Page 8 of Shadowed

She doesn't. She watches her siblings breathe and she doesn't cry and she hasn't cried in three years of my shadow watching her at night and tonight my discipline cracks.

I send a shadow to her windowsill.

Not a surveillance shadow. Larger. Denser. The closest thing my dark can do to reaching out and putting a hand against the glass.

"Hold there." I'm speaking to the shadow now, the way I used to speak to my hounds. "Don't pass the glass. Don't frighten her. Just sit."

The shadow obeys. Curls along the sill like a thing settling onto its haunches. Does nothing. Waits.

Her head turns toward the window.

Slow. The slow rotation of a woman who's seen something wrong and is deciding whether to acknowledge it. Her hand moves—not to the knife this time. Toward the glass. Her fingers stop an inch from the pane and hover there, reaching, not quite touching.

"That's right." I'm not sure who I'm speaking to anymore. The shadow. Her. The empty room. "Reach for me, thief. Don't be afraid of the dark."

The shadow leans toward her hand. Curls a tendril upward toward her face. Brushes the air an inch from her cheek. Traces the line of her jaw without crossing the glass. Drifts toward thecorner of her mouth and she makes a sound—small, surprised, the breath of a woman who didn't know her body could do whatever just happened—and her lips part.

"There you are."

My voice has dropped. The register I used to use centuries ago, the one I'd forgotten my throat could still make. The shadow brushes her lower lip through the glass it cannot pass. Her mouth opens further. Her hand jerks against the pane like a reflex and the marks on her skin that don't yet exist flare under the watching of my dark, and her thighs press together on the floor, and my hand on my cock has gone past stroking into the savage hold of a male whose discipline is the only thing keeping him from stepping through the dimensional boundary and onto her body.

"Yes. Like that. That's what your body's been waiting to know."

She presses harder. Her fingers chase the shadow on the other side of the pane. Her breath catches. The shadow brushes her bottom lip again and her eyes close for one moment—one moment I will keep until the night she's underneath me—and then she opens them and her hand is shaking against the glass.

"That's enough."

I say it to the shadow. To myself. To the prehensile length in my fist that wants to keep going.

"Pull back. Now."

The shadow withdraws from the windowsill. Her fingers chase it half an inch—chase, the unconscious lean of a body that's decided what it wants before the mind has been told—and then she catches herself. Pulls her hand back. Curls her fingers into her palm slowly, the way you close around something you almost held.

"Good." My voice rough enough that the throne-room shadows ripple. "Good thief. You almost reached me."

I memorise the gesture. I memorise the shape of her mouth still open. I memorise the way her thighs press. The body that doesn't know it's been claimed already, knowing, beginning to recognise the dark that is its mate.

My fist on my cock loosens. I don't finish. I won't finish until the first time I'm inside her, and the first time is coming. Two weeks. Seven centuries of patience and the last fortnight will be the longest stretch of all.

"Soon, little thief." My voice in the empty throne room is a register I haven't used in centuries. "Soon I find out what you sound like when an alpha gives you what you've been reaching for. Soon you find out what your hands have been picking locks for."

A pause. The shadows wait for me to finish.

"Mine."

My shadows ripple along the walls. The pattern is one I haven't seen them make in seven hundred years. Anticipation isn't the word. Hunger is closer. Ownership is closer still. The dark thing inside my dark thing waking up after centuries of starvation and tasting what's coming and deciding it's going to enjoy every second of the having.

I let them ripple. I let them want.

I let myself want.

The patience has teeth. The teeth know her name.

5

LILITH

Three days of wrong shadows and I am starting to lose my professional composure, which is a problem because my professional composure is the only thing that separates me from the kind of thief who gets caught.