Page 81 of Shadowed

I step through.

The dark swallows me. The cold burns. The marks flare—white-hot at my throat, my wrists, my ribs—and then the passage spits me into an Ashworth alley and the cold is just coldand the dark is just dark and the marks settle against my skin and pulse with a heartbeat that is not mine.

I stand in the alley off Lantern Row. Fog. Coal smoke. The distant rattle of a hansom cab. The world I came from, the world that made me, the world where lock-picks and bread prices are all I need to understand.

I don't look back.

35

CALIGO

Eighty-eight percent.

Twelve points in the first hour. The connection to the Shadow Realm—wide, full, humming with power since the fourth night—narrows. Not gradually. In lurches. Each one a door slamming shut somewhere in the palace. Each one a lamp going dark.

I stand where she stood. The file is on the table where she put it. My handwriting. My annotations. Criminal development on schedule. I wrote those words sixteen years ago, sitting at this table, reviewing the quarterly surveillance reports on a family whose suffering I was managing the way a farmer manages a field.

I pick up the file. The pages are warm from her hands.

Lord Nephilik approaches. He moves carefully—the measured steps of someone entering a room where something has broken.

"The bond —"

"I know."

"The restoration —"

"I know."

"If she doesn't return, the court —"

"I know." My voice is the quietest it has been in seven hundred years.

Nephilik stops. He has served me for four centuries. He has seen the court at forty percent, at thirty, at the lowest point when the shadows barely answered and the walls went still. He knows what a declining court looks like. He is seeing it begin again.

His shadows deepen against the marble—the court responding to his distress before his face does. The old male's composure is armour worn for centuries, but the shadows between his form and the wall grow darker, denser. They roil like living ink. Around us, the palace feels the shift—the moment the court's second-most-powerful male registers that his prince is breaking, truly breaking, not recovering from a wound but watching one open wider with each passing minute.

"The passage," Nephilik says, and there is careful metal in the word. "The dimensional breach. You've held it open."

I nod.

"She can return through it."

"Yes."

"Which means she remains within reach. Reachable." He moves closer, and I see him calculate the cost of that reach—the extended pathway, the bleeding of our power across realms, the vulnerability. "Sire. If you hold the passage and she is angry, she could use it as a threat. As leverage. She could —"

"She won't." The certainty in my voice comes from somewhere ancient, somewhere that knows her better than I know myself. "She won't use the passage. She won't come back through it."

Nephilik's shadows settle slightly, accepting the command. But his eyes—dark, steady, four-hundred-years-loyal—search my face for something he doesn't find. "And if she chooses neverto return? If the passage collapses on its own in seven days' time and she has made no move to cross it?"

I don't answer because the answer is that I'll close the passage myself. I'll sever my only thread to her and I'll stand in this dimming court and I'll let her be something I orchestrated into existence for the last time. I'll give her the one thing I never gave her before.

I'll give her absence.

"Shall I send trackers?"

"No."