Chapter 176: Share, Maddox. SHARE.

Nicholas Shadowfell survived a portal built with a one-in-four explosion rate and followed a princess through a keep that smelled like bath salts, all to reach the woman whose heartbeat had been pulling at his chest for weeks.

He was ready for the Dragon King to be standing over her with gold eyes and a territorial growl and the posture of a man defending the last thing on earth he’d ever surrender.

He was not ready for what he actually walked into.

A full brown room where everything matched perfectly. Blair was wrong on that one. The room looked good.

But the brown bed had a line down the center. White chalk. On the foot of one side, the letter M. On the other, the letter L. Nicholas did not understand the lettering. He would understand it in approximately thirty seconds and wish he didn’t.

Guinevere was in Maddox’s arms, who was standing. She was wrapped from head to slippers in a brown blanket that covered her completely. No skin visible whatsoever. She looked like a standing burrito.

Maddox’s dragon was rumbling in his chest loud enough to rattle every brown candle on every brown surface. His eyes were full-dragon, gold with black slits. His jaw was locked and his arms were banded around the blanket-wrapped woman with the iron commitment of a man who had confused his wife with a siege position and was holding the line.

Kael was sitting up in bed, propped against the headboard, counting.

"Five. Four. Three."

Maddox’s grip tightened. The brown blanket compressed around Guinevere’s body. A glow pulsed underneath it, white-hot, turning the blanket into a lampshade.

"Two. One. TIME. Landon’s turn."

Maddox physically turned his body away from Landon and Kael, rotating a full ninety degrees, taking his wife with him, and stared at the brown wall as if Kael had not spoken.

"Maddox, I know you can hear me," Kael sighed. "Share. Remember?"

"Is something burning?" Blair asked.

Every head in the room turned, except Maddox’s. The brown blanket wrapped around Guinevere was smoking.

"Drakencrest." A glowing man in a crown, Nicholas assumed was Landon, stepped forward, hands out, voice steady. "Let me take her."

"It’s her flame," Maddox said, still facing the wall. "She runs hot. It’s normal for dragons."

"The blanket is smoking, Commander," Sterling said from the corner of the room. "That is observably abnormal."

"He’s right," Ryker agreed. "You’re going to cook her like a rotisserie chicken in a brown bag. Hand her over."

Maddox didn’t move.

Kael looked at Landon. Landon looked at Kael.

"Maddox," Kael said. "She is miserable under that."

Maddox looked down at her.

From across the room, Blair’s eyes narrowed on her brother. Her expression shifted from concern to homicidal calculation in under a second.

"Maddox Drakencrest, if she dies because she’s overheated right now, I will end you."

Maddox’s head snapped towards his sister. Then he turned, and begrudgingly handed her to the glowing man.

The transfer was grudging, mechanical, and accompanied by a sound from his dragon that communicated the full emotional range of a beast being forced to share its favorite thing with the person it least wanted to share with. The growl started deep and climbed into something that bordered on a whine before settling into a sustained grumble that would continue for the foreseeable future.

Landon received her and immediately threw the smoking blanket on the floor, where it landed with a thud and continued to smolder. In one fluid motion, he unclasped his white cloak and wrapped it around her.

The cloak was luminous. Pristine. It caught the light pouring off her skin and amplified it, and she looked like a divine bride that should be painted on a temple ceiling, something that belonged in the arms of a king made of light.

"Get your goddamn cloak off of her," Maddox and his dragon said together.

Landon looked at Maddox, his jaw tight.

"I put this on her so you would relax. But okay, fine."

He pulled the cloak off of her.

Guinevere lay in Landon’s arms in her tiny silk baby-blue pajamas and Blair’s slippers, glowing white-gold, runes crawling across every visible inch of skin, completely unconscious and completely exposed and Landon was completely fine with it.

Maddox’s dragon made a new sound. It started as a growl, shifted into a groan, detoured through something that resembled a foghorn, and landed on a frequency that could only be described as a blow horn that had discovered feelings. The sound vibrated through the floor and up through the bed frame and rattled Sterling’s bracelet on his wrist.

"That’s a new one," Kael observed. "I’m going to call that the Sad Honk."

"Shut up, Kael," Ryker, Blair, and Sterling said in unison.

From the doorway, Nicholas felt the fever coming from her drop. The pressure behind his sternum eased. The gold and white faded from his skin. Whatever Landon was doing to her was working, and the relief traveling through the matebond was immediate, undeniable, and deeply unwelcome because the relief was coming from another man’s hands.

Then Landon adjusted her, and inhaled deeply.

Nicholas’s wolf surged so hard his vision flickered molten. His canines ached. Every territorial instinct he’d spent three weeks suppressing detonated at once because she was right there, fifteen feet away, in the arms of a man made of light, wearing almost nothing, and his wolf was done.

When Nicholas spoke, the words came out in two voices, his wolf speaking with him.

"Who the FUCK is that?"

Maddox turned from the wall, just now noticing the door opened.

His gold eyes found Nicholas’s molten ones across the room, and what passed between the two kings in that second was a complete, wordless exchange that contained recognition, territorial fury, grudging respect, and the mutual understanding that the woman between them had just added a third man to a room that already couldn’t handle two.

Kael looked at Nicholas. Looked at Maddox. Looked at Landon holding Guinevere. Looked at the chalk line on the bed. Looked back at Nicholas.

"We’re going to need a bigger bed."