Page 78 of Shadowed

I pulled them back. They returned. I pulled harder. They resisted.

Now it's midnight and I'm standing in the corridor and my shadows got here first and the court is telling me what I already know.

I put my hand on the door. The wood is cool. My shadows surge—every tendril pressing forward, straining through the gap beneath the door, reaching for her, doing in dark what I will not do in words.

I can smell her through the door—not the heat-scent, the other one. Sweat and fear and the acrid edge of anger. The scent of someone who has been sitting with bad news for hours and has no one to sit with her.

I pull my hand away.

I walk to my study. I review the northern corridor access points. I work until dawn on terms that will protect the border for a generation, and I do not go to her door again.

My shadows pool at my feet and they are heavy with the thing I will not let them say and I don't look at the patterns on the wall.

This is the crack. Not the file she hasn't found yet. Not the confrontation that hasn't happened. This—the silence where words should be. The choice to attend to walls and borders while the woman who restored my court reads threat assessments about her siblings and doesn't know they are already safe.

I've spent my entire reign learning to prioritise survival. I've never learned to prioritise her.

The shadows press against her door all night. I let them. It's the smallest concession—shadows instead of words, presence instead of explanation. It's not enough.

It's not enough and I choose it anyway because I'm seven centuries old and broken in ways the restoration did not fix and the hardest lock in Shadow Court is not in any archive.

It's the one I keep closed when I should open it.

33

LILITH

Igo to the archives at three in the morning because three in the morning is when I work.

Not the archives I've been given access to—the training records, the court histories, the carefully curated collection of documents that tell a story someone wants told. The sealed archives. Deep in the palace. Behind locks that no one but Caligo should be able to open.

I need information. The intelligence reports told me my siblings are being watched. Caligo hasn't spoken to me in two days—he's been in the west wing with the Frost Court delegation, and his shadows have been pooling outside my door at night but shadows aren't words and I need words. I need to know who is watching my siblings and why and how to stop it and I need the information now, not in three days when the delegation leaves.

I need a locked door that has answers behind it.

Seven locks.

The first three are physical—heavy, shadow-forged, the kind of lock I'd have killed to practise on when I was twelve. Beautiful work. Twelve tumblers each, the pins set in a spiral pattern thatrequires three picks working simultaneously. My hands know them. The palace holds its breath while I work.

The fourth is a ward. Shadow magic, layered thick, the kind that should burn a human's skin on contact. I press my palm to it and it does not burn. It reads me. The shadow-marks on my wrists pulse against the ward's surface and something in the magic recognises something in my blood and the ward parts like a curtain.

Five. Six. Seven. Each one harder. Each one opening. My picks moving through shadow-forged mechanisms that should be impossible for human hands, and every tumbler clicking for me the way they've clicked since the first night I set foot in this court. My gift. The thing that makes me useful. The thing that made me his.

The deepest archive of Shadow Court opens and the air inside is old. Decades old. Undisturbed dark, the kind you taste.

I step inside.

The records are meticulous. Shadow Court keeps everything—treaties, intelligence reports, personnel files, strategic assessments. Seven centuries of paperwork filed in crystallised shadow, each document preserved in the dark the way other courts preserve things in ice or stone or living vine.

I don't know what I'm looking for. I'm looking for anything that explains why Frost Court is surveilling three children and why my bond-mate is in the west wing talking borders instead of here talking to me. I'm looking for the thread that connects the threats to the silence to the feeling in my gut that says something is wrong in a way I haven't mapped yet.

I find the file in the fourth drawer of the third cabinet.

It's labelled GREY, THOMAS. My father's name. Dated twenty years before I was born.

My hands go still. Not shaking—still. The stillness before a tumbler clicks. The moment you know what the lock is going to tell you.

I open the file.