Page 32 of Shadowed

I walk away and I don't think about the shaking hands or the dry eyes or the images under the pillow. I don't think about the way she holds everything she loves at arm's length because arm's length is the distance she can still protect.

My little thief, who does not cry. Who puts photographs under her pillow and holds her jaw shut and keeps her hands in her lap and waits for the shaking to stop.

I think about percentages.

---

In the throne room, alone, I count.

The shadows along the walls are moving faster. I've been measuring shadow-response speed for seven hundred years the way a physician measures a patient's pulse—not with instruments, with attention, with the accumulated patience of centuries of watching the same thing slow down.

They are faster. Not dramatically. A percentage point, perhaps two. But I haven't gained a percentage point in seven hundred years and I've gained two in two weeks because a human girl chose to train with my blade and chose not to cry over photographs of her siblings and chose—this is the part that matters, the part that changes everything—chose to stay when the garden opened.

Willing choice. That is the mechanism—and I use the word willing precisely, because what I need from her isn't compliance. Compliance gives me nothing. Reluctant cooperation gives me fractions. What moves the court is willing darkness: the criminal choosing the shadow, the thief choosing the blade, the girl who picks locks choosing to open this one. Her soul has to reach for the dark on its own. Has to own it. Has to become the kind of darkness that doesn't look back.

That's what I'm building. Not an operative. Not a weapon, though she's becoming one. I'm corrupting her, methodically, the way you work a lock—finding what she already carries and pressing on it until it opens wider than she knew it could. The dark instinct she was born with. The cold satisfaction she takes in precision. The part of her that looked at forty-three names in a ledger and felt not grief but arithmetic. I'm giving that part of her everything it's been starved of: purpose, craft, the pleasure of being very good at something dangerous.

When that part of her is all of her—when she can't find the seam between the thief and the weapon and the shadow-court operative—then I'll take her. The soul before the body.The corruption before the claiming. And the bond will seal with everything she is, dark and chosen and irreversible, and the court will have what it needs.

I run the numbers. Two weeks of willing training: two points. The sibling-bond deepening her investment: ongoing. The assassination work engaging the instinct she was born with: one kill, more coming. The growth won't be linear. It never is. But I can feel the court pulling itself up from the grey, and the pull is getting stronger.

"Sixty-two percent," I say to the empty throne room. "Two weeks."

The shadows along the walls ripple. Faster. Darker. Answering me the way they haven't answered in centuries.

Eight points. Eight points in two weeks when I haven't moved in seven hundred years.

I stand in the throne room with thirty-eight occupied chairs and I look at the shadows moving along the walls—faster, darker, responding to my attention with a sharpness they haven't had in centuries—and I think about a girl who puts photographs under her pillow and does not cry.

She's going to save this court. She's going to save it by choosing the dark, one lock at a time, and the fact that the choosing is genuine—that she argued three training protocols because she cared about efficiency, that she kicked my shadows because they annoyed her, that she sat on the floor instead of the chair because the floor is where she does things that matter—the fact that it's real is why it works.

---

My cock aches. The constant, grinding presence of it—heavy, urgent, the prehensile curl of it pressing against my thigh whenever I think about her, which is always. The ache has changed in two weeks. Less sharp. Deeper. The kind that's settled into my bones and taken up residence—not the wantingof a male who sees something he desires, but the pull of a male whose body has decided who it belongs to and is dragging the rest of him toward her whether he agrees or not.

The shadows curl around the throne. Faster. Darker.

My shadows at her door make the protective pattern again. I didn't instruct it. I can't stop it.

"Mine," I say to the corridor. To the shadow-pattern on her door. To the mathematical certainty of what this is becoming.

I'm not certain I want to stop it.

14

LILITH

The target is a woman named Mrs. Pemberton who runs a charity for displaced omega girls.

I get the briefing in the training room—a single page, shadow-ink on dark paper, the letters shifting slightly in the blue-grey lamplight as if the words themselves are reluctant to stay still. Name. Address. Occupation. Routine. And at the bottom, in his precise, unhurried hand: Confirm by independent assessment.

"You want me to kill a charity worker."

"I want you to conduct your own surveillance first."

"And if I determine she's exactly what she appears to be? A woman who helps children?"

His shadows do the flat-spread thing. The one I've started cataloguing—it means he's watching me work something out. "Then you report that assessment and the assignment's withdrawn."