Page 7 of Shadowed

"What?"

"From the lip-reading:Lovely chat. Let's not do this again."

The sound that comes out of my chest is not a laugh. It's lower than a laugh, rougher than a laugh, the noise of a male whose hunger has just identified its target and decided to enjoy itself. Nephilik's shadows go still against his coat. He hasn't heard that sound from me in seven centuries.

"My prince?—"

"Continue the watch, Nephilik. Every word she says to a shadow logged. Every reach. Every glance toward the dark she can't explain. Every breath she takes that catches and won't tell her why."

"Yes."

"Leave."

He bows. The throne room door closes behind him and I let my discipline go before the latch has finished settling.

My hand goes to my cock.

Not stroking. Gripping. Through the leather, through the fabric, my fist closes around the prehensile length and squeezes hard enough that pre-release leaks against the cloth. I haven't put my hand on myself in two hundred years because there's been nothing worth the gesture. Tonight I close my fist around my cock because the alternative is letting my shadows followNephilik into the corridor and tear him apart for the offence of having seen her face on my walls.

"Mine."

The word comes out of my mouth before I've decided to say it. The throne room takes the sound and gives it back—mine,mine, the syllable bouncing off shadow-stone walls that haven't heard their prince claim anything in seven centuries. The shadows along the wall ripple in answer. They believe me before I've believed myself.

I close my eyes and I watch her with the shadows that follow her home.

The market. The bread, the cheese, the milk. A scrap of blue ribbon she holds up to the gaslight and examines with the same critical eye she turns on locks—colour, weave, value per penny—then tucks into her pocket and keeps her hand on for three steps before letting go. The ribbon is for the sister. Fourteen. Birthday last week. The shadow logs say Lilith gave Elena nothing because nothing was the only thing the jar could fund. The ribbon costs tuppence.

"You'll have a coat next month, thief." My voice is flat in the empty throne room. The shadows don't ripple this time. They're listening. "And shoes for the sister and a doctor for the youngest and a real bed for the boy. By the new year your jar won't matter. By the new year you won't have a jar."

I have spent five hundred thousand pieces of gold on women who meant less to me than that ribbon means to her. My hand tightens on my cock.

The flat. The Bramah she rebuilt herself, seven levers, the best three shillings could buy. She uses the key. She picked the Bramah once in my watching, the night she finished installing it, fingers moving through the mechanism the way other women touch lovers—blind, sure, possessive—and she smiled. Fifteen years old, alone in the dark, smiling at a lock that worked. Theonly smile I've witnessed in three years that wasn't given to a sibling.

"That smile is mine."

The shadows ripple again. They agree.

Mine, mine, mine. The pulse of it rolls through the throne room and the shadows lash against the walls and my fist works slow against my own cock because I won't finish in my own hand. I haven't finished in my own hand in seven centuries and I'm not breaking that count tonight. The next time I finish will be inside her. In her cunt. In her mouth. On her tits. In the dark of her flat or the dark of my chambers or the dark of whatever room my shadows have built around the bed I haven't claimed yet. Not in my fist. Not into cloth.

Inside her.

The flat. The three children. The shoes money to the sister. The apples to the brother. The milk to the youngest.

She takes nothing.

"Eat, you stubborn girl."

The shadow at her window can't reach her. Can't push the bread toward her hand. Can only watch her give and give and give and take nothing for herself, and my cock aches and my shadows tear gouges into the stone walls and the part of me that was a court strategist seven centuries ago is calculating what she'll be when she has eaten. When she has slept. When she has had a year of food and warmth and a male watching her back so the watching costs her nothing.

The part of me that is a male is calculating what she'll be the first time my knot locks her around me.

How wet she'll be. How tight the prehensile curl of me will fit when her body opens for an alpha for the first time. The sound she'll make when the knot seats. The bite my mouth will leave on the line of her throat where the bond-mark belongs. Howmany times I'll have to make her come before she stops trying to flatten her voice and lets me hear what she sounds like undone.

Both parts agree on the answer.

The flat goes quiet. The children sleep in stages. She sits on the floor by the door, back against the wood, hands in her lap—those extraordinary hands—and her eyes are open because they don't close. They never close.

"Sleep," I tell her. The throne room takes the word. She doesn't hear it. "Sleep, thief. Just once, sleep first."