Page 30 of Shadowed

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He sets shadow-dummies against me in the second hour. They materialise out of the floor—dark shapes, roughly human-sized, moving with the fluid coordination of things that don't have bones or joints to worry about. They're fast. Not as fast as a copper in the rookeries, but faster than a drunk with a grudge. They reform when I hit them, the shadow-stuff knitting back together like smoke pulling itself into shape.

I cut the first one apart in six seconds. The second takes four. The third comes from behind and I pivot on my back foot and the blade finds the joint where its arm meets its shoulder with a precision I did not instruct.

The shadow-dummy dissolves into black mist.

I'm standing on the training floor breathing hard, blade still in hand. The dark mineral smell of dissolved shadow sits thick in the air. And my body—my traitorous, ungovernable body—is buzzing.

Not fear-buzzing. Not adrenaline-buzzing. The other kind.

The blade is humming against my palm. He's stepped off the wall, moved a few feet closer to watch, and the hum has sharpened to match, and my blood is up and my skin is flushed and the heat between my thighs has absolutely nothing to do with killing shadow-dummies and everything to do with the fact that he's standing there with the shadow-lamp light catching the white of his hair and the curve of his horns and I am holding a weapon that belongs to him in a hand that also apparently belongs to him and some deep, buried part of me is purring.

Purring. During weapons training. In a dungeon. For my captor.

Thomas Grey, if you're alive somewhere, I'm going to find you and I'm going to have questions.

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He watches from the edge of the floor. I've been learning his shadows—the patterns they make, the movements that meandifferent things. The flat spread against the wall means he's observing. The slow ripple means he's calculating. The sudden stillness—the one where every shadow in the room holds its breath—means I've done something that surprised him.

He goes still four times in the first session.

"You've used a blade before," he says after the third hour, when I've killed eleven shadow-dummies and my arms ache and there's a bruise blooming across my ribs where the eighth one caught me. Sloppy. I was showing off. Showing off is expensive.

"Three-inch knife in the rookeries. Not exactly the same."

"No. Not the same at all."

He crosses the training floor. Unhurried—that stride he has, long and deliberate, the walk of something that has never needed to rush because nothing has ever been faster than it. The white hair moves across his shoulders. The wings shift against his back, the vast dark membranes catching the faint pull of air as he moves. His shadows slide ahead of him like a carpet unrolling.

I track all of it because I'm a thief and tracking things is survival. I track the horns, the angle of his jaw, the pale grey of his hands, the width of him against the shadow-lamp light. The blade hums sharper with every step he takes toward me.

His coat moves as he walks. I've been cataloguing him the way I catalogue buildings—exits, pressure points, structural weight—and there's one detail I've been deliberately not cataloguing. I catalogue it now, because he's crossing the floor toward me in a training room and there's nowhere else to look that isn't worse. What's outlined through the fabric, pressing forward. The prehensile curl of it, slow and seeking, tracking my position as he moves. My skin goes hot from my throat to my sternum and I hold very still.

He stops close. Close enough that the scent of him—stone, cold air, the dark mineral underneath—wraps around me andheat surges low in my belly, and the blade vibrates against my palm in time with my pulse, and I have just enough sense not to look down and see if the steel is glowing.

"I can see your pulse." He doesn't indicate where. He doesn't have to. His eyes don't drop from my face. "The blade reads it."

I don't answer. There's no version of answering that ends well.

His shadow moves. One tendril, dark and cool, lifts from the floor and brushes against the bruise on my ribs through the fabric of my shirt. The touch is light—lighter than breath, lighter than the fog in Cutler's Alley. Cool where the bruise is hot. The pain eases. Not gone—dulled, as if the shadow has drawn the worst of the heat out of the swollen tissue and replaced it with something cold and clean.

I flinch.

Not from the pain. The pain is nothing—I've had worse from tripping on cobblestones. I flinch from the gentleness.

No one has been gentle with me since Da left. Fourteen years of holding children and holding knives and holding my own jaw shut when the world hands me something I can't afford to feel.

Marcus is loyal but Marcus is sixteen and loyalty is not the same as tenderness. Elena is sharp and Tommy is sweet but they're children and I'm the one who holds them, not the other way round.

The last gentle hands I remember are my mother's and she died when Tommy was born and I was twelve and the memory has gone soft at the edges, blurred by use, worn thin from too many nights reaching for it.

His shadow on my bruised ribs is the first kind touch in fourteen years and my body does exactly what I've been dreading—it surrenders. My shoulders drop. My jaw unclenches. For three, four, five heartbeats I lean into the cool press of his shadow against my side like a stray pressing into the first warmhand it's found. My throat closes. My eyes go hot. I am going to cry on a training floor in front of the shadow prince who owns my debt if I don't move right now.

The blade hums. Hot in my grip now, almost urgent, and the heat between my thighs is the same temperature and I don't know what any of it means and I don't want to know and I need to move.

I pull back. Step away. The blade is still in my hand and my grip is still good because my hands don't betray me, my hands are the one part that holds.