behind it and no self-preservation in it. The kind that spends everything and expects nothing back."

The room went quiet in a way that had weight to it.

Kael looked at Guinevere, unconscious on the other side of his bed, slippers on, hair still damp, and his face did something that Maddox had never seen it do. It cracked. The performance fell away, the bravado and the one-liners and the carefully maintained persona of a man who treated sincerity like a foreign language, all of it dropped, and what was underneath was just a man looking at the woman who’d brought him back from the dead with a kind of love he hadn’t earned and couldn’t repay and was going to spend the rest of his life pretending didn’t wreck him.

It lasted two seconds. Then the mask came back, because Kael was Kael, and vulnerability had a shelf life.

"Well," he said. "Add that to the list of things she’ll hold over me."

Maddox’s dragon rumbled in his chest. Low. Deep. A growl that vibrated through his ribs and into the bedframe and rattled the brown candle on the brown nightstand.

The sound filled the room, and there was nothing playful in it. The beast was listening to an old man explain that his mate’s purest love had been given to his brother, and the dragon understood the math even if the man refused to do it.

Kael heard the growl. Looked at Maddox. Read every line of it.

"Relax, little brother." His voice was light. "Zero out of five stars. Terrible experience."

The dragon didn’t stop growling.

"Maddox." Kael held his gaze. "If that ring runs on love, then the woman who set it off loves everybody. She loves you. That was a reflex, and I happened to be the nearest dying idiot. If it had been a stranger, she’d have done the same thing. Your wife can’t help herself. It’s her whole problem. You know that. I know that. Your dragon is an insecure lizard, and I say that with deep, personal affection for both of you."

The growl faded. Slowly. The dragon was not convinced and still wanted blood, but Kael’s bullshit had been delivered with such expert timing that Maddox’s rational mind managed to wrestle the horny murder lizard back into its cage.

"Insecure," Maddox repeated flatly.

"Yes. A possessive, insecure, fire-breathing lizard."

"You’re in our dead father’s ring, in a bed with my wife, calling my dragon an insecure lizard."

"Correct. And if you’d like to hit me for any of those things, I’d ask you to wait until I can feel my legs, because I’d like to at least attempt to dodge."