Page 26 of Shadowed

"Without instruction."

"Yes."

"And your cock?"

I hold her gaze. Sybillis doesn't trade in delicacy. She's survived four centuries of court politics by identifying weaknesses and stating them plainly, and she's just identified mine.

"That's not relevant to this discussion."

"It's the only relevant thing in this discussion." Her shadows slice a thin line into the table surface—precise, controlled, the kind of damage that is a sentence, not an outburst. "You're at sixty percent. You've been at sixty percent since the battle. No rut. No drive. No bond-pull. And now a human girl with impossible affinity is sleeping in your east wing and your shadows are behaving like a rut-bonded male's and you expect me to believe this is about the Blood Debt."

I don't answer immediately. The answer would require admitting things I haven't yet admitted to myself—that the wanting is no longer strategic, that her scent keeps me awake, that the dormancy is cracking open in ways I can't control and don't wish to.

"It's about the court," I say. "It's always been about the court."

"Then keep it about the court." Sybillis pulls her shadows from the wall. The gouges in the table remain. "Because if thisbecomes about your cock and a human girl's green eyes, this court won't survive it. We're dying, Caligo. We're dying and the wolves are circling and I've spent three centuries holding the gates and I won't watch it end because you got hard for a lockpick."

She leaves. The door closes behind her. The stone where her shadows rested bears thin, precise cuts—not rage, not vandalism. A warning, carved into the material of the court she's given her life to protect.

She isn't wrong. She's rarely wrong. That's why I've kept her close for four centuries.

I look at the gouges in the table for a long moment.

"Find her," I tell my shadows. "Don't touch. Find."

They go. They return in seconds—she's in the east corridor, outside the archive doors. Not trying to open them. Not running. Standing with her palm flat against the stone, the way she stood at the passage wall in Ashworth.

Going back to it. The girl who ran four escape attempts in her first three days is standing voluntarily in front of a door that opened for her, pressing her hand to the stone.

"Good," I say to the empty throne room. "That's it. Keep going back to it."

My shadows settle along the walls with what I can only describe as smug agreement. They are as compromised as the palace. Every dark surface in this court has decided she belongs here, and they are not wrong, and I am going to need Sybillis to arrive at the same conclusion before she decides on her own course of action.

I'll deal with Sybillis. I've been dealing with Sybillis for four centuries.

---

Nephilik arrives an hour later with the shadow-courier reports tucked under one arm and the look of a male who has already read them and is deciding how to frame the damage.

"Sybillis?" He glances at the gouges in the table.

"Sybillis."

"How bad?"

"She left the table intact." I take the reports. "That's a good sign."

Nephilik pulls out the chair across from me and sits—the only member of court who does so without waiting for invitation, because three centuries of loyalty have bought him that much. "Frost Court first," he says. "Aratus is moving again."

"He's been moving for a month. Supply lines along the neutral corridor, forward observers on the ridge above the border pass." I set the first report flat on the table. "He's measuring."

"He thinks we're too weak to respond."

"He's right that we're weak. He's wrong about what that means." I look at the troop placement notations. Aratus has three times our standing guard and twice our active magic—on paper, the calculation is simple. Paper has never accounted for what I'm willing to do. "Send a shadow to his forward position. One shadow. Let it sit in the observer's tent for an hour and then leave."

Nephilik considers this. "No message?"

"No message. He'll spend a week deciding what it meant. That's a week he's not moving troops."