Then Maddox's brain caught up.
The pieces had been sitting in front of him for weeks. Scattered across files and fragments and conversations he had shoved into drawers he didn't want to open. Now the drawers were opening themselves and every goddamn thing he'd been stuffing into them came tumbling out at once.
Nicholas Shadowfell had stood up at an auction in front of twenty kings and announced she was his fated mate. Maddox had dismissed it as a play. A negotiating tactic deployed by a wolf king who was being outbid and needed leverage. Clean logic. Beautiful logic. Wrong logic. The universe had been correcting him on that one ever since, with escalating levels of humiliation.
Nicholas had sailed across an ocean because he felt her pain through a matebond Maddox had told himself was fabricated.
