Page 82 of Shadowed

"The bond can be traced. Your shadows can reach Ashworth in —"

"No."

He looks at me. The look of a male who has followed orders for four hundred years and is choosing, very carefully, not to follow this one.

"She asked me to say it without the shadows." The words fall out of the fracture the way the other words did—uncontrolled, unplanned, the things that come through the crack in my chest that she opened. "She asked me to use words. And I could not."

Nephilik is silent. He is wise enough to be silent.

"Leave me."

He goes. The throne room empties. The nobles file out—some quickly, some lingering, all of them carrying the image of their prince standing over a file in a room where his bond-mate just walked out. The whispers will start before they reach the corridor. Let them.

Eighty-six percent. The shadows along the walls move sluggishly. A throne room that held the restored power of ages is dimming.

The door closes behind the last of them.

My fist goes through the table.

Not a decision. Not the command register. My arm moves and the shadow-stone surface—three inches thick, seven hundred years old, the table where four courts sent proposals and my bond-mate slammed a file—splits under my knuckles. The crack runs the full length. The proposals scatter. The ink pot shatters and black pools across the stone floor like blood.

My shadows break.

Not the controlled surge. Not the tactical deployment. The living dark of Shadow Court rips free of my discipline and lashes—whips of shadow cracking against the throne room walls, gouging stone, shearing the candelabra from its mount. It crashes. Bronze on marble. The sound is enormous in the empty room and it is not enough.

I seize the Frost Court proposal—the one I folded into ninths, the one my shadows already consumed—and there is nothing left to burn so I take the Stone Court breeding alliance and tear it in half. In quarters. My hands shaking. Not the measured hands of a seven-hundred-year-old prince. The hands of a male whose bond-mate walked through a passage and took his ability to function with her.

My wings explode open.

The full span—thirty feet, wingtip to wingtip—filling the throne room, knocking the remaining chairs from their rows, the bone-struts slamming into the vaulted walls. I have not opened them fully in three centuries. The membrane catches no light. It fills the room with dark and the room is not big enough and the wings press against the ceiling and the walls and the architectural stone groans.

A sentinel wakes in its alcove. Then another. The shadow-guards responding to their prince's fury—rising from dormancy, dark figures taking form, their empty eyes sweeping the throne room for the threat. There's no threat. There's only me. Standing in the wreckage of a table with black ink on my knuckles andmy wings filling a room built for three hundred and my shadows tearing stone from walls because the woman who restored this court just walked out of it and I cannot follow her.

I will not follow her.

The distinction between cannot and will not is the only thing I have left. My shadows disagree. They fling themselves toward the passage—the dimensional breach still open, still humming, still pulling toward her—and I haul them back. The effort is physical. My vision darkens. My cock aches—a deep, savage throb, the prehensile curl of it rigid against my thigh, straining toward the passage the way my shadows strain, the animal part of me that bonded to her body screaming to follow, to find, to pin her against a wall and fuck the leaving out of her until she understands that walking away from me is not something her body will survive.

I don't follow.

I stand in the ruined throne room with my wings spread and my shadows lashing and my cock hard and my court dimming and I don't follow because following is what I do. Following is what I have done for twenty years. Surveilling. Controlling. Engineering the path so she walks where I need her to walk. Following is the disease and she just named it and the naming broke something open and the thing that broke is standing in this room destroying furniture because it does not know how to be still.

The sentinels watch me. Silent. Waiting for orders that will not come.

I fold my wings. The motion hurts—bone against bone, the strain of having spread them too wide after centuries of containment. I fold them and the room is just a room. Wrecked. The table split. The chairs scattered. Ink on the floor. Gouges in the wall where my shadows carved their fury into stone.

Eighty-four percent.

I go to my chambers.

The bed smells like her. Not the heat—that's broken, that's finished. The other scent. The underneath one. Sweat and coal smoke and the mineral smell of someone who grew up in wet stone rooms. The scent of her hair when she pressed her face to my chest. The scent of her skin when she slept.

My shadows gather on the bed. Not by my design—by their own. They pool on the sheets where she lay and they make patterns against the walls. Her face. Her hands on my locks. The moment she reached for my shadows instead of pulling away from them. The moment she said mine with her mouth against my throat.

The moment she asked me to speak and I could not.

I sit on the bed. The sheets are cold. She has been gone for three hours and the bed is already cold and the shadows are already slower and the court is already dimming and I sit here because seven centuries of isolation taught me how to sit in the dark and do nothing and the skill is apparently unkillable.

Eighty-four percent.