Page 85 of Shadowed

She doesn't ask what happened in the palace. She doesn't ask about the bond or the shadows or the Fae prince. Elena doesn'tneed the story—she reads between the lines and finds the truth there, cleaner than any confession. She learned that too. From surviving.

Tommy finds me later. He's eight and he climbs into my lap without asking because he's eight and lap-climbing is still acceptable and the weight of him—heavier than last time, better fed—settles against my chest and his hair smells like soap instead of the tallow-and-damp of the old flat.

"Your arms look different," he says. Tracing the shadow-marks with one finger. "They're pretty."

"They're complicated."

"Like locks?"

"Like locks."

He falls asleep in my lap. I sit at the table with my brother's teacup and my sister's books and my smallest sibling's weight and I look at the room that should feel like home and doesn't.

The sounds hit me in layers. A dray horse on the cobblestones outside—the percussion of iron shoes, the driver's low curse, the wagon's grind. Two floors up, someone arguing through a paper-thin wall. The man's voice flat, the woman's pitched high with the edge of tears or rage. A baby crying from somewhere across the street, the sound pure and unmodulated, newborn desperate. All of it colliding in the small flat, bouncing off the walls, too many voices for a space this narrow. I grew up in this noise. This is Ashworth. This should be the map of my body.

Three months in Shadow Court has mapped a different Ashworth into me. A place where sounds don't compete but move in sequence—footsteps, then silence, then the whisper of shadow-cloth. A place where darkness absorbs noise instead of amplifying it. Where the air itself holds things softly instead of throwing them at your ears.

The gaslight flickers. Yellow. That sickly gaslit yellow that tastes like coal smoke and copper. The flame catches the shadow-marks on my wrists, and in this light they look wrong—almost ugly, the patterns sharp and too visible, stripped of the cool blue-dark they belong in. His marks. His court's marks. The darkness-marks are shadow-light marks, meant to glow in a court where the only illumination comes from living dark. Here they look bruised. Broken. Like something pulled from its proper place and left to wither in the wrong atmosphere.

I flex my fingers. The marks pulse—not in response to me, but to something happening three months away, in a palace where a prince is learning what it means when the omega he claimed walks away and takes half his power with her. The marks belong there. I belong there. And the too-bright room, the competing voices, the yellow gaslight that makes Ashworth look like a tuberculosis ward—none of it fits a body that has been remade for shadow.

I hate that I think that. I hate that three months in a court made of darkness has made me allergic to gaslight. I hate that the marks on my arms shift when I think about him—his face, his horns, his shadows reaching across the throne room floor. I hate that the marks pulse with a heartbeat that is not mine and the heartbeat's slower tonight than it was yesterday and I know what that means.

The court is dimming. His power is dropping. The restoration unwinding because I left.

I press my hand to the marks at my throat. They burn faintly—not heat, not cold. The temperature of a bond protesting distance. The temperature of something alive that has been separated from the thing that feeds it.

I left. The marks didn't.

Marcus puts a blanket over Tommy without waking him. He sits back down at the table. He doesn't say anything. He doesn'tneed to. He's sixteen and he has my eyes and he's doing the thing I taught him to do—sitting with something difficult and not running from it.

Tommy's weight stays warm against my chest, his breath evening out into the rhythm of deep sleep. I sit with the too-bright room and the shadow-marks that don't belong in gaslight and the realization that I've brought the court home with me whether I want to or not. Both things are true. The provisions. The price. The warmth of this flat and the cost of it written in Fae script under my skin.

I don't know what to do with any of it.

I taught Marcus how to sit with difficult things. In the rookeries. In the dark. Before any of it was on schedule.

That part was real.

37

CALIGO

Eighty percent. The number sits in the throne room like a corpse.

Three days since she left. The Shadow Realm connection narrows by the hour—I can taste it, the way you taste blood in the back of your throat before you see the wound. My shadows move sluggishly along the walls. The architecture reconfigures with visible effort, corridors stretching when they should hold, lamps flickering in patterns that haven't appeared since the decades before Lilith.

Before Lilith. I'm already dividing time by her.

The court can feel it. The nobles move differently—careful, tight, the cautious hunched posture of people inside a building they suspect is failing. The sentinels slow in their patrols. The palace groans at night—stone shifting, the deep structural sounds of something massive settling into a shape it had hoped to leave behind.

The east corridor is dying. The shadow-stones that line it have dulled from obsidian to slate, and three sections have cracked lengthwise in patterns that match the fissure in the throne room's architecture from last week. When I walk it, theair is stale—the active circulation has stopped. What remains is the breath of an ancient building remembering how it functioned when its Fae lord was diminished to thirty percent, when the palace itself had to do the work. The paintings on the walls have faded a shade darker, as if the gallery is draining its own pigment to fuel what little magic the court still generates.

A sentinel stops me in the north gallery. Not stops. Dissolves. One moment he is rigid in the posture of duty, the next his form is separating at the edges—shadow bleeding into the darker shadow of the walls, his substance thinning like watercolor in rain. I watch him scatter. There's no scream. The Fae who maintain themselves as shadows don't have the architecture for that. He simply becomes unmade, his component parts returning to the undirected darkness of the Shadow Realm. His armor clatters to the stone.

The garden is worse. The garden that grew for her—that bloomed under her hands in a matter of days, responding to the combination of her will and the Fae court's hunger to sustain her—has gone dormant. The roses have withdrawn entirely. The vines have hardened into something closer to dead wood, and where she touched the fountain, the water has turned the colour of old silver, still moving but moving without purpose. I stand in the center of what was a growing thing and feel the cold sink into my ribs. It's below my skin, this cold. It lives behind my heart now.

My shadows move differently. The grey creeps into my peripheral vision like smoke—not in the way it does when I'm exercising control, but passive, leaching. When I press my hand to the wall, the stone is cold enough to sting. The connection between my court and the Realm is measured in percentages, but I feel it in the physical erosion of myself. The ache behind my ribs. The lethargy in my fingers. The sense that my own shadowsare becoming ornamental, decorative, a shadow-court in name only.