Page 73 of Shadowed

"The seventh bond." My forehead against her spine. My cock still inside her, the knot holding. "Sealed."

"No. The other thing. The —" She presses her belly. "The spark."

I wrap my arm around her waist. My hand over hers. My shadows settle—everywhere, all at once, the court at one hundred percent and every tendril in the palace answering my will for the first time in seven hundred years.

"That," I say, "is a conversation for when the knot softens."

She laughs. Short, sharp, the dark-humour laugh I heard once before—the first time, on my floor, when she told me to ask again when she wasn't heat-drunk and naked.

"You're going to tell me I'm pregnant."

"I'm going to tell you that Shadow Court's magic has made a suggestion."

"A suggestion." Flat. Dry. "Your court's magic made a suggestion. To my uterus."

"Lilith —"

"No. We're going to have this conversation. Right now. While your knot is still inside me and I can't go anywhere." She presses her belly. "Because if there is a shadow-baby starting in there, I have opinions."

My laugh surprises me. Low, rough, torn from the same fractured place in my chest. But it dies fast. Because her hand is on her belly and my hand is on hers and the spark is real and she's heard the headline—I chose you from a file, I built the cage—but not the full accounting. Not the architecture. Not every bar she never saw.

"We'll discuss it," I say. "All of it."

"All of what?"

The knot holds. The court hums at full power. Outside the window, Shadow Court's sky deepens from purple to black—true black, living black, the colour of a court restored. And in the glass, where Oberon's reflection was, my own reflection staresback. Grey skin. Charcoal horns. The face of a male who built the cage and is about to open every door himself.

"All of it," I say again. And she hears the weight of it this time. Her hand goes still on her belly.

One hundred percent.

Seven of eight bonds sealed.

I hold her and count the hours before the knot softens. I said after. I meant it.

30

LILITH

The court is alive.

Not the low hum of the last six weeks—the dormant pulse, the sleeping-creature breath of a palace at seventy percent. This is different. The walls are singing. Not a sound exactly—a vibration in the stone that travels through my bare feet and up my spine and settles in the shadow-marks at my throat. The marks shift in time with it.

I stand at the window of my room—my room, the one the palace gave me, the one with the lock I picked three times before the palace stopped resetting it—and I watch Shadow Court change.

The sky has deepened overnight. True black, not the grey-purple of the weeks before. The garden below is twice the size it was yesterday. New flowers—not the dark-petalled ones that lean toward my hand or the silver ones in the hidden garden, but something else. White flowers with dark centres, growing in patterns that spell out shapes I almost recognise.

The sentinels walk the corridors.

I watched three of them pass my door this morning. Shadow-figures, tall, silent, their forms solid in a way they weren't before.One paused outside my room. Turned its featureless head toward my door. I felt it read me—the marks, the bond, the blade at my hip—and something like acknowledgment passed between us. Then it moved on.

Caligo's court at one hundred percent. Fully restored. Centuries of slow death reversed in six weeks by a street thief from the rookeries who reached for the dark and found it reaching back.

I press my hand to the window glass. The marks on my arms shift—dark patterns moving under my skin, responding to the court's vibration. They extend past my elbows now, spreading toward my shoulders, and there are new ones on my collarbones. When I breathe, the marks at my ribs expand with my lungs. As if the court's language has learned the rhythm of my body.

"The court looks good on you."

I don't turn. His reflection in the glass—white hair, charcoal horns, the ghost of a smile I never saw before last night. His shadows are different. Fuller. More of them, and they move with a speed and complexity they didn't have a week ago. They fill the corridor behind him like a tide.