Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

Half the table couldn’t look away from the magical bonfire. The other half was still processing the flaming shitshow their night had become. Guinevere was the president of the second group.

Alarm bells were sounding off in her brain. 750 million in gold. Silver cuffs. Cum-chanting demons. Her father’s actions tonight contradicted his actions three weeks ago so violently that one of them had to be a lie.

Lord Solandris spoke, knocking half the table out of a daze.

”Three kings and four dragon lords took a blood oath and entered a chamber. I informed them that I had fathered a bastard daughter and was seeking a union for her. But there were terms that must be agreed to.”

At the mention of bastard, Kael’s eyebrows climbed so high they threatened to leave his face.

TERM THE FIRST:

”First,” Lord Solandris said, ”was that she will not be seen by any man in that chamber. The contract would be signed in good faith alone.”

Guinevere glanced down at Term the First on the parchment. Her grandfather had invented the world’s most expensive blind date and enforced it with a death clause. Somewhere in history, a king had looked at this contract and thought ”seems reasonable.” That king was her father.

She glanced at Kael, whose jaw was doing something that suggested he had seven comments loaded and was exercising superhuman restraint by not firing any of them.

TERM THE SECOND:

”Second, she will be titled and crowned immediately. For those present with one wife already, my rule was no subsequent marriages shall occur and her rights, titles, and honors shall be equal to the crown.”

Lord Solandris took a sip of his whiskey as his words settled over the table.

Immediate crowning. No second wife. The man had written terms that protected a woman he’d fathered out of wedlock with more care than most men protect their legitimate heirs. Guinevere wasn’t sure what to do with that.

Kael’s eyebrows, which had already climbed dangerously high at bastard, now resided somewhere near his hairline. They showed no signs of returning.

TERM THE THIRD:

”Third, her identity and origins shall never be disclosed, spoken of, revealed or tied back to House Solandris in any way.”

The tent was completely silent.

Queen in title, ghost in origin. Guinevere swallowed the unwanted lump in her throat at the thought. Her entire life had been built on this term. Every unanswered question. Every redirected conversation. Twenty years of locked doors, and the key had been sitting in a Solandris tent the entire time, on a parchment she’d spent the evening refusing to touch.

TERM THE FOURTH:

”The fourth term stated that House Solandris retains the right to claim any son born as a potential heir to Solandris if they possessed a dragon shift or any extraordinary gifts.”

Guinevere blinked. Her grandfather had written a retrieval clause on unborn children. The man put a return policy on babies that didn’t exist yet. The audacity was so massive it had its own gravitational pull.

”You are joking,” the dragon king had said, before he died and stopped being able to say things.

”I am never joking,” Lord Solandris replied to a ghost, and then to the table. ”That was, more or less, the reaction of the entire room. You want me to sign a life-altering, blood-binding contract for a woman I am not permitted to lay eyes on, and forfeit any dragon-blooded son I sire on her. That is madness, Solandris. And I told them what I will tell you now.”

He leaned back.

”It was.”

Guinevere waited.

”And your father signed it anyway.”

She looked at Renwick.

Renwick looked at the parchment, at the two seals pressed deep into old wax, and for the length of one breath he was not the Wolf King who auctioned her or the man who cuffed her tonight. He was a man revisiting the single most reckless thing he had ever done, and finding, apparently, that he still did not regret it.

”He was mourning his late wife,” Lord Solandris continued. ”He had a toddler-aged son, a grieving pack, and a court already whispering about who the next queen should be.”

Cassian’s mother had died long before Guinevere was born. She knew that. But hearing it laid out like that landed somewhere under her ribs.

Her grandfather turned his glass in his hand. ”A blood contract forbidding a second wife was, to a man in that chair, not a cage. It was an excuse. A permanent, unbreakable, gods-witnessed reason to tell every ambitious house in Nyros that the seat beside him was taken by law and their daughters could stop circling.”

Kael let out a low whistle. ”He signed a wife sight-unseen to get the vultures off his lawn. That’s either the dumbest or the smartest thing I’ve ever heard, and I genuinely cannot decide which.”

Her father’s silence after Kael’s comment was the silence of a man who agreed with both assessments.

”So he signed,” Edward finished. ”Before he had ever seen her face. He bound his own heartbeat to a woman he could not picture, on the strength of a debt and the convenience of a fourth term he assumed would never trigger, because what were the odds of a dragon-shifter son?” The corner of his mouth moved again, the exact tell she’d inherited without permission. ”And then he met her.”

For the first time all night, something crossed Renwick Lunaris’s face that had nothing to do with strategy.

”And then I met her,” he repeated. ”She was beautiful. That part was not in the contract.”

Guinevere’s jaw dropped. Her father had just admitted, out loud, in front of witnesses, that her mother was beautiful. She needed a minute.

”Yes, she was,” Lord Solandris said with no emotion, just stating a fact. ”Her mother was pure ’Light Fae,’ also known as a Luminari. Thought to have gone extinct, with occasional traces popping up in bloodlines. If a woman was thought to be a Luminari, they were highly coveted in dragon culture because sons born of such hold additional power beyond just flame.”

Lord Solandris’s gaze landed on Kael for a full three seconds before continuing.

”I wanted my daughter to have a good man first, king second. A man willing to sign a binding union in good faith, not because of her appearance or the idea of a powerful heir because of her origins. And a man willing to crown a bastard without telling a soul who she was. That is what I wanted for my daughter.”

The tent went still in a different key than before.

”Which term am I?” she asked, and her voice was even, because even was all she had left.

Edward Solandris looked at his granddaughter with the quiet, terrible approval of a man watching a blade he did not forge turn out to be the sharpest in the room.

”Now,” he said, ”you’re asking the correct question.”