Page 93 of Shadowed

Eighty percent. Eighty-two.

Her forehead is still against mine. Her breath is warm—the only warm thing in this room, in this court, in the cold dark I have occupied for seven centuries. The marks on her skin are crawling. They move in the low light—the shadow-patterns climbing her throat, reaching toward my hands, the bond's calligraphy writing itself in real time across skin it missed.

I kneel.

Not for heat. Not for rut. Not the blind drive of a male claiming what his body demands. I kneel because she came back knowing the worst of me and I have no other language for what that means except the body on the floor.

Her hand is still on my face. She looks down at me—green eyes, bright. Not what she expected from a seven-hundred-year-old king on his knees in his own throne room. Someone seeing something she did not plan for.

"That's new," she says. The fencing voice, but the crack is showing.

I press my mouth to her stomach. Through the fabric of the rookeries coat. She is still wearing the rookeries coat—the dark wool, the patched elbows, the coat she wore home and wore back and did not exchange for anything the palace offered. The scent of Ashworth in the wool. Fog. Coal smoke. Where she stole bread at six.

My hands find the coat buttons. I undo them the way she would—one by one, reading them, letting each one give before moving to the next. She watches. Her breathing changes. The dark patterns on her ribs pulse faster.

The coat falls open. Beneath it, a cotton shirt. Beneath that, her skin. The shadow-marks are vivid now—climbing her ribs, circling her navel, the dark patterns of my court mapped onto a body that chose to carry them.

My mouth finds the mark below her navel. She makes a sound—not a moan, not yet, something closer to an exhale that forgot to stop. My shadows respond before I can hold them. A single tendril curls up the back of her calf, light, questioning. Not wrapping. Asking.

"Yes," she says. Not to me. To the shadow on her leg. "Yes, fine, come here."

The tendril wraps her ankle. Another slides along the back of her knee. They move like hands learning a surface they already know—tracing the paths they traced before the break, re-mapping what was lost. Each one pauses before settling. Each one waits for her body to accept it before tightening.

My shadows are asking permission. Every tendril a question. Every touch contingent on the answer her skin gives back.

I pull the shirt over her head. The marks go all the way up. New ones—patterns I have never seen, dark script across her collarbones, the bond writing the story of her absence in shadow-language on her chest. I trace a line that runs from her throat to the hollow between her breasts. My thumb follows the dark calligraphy and the mark warms under my touch and her breath catches.

"That one is new," I tell her. "It appeared while you were gone."

"What does it say?"

I read the shadow-script the way she reads locks—by feel, by the language of the tumblers. The mark tells me what my shadows wrote while she was in Ashworth and the court was dying by degrees.

"It says you came back."

She laughs. Short, rough, the dark-edged sound that makes my chest crack open. "That's presumptuous. It couldn't have known."

"My shadows knew." My tongue traces the new mark. "They always know."

I pull her trousers down. My hands on her hips. My mouth following the marks—every shadow-pattern that crawls her stomach, her thighs, the dark script on the inside of her knee that was there before the break and the new ones that appeared during it. Her hands find my horns. She grips. The familiar pressure—her fingers curling around the base of my horns the way she curls her fingers around a lock, sure, firm, reading.

I put my mouth on her.

She jerks. Hard—her whole body flinching, hips twisting sideways, hands shoving at my horns. Not pulling me closer. Pushing me away. The sensation too raw after a week of nothing. Her thighs clamp shut against my ears and her body fights me—the instinct of a woman who has never let anyone hold her down and does not intend to start.

I don't let her go.

My hands lock on her hips. My shadows move faster than thought—tendrils wrapping both thighs and wrenching them apart, pinning them open, the living dark holding her spread while my tongue finds the rhythm her body taught me on Night Two and Night Three and Night Four. Learned by repetition. By attention. By the absolute refusal to get it wrong.

"Don't —" She is pulling at my horns. Yanking. Trying to drag my mouth off her. "It's too—I can't just —"

I flatten my tongue against her clit and press. My hands dig into her hips hard enough to bruise. The shadows hold her thighs wide and she cannot close them, cannot twist away, cannot do anything except stand there shaking while I eat her with the single-minded focus of a male who starved for eight days and is not wasting a drop.

She sobs. Her grip on my horns shifts from pushing to pulling—the transition happening between one breath and the next, her body giving in before her mouth does. A tendril curls up to circle her nipple and she arches into it and a sound comes out of her—a strangled keen that bounces off the stone walls.

"There," she chokes. "There—right there—don't stop —"

I don't stop. My tongue works her in flat strokes while the shadows pin her thighs apart and my hands hold her hips still. She is trembling. Her thighs straining against the shadow restraints and failing and the trying makes it worse—every clench, every flex presses her harder against my mouth.