Chapter 457

“Fine,” she said. “But then we are having tea. Non-negotiable.”

His eyes agreed. The agreement was immediate, genuine, and carrying the specific sincerity of a dragon who understood that cooperation produced baths and massages and resistance produced lectures, and the bath-to-lecture ratio favored cooperation.

She walked toward the arena. Petra fell into step beside her, Avalon on her hip, both women navigating the flow of personnel with the composed authority of a queen and her attendant cutting through a crowd that parted for them because the crowd had learned that failing to part produced commentary.

They reached the edge of the training field. A cluster of Draken Forces soldiers were gathered along the perimeter, craning their necks, jostling for sightlines.

“What are they gawking at?” Bellatrix snapped at the nearest soldier, a young man whose posture went rigid so fast his spine nearly overcorrected.

“The princess training on shifts, Your Grace.” He swallowed. “Her wolf is what everyone wants to see.”

Bellatrix rolled her eyes. The eye roll was comprehensive, full-rotation, the specific ocular event she reserved for information she found beneath her intelligence and above her patience.

She had read about Serena’s wolf in the Knotty Omega. White wolf. Glowing. Stunning. The publication had dedicated three paragraphs to the description with the breathless enthusiasm of a gossip column that had stumbled onto actual news and was milking it for every subscription it could produce.

She put those odds at zero. White wolves were mythology. Fantasy. The kind of thing children whispered about and scholars debated and nobody had ever actually confirmed, because confirming it would require a white wolf to exist, and white wolves did not exist, because the universe was many things but it was rarely that dramatic.

Serena’s wolf was probably grey. Maybe brown. Possibly, if the Moon Goddess was feeling generous and Bellatrix was feeling charitable in her assessment, pink or gold. A rarity, like her own purple. Something unusual enough to generate gossip and ordinary enough to fade from conversation within a month.

The absolute last thing that girl needed was another distinction. Another title, another rarity, another reason for every wolf on the continent to look at Serena Frostborne and see something exceptional. The girl already had two Alpha mates, a dragon, magic, a coronation, and a jawline that made Bellatrix’s own mirrors feel competitive. If the wolf was white on top of all of that, the universe had favorites and the favoritism was obscene.

Her eyes moved past the crowd and found the arena floor.

Tiberon was there.

Her gaze sharpened. Tiberon was on the training floor, positioned against the far wall, arms clasped behind his back, watching the center of the arena with the focused attention of a man supervising a session.

Serena was in the center. Training suit. Hair pulled back.

No Dexmon. Tiberon was working with Serena one-on-one.

Her eyes narrowed.

Since when did Tiberon train Serena personally? Since when did the King of Drakenfell take time out of his schedule, his very full, very important, divorcing-his-wife schedule, to stand in a training arena and coach his son’s mate on shifting?

The implications assembled themselves in her mind with the rapid efficiency of a woman whose strategic processing speed had been refined by thirty years of court politics. Tiberon and Serena had a relationship. A real one. A functional one. Functional enough that Tiberon was investing personal time in her training, which meant Tiberon valued her, which meant Tiberon saw her as an asset worth developing, which meant Tiberon’s feelings about Serena were warmer than Bellatrix had estimated.

That was fine. That was actually better than fine.

Because warm meant invested, and invested meant Tiberon would want Serena happy, and Serena happy meant Serena married, and Serena married meant a wedding, and a wedding meant Bellatrix planning the wedding, and Bellatrix planning the wedding meant the calendar was locked and the divorce was frozen and Step Six was doing double duty because Tiberon would want the wedding too.

The math worked. The math was beautiful. The math was the kind of math that made Bellatrix want to pour herself a glass of Nightspire reserve and toast her own intelligence.

She glanced down at Onyx.

Onyx was looking up at her with the steady, unblinking gaze of a dragon who had watched her internal monologue play out across her face and had formed an opinion about it.

“You were thinking it too,” she snapped.

Onyx blinked once. The blink was slow, deliberate, and carrying an opinion he was choosing to express through eyelid velocity rather than sound.

She and Petra turned on their heels. The crowd was still gathering. More soldiers were arriving. The shift training was about to begin, and the shift training was going to produce whatever wolf Serena produced, and the wolf was going to be whatever color the wolf was going to be, and Bellatrix was going to miss it because Bellatrix had a wedding to plan and the wedding was more important than watching a girl shift into a regular wolf with zero skills.

A white wolf that glowed, according to the Knotty Omega, which was definitely exaggerated. If Bellatrix were to guess, she was a grey wolf. The color of sewage water or something of that sort.

Onyx protested. The protest was a chirp that escalated into a whine that escalated into the specific, sustained vocalization of a dragon who wanted to stay and watch and was being carried in the opposite direction of the thing he wanted to watch.

“Oh, hush. Do you want your massage and bath?”

The protests stopped. Immediately. Completely. The vocalization cut off mid-whine with the surgical precision of a creature whose priorities had just been recalibrated by two words, and the two words were “massage” and “bath,” and the recalibration was total.

He did, in fact, want his bath and massage. He wanted them more than he wanted to watch a princess shift into whatever she shifted into, because the princess would shift again tomorrow and the bath was happening now and Onyx was a dragon who lived in the present and the present smelled like scale oil and warm water.

Bellatrix walked toward the castle. Petra walked beside her. Two women, two dragons, zero awareness that the woman they had just walked away from was about to shift into a wolf so white and so luminous that every soldier on that training field was going to lose the ability to speak for three full seconds.

Behind them, on the training field, Tiberon issued an Alpha command.