Chapter 170: "No Touchy" — Says the Battering Ram With Separation Anxiety

Maddox burst through the double doors. He shoved past Jaxon and Aldric, ignoring their glowing hands, and dropped to his knees beside the bed.

"Baby." His hand found her face. "Wake up for me."

She didn’t wake up.

Her hair was luminous white, bright enough that looking directly at it made his eyes water. It seemed to be getting brighter by the second.

The heat radiating off of her felt like an oven door opened in his face.

He pulled her off the bed and into his arms like she weighed nothing. His skin lit gold immediately, matching her glow. His dragon rumbled as his body began drinking the heat inside of her.

That’s when he knew this wasn’t that. Sure, he still pulled merge heat from her. But this was something else. A warning.

"She’s burning up." He pressed his palm to her forehead and his jaw tightened. "This is past my flame. What is wrong with her?"

"We were trying to determine that before you shoved past us like a battering ram with separation anxiety," Aldric said, his voice carrying the measured irritation of a man who had been elbowed aside by his own king while performing medicine. "Hands on her sternum, magic in her chest, diagnostic in progress, and then six-foot-five of concerned husband bulldozed the procedure. If you’d like to hold her and panic, I can accommodate that."

"How long has she been like this?" Maddox asked, ignoring every word Aldric had just said with the practiced ease of a king who had been ignoring medical professionals since childhood.

"She was warm a few minutes ago," Blair answered from the chair, her voice steady but her eyes tracking the white glow with an intensity that said she’d been watching it escalate and hadn’t liked the trajectory. "But it’s been getting worse. Fast."

"It’s more than my flame." Maddox’s arms tightened around her. "I’m touching her but the heat is staying in her. It’s building. Why is it building?"

At that moment, Kael, who had been propped against the headboard in unusual silence throughout the entire commotion, went rigid.

His eyes widened. The grey in his face shifted as something that was decidedly neither sleep nor delirium crossed his expression.

"What the hell is that?"

"What?" The word came from five mouths at the same time, which was both efficient and deeply unhelpful.

Aldric pinched the bridge of his nose. "One at a time. Or, ideally, none at a time, so I can work."

Kael moved, wincing as he did. He dragged himself across the bed towards the end where Maddox was holding Guinevere.

He reached for her hair.

Maddox yanked Guinevere away from his brother so fast it sounded like MINE had been violently ejected from his soul at Mach speed.

"I am literally trying to help, you possessive psychopath." Kael’s hand was still extended, hovering in the air where Guinevere’s head had been a quarter-second ago.

Blair, from her chair, stared at the interaction and thought: thank fuck Maddox didn’t walk in ten minutes ago.

Maddox stared at him with gold-slit eyes wearing the expression of a man whose dragon was telling him to bite his brother for reaching.

"What." he snapped.

Then the king part of him caught up with the dragon part, and he lowered Guinevere inches without putting her down.

"Your bedside manner is really something," Kael commented. "Have you considered a career in diplomacy? You’d be terrible at it."

Kael reached again. His fingers brushed the white strands aside from her neck.

The second his skin made contact, heat and light poured out of Guinevere and into Kael in a rush so immediate and so visible that every person in the room saw it happen.

The relief was so sudden, that even with her unconscious, Maddox felt it hit through their matebond like a valve being released on a pressure cooker.

Her temperature dropped. Her breathing evened. The blinding white in her hair dimmed to something manageable.

She was still unconscious. She was still glowing. But the heat that had been building toward something dangerous was now draining into Kael.

Kael didn’t register any of it. He wasn’t thinking about the heat or the glow or the transfer or the fact that his body was absorbing light from his brother’s wife like a sponge.

His eyes were locked on her neck, on the thing he had spotted, and his face was doing something complicated.

"Interesting. They both get the gold, but Ashenvale gets the white too," Jaxon murmured from behind Maddox, as if he were observing a rare species in the wild.

"They were glowing earlier. All three of them," Aldric commented.

Maddox’s dragon grumbled. Low, deep, the vibration traveling through his chest and into Guinevere and into the bed frame and into the floor.

When he spoke, the dragon was riding shotgun on every syllable, the man and the beast sharing the same vocal cords the way they did when the territorial instinct overrode the social contract.

"Why are you still touching my wife, Kael?"

Kael didn’t answer. His fingers were frozen on her hair, pushed aside, his eyes locked on something that hadn’t existed two days ago.

His dragon, from deep inside his chest, began to purr. This did not help.

The silence stretched. Kael’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"Kael." Maddox’s voice dropped lower. "Speak."

Ryker’s voice cut into Maddox’s mind.

Ryker: The Luminari healer is here. But so is the King of Light.

Maddox: Why is Landon here?

Maddox’s dragon answered before Ryker could. Kill him. Eat him. Burn his bones.

That’s not a proportional response, he thought back to the beast.

The dragon disagreed, then rumbled so hard both nightstands rattled in tandem. A brown candle surrendered its post, rolling off the edge and hitting the floor with a soft thud.

Ryker: He’s insisting he comes back to see her himself.

Maddox: No.

Ryker: The man rebuilt our wards overnight, sent his best healer at dawn, and blasted the Dark Fae king through a portal for her. Do you really want me to turn him away?

Yes. The answer was yes. Every fiber of his being screamed yes.

Maddox: Fine. He can come in but he doesn’t touch her.

His dragon growled again.

If he reaches for her, we burn him.

Maddox considered this a reasonable middle ground.