Page 41 of Shadowed

Spine flat. Knees gripped until my knuckles ache.

"I don't want to need you." My voice is the last steady thing I own. I say it to the open door, to the dark corridor, to the scent of him still flooding my lungs and making everything worse. "I don't want to need anyone. I've never needed anyone. I'm not—I'm not the girl who needs —"

The shadows in the corridor shift. Thicken. His shape in the dark—tall, horned, the spread of vast wings filling the doorframe.

My hands unclench from my knees.

My hands. The one part that holds. The part that has never broken, not through coppers and cold and fourteen years of keeping everyone alive.

My hands open like locks and reach for the dark.

17

CALIGO

Every shadow in the palace turns toward the east wing at the same time.

Not my instruction. Not my choice. Every shadow—the surveillance threads, the defensive wards, the ancient slow-moving sentinels that have guarded this court since before the battle—all of them pivot like a compass finding north.

The north is her.

I'm in the throne room counting shadows at seventy percent when the scent hits.

Sweet. Ripe. Drowning. Her scent floods the stone corridors, floods the throne room air. My cock goes rigid so fast the pain of it whites out my vision for a full second.

Seven hundred years.

The rut cracks open at the base of my spine with the force of seven centuries of damage demanding repair. Not the pre-rut tremor from days ago—that was a hand testing a locked door. This is the door torn from its hinges. The pressure builds from the base of my spine outward, flooding my cock, my balls, my belly, my chest. The wanting is total. Violent. My hands crack the stone arms of the throne and my wings tear free of their bindingsand I am already standing, already moving, because staying in this room is no longer something my body will accept.

My shadows pour out ahead of me. Every one, the throne room's worth, flooding down the corridor toward her. I don't instruct them. I couldn't stop them.

I walk. The palace shortens corridors—walls sliding, passages compressing. Her scent thickens with every step. The sweet surface. The ripe heat underneath. Something darker—mineral, shadow-touched. Her blood carries my court in it now, and the rut drives so hard my wings won't fold. They scrape both walls of the corridor. Seven centuries of control and my own body refuses the command.

I stop trying to fold them. I walk with wings spread, stone scraping the membrane on both sides, and I don't care.

I reach her door.

Open. All three of her locks—the Chubb and the lever and the bolt she forged herself—undone. Clean. No force. They opened the way everything in this court opens for her, because the mechanisms know what she is even when she doesn't.

I fold my wings to enter. The effort it costs me is humiliating. The rut screams to keep them spread, to fill the room, to make myself as large as the wanting—and I force them shut one increment at a time and step through.

She's on the floor. My shadows pooled around her—the gentle ones she stopped kicking—wrapped around her wrists and shins and waist. Her face lifts toward me.

Heat-glazed. Green gone glassy, pupils blown, a flush climbing her throat. Her lips parted. Her hands open in her lap—palms up, reaching.

The slick is everywhere. Darkening her trousers, pooling on the stone beneath her. The scent of it hits me like a fist. My rut surges so hard my horns ache and the wings I just forced closedtry to spread again and I drive them shut by will alone, my jaw locked, every muscle in my body fighting a different instinct.

"I don't want to need you." Her voice is steady. The last steady thing about her. "I don't want to need anyone."

"I know."

The rut screams for me to cross the room. My cock strains toward her. My shadows are already there—already touching her, already doing what every part of me wants to do.

But she has to reach. Willing choice—the girl who picks locks choosing to open this one. If I take her before she reaches, the key destroys the lock.

I wait.

It's the hardest thing I've done in seven hundred years. The rut claws at my spine. My cock aches toward her. My shadows keep creeping closer across the floor and I keep pulling them back and I press my horns against the door frame and hold them there—the cold stone the only thing keeping me in place—and I wait.