2. Max
Max
The tent flap ripped open, and the cold night rushed in with it.
Caspian came through the entrance, broad shoulders filling the gap, wine-red hair flattened on one side from sleep. He wore a crumpled T-shirt and a pair of trunks. He must’ve rolled off his bedroll and charged in here.
Drakken slid in behind him.
The dragon prince had to duck lower than Caspian to clear the flap. He was bare from the waist up, all hard muscle and fury, a pair of dark jeans hanging low on his hips. He carried his broadsword, his gray eyes sweeping the tent, cataloging threats.
When they found only me crumpled in Aelindor’s lap, his expression flickered with confusion, or even worry, before his face went unreadable. Drakken wasn’t the kind of man who allowed himself to show any emotions except for rage.
The three heirs filled my small tent like war gods crammed into a closet. The air charged with their combined presence—Fae magic and wolf heat and dragon fire and the weight of three alphas who ruled a kingdom, all of it pressing against the canvas walls until I half-expected the seams to split.
They’d come running at a scream I didn’t even remember making.
Aelindor had gotten to me before the sound had left my throat, as if something between us ran deeper than proximity. He’d felt the fracture in me before it became a sound and pulled me into his arms while driving away the nightmare with a kiss.
Caspian dropped to a crouch beside me, his green eyes roving over me to check if I was all right.
“What happened, Max?” he asked with urgent concern.
His warmth made me want to throw myself into his arms too, even though I was in Aelindor’s embrace.
I gazed at him through the blur of tears.
Outside, I could sense the Spartans closing in, boots on packed earth, the clink of weapons drawn. A head poked through the tent flap, lantern light spilling across the canvas floor.
Drakken didn’t turn around. He just lifted one hand and waved the soldier off. The Spartan withdrew.
“What the hell is going on?” Drakken barked, the voice of a general demanding a situation report. “This had better not be another bid for attention!”
“Stop being insensitive,” Caspian snapped at him, his wolf pressing close to his skin, as it homed in on the dragon prince. “Don’t you see Max is crying? Something happened.”
“That’s why I asked,” Drakken shot back, but the bite had gone out of it. He was staring at my face. At the tears. At the way my fingers were knotted in Aelindor’s shirt like it was the only thing keeping me from falling through the floor of the world.
If I hadn’t been so destroyed, the scene might have been hilarious.
Four of us crammed into a tent meant for one person and a bedroll.
Caspian hunched sideways to avoid elbowing Drakken.
Drakken bent at the waist like a man trying to fit inside a child’s playhouse, smoke leaking faintly from his nostrils, broadsword scraping the canvas.
Aelindor was the only one who looked remotely composed, even with his linen shirt buttoned wrong.
I knew in my bones that these heirs had never bent for anything or anyone, but they were here, bending for a tent that was too small for even one of them. Something about that image lodged in my chest alongside the grief.
“Get out before this tent collapses,” Aelindor advised in his steady voice. “I’ll bring Max to our tent. She’ll sleep there tonight.”
“Get out, Drakken,” Caspian said. “You’re in my way again.”
Drakken scowled at the shifter, but he backed out. The canvas rustled as his shoulders scraped both sides of the flap on the way through. Caspian followed, but he didn’t go far. I heard him stop just outside and hold the flap open for Aelindor and me.
“I can walk,” I murmured through the last of my tears.
“Shush,” Aelindor crooned, his lips brushing my hair. “Let us take care of you.”
He shifted me in his arms, gathering me against his chest. He bent low to clear the entrance, moving with a grace that made the awkward geometry of the tent irrelevant. His arms were steady. His heartbeat was even. Everything about him was an anchor dropped into the storm inside me.
The night air hit my damp face as he carried me out. Cold, sharp, laced with the sulfur tang that clung to everything this close to the DarkVeil. The campfire had burned down to a low bed of embers that threw unsteady light across the circle of tents.
Caspian moved to Aelindor’s side, one hand hovering near my arm, ready to help. His wolf instincts had him pacing, guarding, checking the perimeter with quick turns of his head even as he stayed close.
Drakken stood a few feet away.
He’d planted himself like a sentry, watching me—for the first time not with hostility, but with the lost expression of a man who didn’t know what to do with me.
The Spartans at the perimeter watched Aelindor carry me toward the heirs’ tent, and then, without a word or an order, they fanned out into the dark, back to guarding the line.
I wondered if they’d still see me as one of their own after this. The girl cadet who’d drunk their war-grade liquor reduced to a sobbing wreck in their beloved Fae prince’s arms.
But that was the smallest of my fears now. So small it barely registered against the inferno of panic burning through my chest.
Missy, my little viper. Alone and taken!
“You can bring her bedroll to our tent, Drakken,” Aelindor said over his shoulder as he brought me into the larger tent.
He lowered himself onto his bedroll with me cradled against him. I pressed my face into his neck and breathed him in, his addictive scent of pine and powerful Fae male blanketing me.
It comforted me for a second before my lungs seized again.
A tightness started in my ribs, a band of iron cinching around my chest, squeezing the air out in thin, useless gasps. The tent walls seemed to contract, the canvas pressing inward, the air thickening until every breath was like trying to inhale through wet cloth.
Panic attack.
I’d had them in the deepest shafts of Crimson Ridge when I was a kid, when the rock groaned and the dust was so thick you couldn’t tell if you were breathing air or stone.
I knew what this was, but knowing didn’t help.
“Her face—Aelindor, she’s turning blue!” Caspian said from somewhere beside me, as if he was having a panic attack himself.
“Max. Breathe.” Aelindor’s hands framed my face, tilting it toward his. His impossible blue eyes filled my vision. “Breathe with me.”
I couldn’t. The air wouldn’t come. My chest was a locked door and someone had thrown away the key.
He kissed me. Not the way he’d kissed me minutes ago.
This was deliberate as he pressed his mouth to mine and breathed into me, slow and measured with care, filling my lungs with his air when mine refused to work.
His exhale became my inhale, his tenderness and calm pouring into my body like liquid sunlight.
Caspian laced his fingers through mine, the jolt of contact racing up my arm and lodging behind my ribs like a spark plug firing.
“I’m here, Max,” he whispered. “Breathe easy. We’re all here. You’re safe.”
Calm down, girl, my demon passenger commanded, sharp as a slap.
It hadn’t spoken during the vision, or offered any comfort while the Oracle’s black eyes swallowed my sister’s face.
It’d been observing quietly, calculating like a predator.
This weakness cannot happen again. You can’t let fear freeze you if you want to survive.
If you want to get Missy out, get your shit together.
The entity in me had no patience for a girl choking on her fear. It’d watched civilizations crumble without blinking an eye.
I stopped fighting the terror. I’d been clenching against it, locking my muscles, trying to hold the fear at arm’s length the way I’d held every emotion at arm’s length since my parents died.
You couldn’t outmuscle a panic attack. So I let it pass through me. Let it burn itself out.
The air came easily now, and Aelindor’s lips left mine. He pressed his forehead to my temple, one hand moving to the back of my neck to anchor and comfort me. Caspian’s thumb traced slow circles on my knuckles.
My tears dried. My heartbeat slowed. My lungs opened completely as two of the most powerful men on the continent anchored me.
And my inner demon was right. I couldn’t lose my shit like this ever again. Not with Missy in the Collector’s hands and no one but me to get her out.
“That’s my girl,” Caspian said softly and squeezed my hand.
I squeezed back, and my gaze found Drakken.
He stood at the far side of the tent, his arms crossed over his bare chest, his shoulder braced against the pole, as he watched me with intensity that bordered on aggression.
But his jaw wasn’t locked the way it usually was when he looked at me.
And there was something else I couldn’t name and hadn’t seen before in his gray eyes.
For a moment, the world narrowed to the four of us in a tent, in the middle of the night, three blocks from the DarkVeil.
Aelindor’s arms wrapped around me, Caspian’s fingers laced with mine, and Drakken’s watchful presence filling the silence across the tent.
The three most powerful alpha males arranged around me like the points of a compass.
A primal, aching need seared in my chest.
Aelindor’s touch could still the chaos inside me and quiet every screaming nerve, Caspian’s always sent a spark to my core and made me feel fierce and alive, and even though he wasn’t here, I could still feel Nikolai’s mouth between my thighs if I let myself remember.
His crimson eyes had looked at me like I was the answer to a hunger that had nothing to do with the blood he needed for survival.
Even Drakken, with his rage and resistance, lit something in me.
Every romance I’d ever heard of followed the same shape: one woman, one man. You chose, and you committed. That was the deal. Wanting more than one person wasn’t loyalty; it was betrayal. My logic accepted the conventional ideal of faithfulness, but my body didn’t give a fuck.
And the guilt felt like a cold, waterlogged coat.
Even though I was a piece of shit, I warned myself to be very careful not to reach the point of causing them to fight over me. The heirs weren’t like ordinary men. They were powerful, territorial alphas, raised on war and dominance and able to topple kingdoms.
I’d seen Caspian and Nikolai bicker over who got to hold the cup for me when I was half-dead in the infirmary.
I’d watched Caspian stake his claim on me in public at the Broken Drum while Drakken glared from across the balcony like a rival king.
Every interaction I’d witnessed between Caspian, Nikolai, and Drakken, when it involved me, had been a contest. A tug-of-war with me in the middle, being pulled until my bones ached.
But it was different with Aelindor.
When the Fae prince held me, Caspian didn’t challenge him, and Drakken left us be. No jealous snipes, no attempts to pull me away, no brutalizing each other.
When Aelindor was in the room, even though the competition didn’t vanish, it shifted into discipline.
I wanted to indulge in their warmth and comfort just a little longer. I didn’t have the energy or will to untangle myself from them. Not tonight, anyway. Not with the Oracle’s words chilling my blood and my sister’s scream still ringing in my skull.