Page 74 of Shadowed

"You said that about the blade."

"The blade looked good on you too." He steps into the room. His shadows enter with him—pouring across the floor, climbing the walls, the living dark of a court at full power. "The court, the blade, the marks. Everything looks good on you because everything belongs to you."

I turn. Look at him. The prince of Shadow Court at one hundred percent—his shadows dense and fast, his eyes fully dark, his wings held close but vibrating with contained power. He looks taller. Broader. Not a different male. The same one, but finished. A lock with all its tumblers seated.

"We need to discuss Aratus."

"We do."

"And Sybillis."

"Her too."

"And the —" I press my hand to my belly. Flat. Nothing to feel yet. "The suggestion."

His mouth curves. The smile—the real one, the one that cracked open during the first heat and has been widening since. "The suggestion can wait. The court cannot."

He extends his hand. Not commanding—offering. Palm up. Grey skin, shadow-marks of his own tracing his wrist. The hand of a male whose shadows said the thing he wouldn't, while he was inside me, and meant it every time.

I take it. His fingers close around mine. His shadows wrap our joined hands—not tight, not possessive. Present.

We walk to the throne room.

The palace adjusts for both of us now. Corridors shorten. Lamps brighten when I approach and dim when he does, the light meeting in the middle of wherever we are. The stone warms under my feet and cools under his and the temperature is perfect where we stand together. The court has learned our shapes.

The throne room is changed. Bigger. The ceiling higher, the shadows denser, the sentinels flanking the doorway—two of them, tall and watchful, their featureless heads tracking our approach. They part when we enter. They bow.

Not to him. To both of us.

"Shadow Court recognises its bond-pair," Caligo says. Level. The command register. But his hand tightens around mine. "The throne room responds to both."

I look at the room. The table in the centre—stone, shadow-forged, maps and intelligence reports spread across its surface. The window behind the throne where Oberon's reflection appeared last night. The chairs—two of them now, where there used to be one.

The palace built me a chair.

I sit in it. The stone moulds to my body—adjusting, learning, the same way the blade adjusted to my grip and the locks adjust to my picks. My chair. At the table. In the throne room of a court that answers to my choices.

A chair is also a place you're put. I push the thought away before it fully forms.

"The Aratus situation first." I pull the intelligence reports toward me. Reading upside down is a skill I learned at twelve, fencing documents from merchants who didn't know I was memorising their inventory. "The operative was a probe. He wanted to test whether Sybillis's intelligence was accurate."

"It was accurate at the time she sold it."

"It's not accurate now." I look at the reports. Shadow Court's defensive capabilities at one hundred percent versus the seventy-eight percent Sybillis mapped. "Everything she told him is obsolete. He's planning an attack against a court that no longer exists."

Caligo's shadows spread across the table. The observational pattern—tendrils testing the reports, reading the intelligence, but there is a new quality to the spread. Speed. Depth. Power that wasn't there a week ago.

"Let him come," Caligo says.

"No." I put the report down. "Let him think he's coming. There's a difference."

His eyes find mine. The lightless black—and behind it, the thing I used to call patience but now recognise as something else. Attention. The complete, focused attention of a male who has spent centuries listening. Who has decided the thing most worth listening to is me.

"Explain."

"I'm a thief. Thieves don't fight. We misdirect." I pull the map toward me. Shadow Court's borders, the passage points, the dimensional weak spots. I've been mapping them for weeks.Not because he asked me to. Because I map everything. "Aratus expects a court at seventy-eight percent with gaps in shadow coverage. He'll send a strike force matched to —"

I stop. Rephrase. "He'll send a force sized for the court Sybillis described. We let the first wave through. Deep enough to commit. Then the sentinels close behind them and they're in a court at one hundred percent with no retreat."