Page 40 of Shadowed

Not fear-shaking. I know fear. Fear is cold and it tightens and it sharpens.

This loosens. This opens. Every muscle in my body going soft and ready. My cunt clenching in waves that match the pulse at the base of my spine. My slick soaking through my trousers and the stone beneath me going dark with it, and the humiliation of that is nothing, nothing, compared to how badly my body wants something to fill it.

"I don't want this." My voice cracks on the last word. "I don't—I swore—I'm not this. I'm not —"

But I am.

My blood woke up inside his court because his court is what woke it. Six weeks of shadow-wards dissolving at my touch andshadow-steel fitting my grip and shadows curling around my ankles and my dormant omega blood drinking it in, every drop.

The dosage finally hit whatever threshold my body was waiting for.

Now the heat is here and it is not going to stop.

The shadows come.

Not his surveillance tendrils. Not the flat observation threads that report my movements. These are the gentle ones—the ones I stopped kicking two weeks ago, the ones that curl around my ankles when I walk and pool in my palms when I'm still.

They slide under the door. All three locks irrelevant, because shadows don't need locks.

They pool around me on the floor.

Cool. Dark. Soft in a way shadow has no right to be soft. They settle against my bare arms and curl around my shins. One—bold, slow, careful—wraps around my wrist the way a hand would if the hand belonged to someone who was trying not to frighten me.

The relief is immediate. Where they touch, the burning eases—not gone, not even close to gone, but dulled the way the bruise dulled on the training floor. Cool dark against burning skin.

The contrast drags a sound out of me.

More of them now. Curling up my calves. Pressing against the backs of my knees. One slides along my ribs and I arch into it before I can stop myself, my back lifting off the door, my chest pressing forward, and the heat spikes instead of easing because these shadows are his, they carry his cold, his attention, his presence through the stone walls—and my body knows it.

My body is not eased.

My body is fed.

I press my face into the pool of shadow gathered in my lap and the cool darkness against my flushed cheeks and burning forehead is so good I make a sound.

Not a moan. Worse. A whimper. The sound of something that has been holding on for a very long time and has just found the thing that makes holding on unnecessary.

The shadows tighten. Everywhere. Around my wrists, my ankles, my waist—holding me the way I hold Tommy when he wakes from nightmares, firm enough to anchor, loose enough to breathe. My body stops shaking and starts something else, something slower, a deep full-body shudder rolling through me in waves, and I am gasping into the dark and my hips are rolling and I am begging without words for something my mouth refuses to ask for.

The locks click.

All three.

Chubb first—the heavy mechanical thunk I know better than my own heartbeat. Then the lever, softer. Then the bolt, sliding back with a whisper of metal on metal.

I set those locks. My hands set them. My hands, which do not betray me, which have held steady through everything.

The locks open anyway.

Not forced—I'd hear forcing, I'd feel the mechanism strain. These open clean. Smooth. The way his locks opened in the flat, the way the archive wards dissolved, the way every shadow-mechanism in this court responds to whatever is in my blood. My own wards. My own locks. Opening for him without my permission because the metal has decided—the way my blood has decided, the way my body has decided.

I'm the last part of me still holding out.

The door swings open.

His scent hits before anything else—stone, cold air, the mineral depth underneath—and my body arches off the floor toward it before I can stop myself, my spine curving, my hips lifting, the presenting instinct so overwhelming that for one terrible second I don't fight it. My cunt clenches, empty anddesperate, and the sound I make is raw and wrecked and absolutely unforgivable.

I drag myself back against the wall.