Page 20 of Dragon King’s Bullied Mate

“We are not buying the entire confectioner’s stall.”

His expression turned hopeful anyway. “Maybe just half of it?”

The warmth of the exchange should have eased her tension, yet the air around them still felt wrong somehow. It carried the sharp scent of pine and frozen earth beneath a sky growing steadily darker as daylight began to disappear behind heavy clouds. Again and again, Lyra found herself glancing toward the treeline as though she expected mounted soldiers to emerge from the forest at any moment.

Every shadow between the trees seemed deeper than usual and every distant sound made her pulse jump. It was the guilt from not mentioning the poison. She gave herself a shake. If she had, they may have taken her away from Beckett. She had done the right thing.

Beckett eventually crouched near another patch of blooms and brushed snow carefully aside. “Will the king come back when he gets better?”

Lyra’s fingers stilled around the scissors mid-cut. The sensible answer should have been no. Kings did not return to isolated cottages hidden deep within the woods, especially not after nearly dying there.

Men like Mikael belonged to castles and great halls lined with banners and staff, not tiny kitchens warmed by woodstoves and patched blankets. Once he recovered, he would return to his world, and she would remain in hers, exactly as things should be.

Yet somewhere deep inside herself, buried beneath caution and reason and every instinct that had kept her alive this long, she realized the thought of never seeing him again left an ache she did not know how to explain.

The realization unsettled her enough that she said nothing at all.

Beckett glanced up at her, waiting for an answer that never came, before eventually returning to his flowers with any further questions.

By the time their baskets were full and the cold had begun creeping painfully through Lyra’s gloves, unease had curled so tightly inside her chest that she could no longer dismiss it as simple worry. The forest had gone unnaturally still around them, absent even the distant rustle of animals moving through brush or the call of winter birds overhead.

Mikael had not ended up at her doorstep by chance.

And whatever had begun the moment she dragged an unconscious king from the snow did not feel finished yet.

Chapter 9

Mikael

Pain dragged Mikael upward through heavy darkness in slow brutal waves. For several long moments he remained motionless beneath the crushing weight of exhaustion, unable to separate dream from reality as fragments of snow and warmth still clung stubbornly to the edges of his mind.

The sound of a door caught his attention. A castle door. He was home. His eyes opened sharply.

Light flickered across the ceiling above him but it was distorted by the haze still clouding his vision. Confusion hit almost immediately because he didn’t remember returning to the palace at all.

The last thing he could clearly recall was cold. Not ordinary cold, but the kind that settled deep into his bones while snow lashed against his face hard enough to blind him as his dragon raged uselessly somewhere inside his skull.

After that, nothing.

Mikael pushed himself upright too quickly, and agony exploded through his head hard enough to force a curse from his throat while the room tilted violently around him.

Movement erupted nearby.

“Your Majesty, don’t.”

A servant rushed forward with panic flashing across his face, but Mikael held up his hand. His dragon reacted instantly with savage hostility that surged through his chest so violently that he felt as though he’d been physically struck by it.

Mikael gritted his teeth hard enough to ache. Where had his dragon been?

“Get out,” he snapped.

The servant obeyed immediately.

Silence returned once more. Mikael pressed a hand against his temple and forced himself to breathe slowly while fragments continued slipping frustratingly through his grasp like water through open fingers. There should have been memories or explanations.

Instead there was only absence and blank spaces. Along with the absence of a person. A woman.

He couldn’t see her face clearly when he reached for the memory nor could he remember her name or voice no matter how hard he tried. Only the impression of her lingered with strange intensity beneath the fog that clouded his thoughts and left behind flashes of gentle hands and the unmistakable feeling of safety that made no sense whatsoever.