Page 35 of Shadowlands Omega

“Come, Kiandah. Let me take you home.”

14 | Kiandah

Shadow Keep

“You can open your eyes.”Yaron’s whisper is delicate, fragile, and uncharacteristic.

It causes me to jolt and pull away from where my face was buried in his chest. I could have fallen asleep there, in the safety of his shadows, if I hadn’t been freezing. Though he wrapped me in his dry cloak, the wetness from the mud on my clothes sank into my bones and I couldn’t stop shivering as he carried me in a cradle hold all the way back to the keep, his upper body Alpha while loping along on the legs of his beast.

I peel back from his body, peel my eyes open and look around just as the heavy sound of a door shutting registers. I recognize that sound and know where we are even before the haze clears from my eyes.

We’re back in his private chambers. His legs are human again and I hover at a slightly higher than normal human height off of the ground. Shyness and shame roll over me as the scent of pig shit clashes violently with the fresh scents of his room. Spicy incense, rich leather, sandalwood, and something distinctly Yaron. It’s too much.

I stutter out a torn whisper, “Thank you. You can put me down.”

“Yes, I can,” he replies, but he doesn’t.

Instead, he walks us back to the bathroom, which is separated from the rest of his open-air chambers by a large arched door. It’s colored slate, etched in so many beautiful and terrible depictions of beasts on the hunt and beasts coupling with one another, ravaging and rutting. I’ve tried not to overinterpret the symbols every time I had to go to the bathroom, but it’s been hard. I don’t know if the overall message is of devotion or destruction.

He pushes the door open with his foot and carries me into the bathroom. The cavernous space feels teeny tiny with him in it as he closes the door behind us, then moves to the far wall where he sets me down on the wide stone edge of the bathtub.

He keeps his hand on my thigh, just above my knee, as he reaches past me to turn on the spout. I can feel the heat from the water and shiver for the thousandth time as longing to be fully submerged fills me up just as water fills up the basin. I don’t comment on the modern water pump technology. Most homes in the Shadowlands use water pumps imported from the North Island, among other illegal technological necessities. To see the Shadow Lord with his fancy water in his rough-hewn stone tub is a contradiction that has made me smirk in the past. Not now, though. Now, I’m grateful for the chance to wash myself completely free of that foul Rider’s touch.His hands on my body, the feeling of him tugging my tunic loose…I shudder.

“Let me check your wounds first.”

He grabs a very, very small stool from beneath the vanity and drags it over. The stool looks far too small for him and he teeters in it in a way that makes the corner of my mouth twitch. He sees it and narrows his eyes. “Something on your mind?”

Only the manner of my torture. I shake my head.

He gives me a lingering look before changing the subject. “I can smell blood on your hands. May I see them?”

I show him my palms without protest.

“Stay still, please.” Please.

“S-sorry,” I croak.

His eyes narrow further as he plucks my right wrist off of my lap and hunches over it. “Now, I’ll ask you again and do not lie to me twice, Kiandah. I do not tolerate liars. I have told you this before and do not intend to repeat myself again. Ever. So, tell me now what thoughts are causing you to look at me thus.”

His gaze is focused on my palms as he picks little rocks out of them with the tips of his very sharp claws. My gaze is focused on his shirt — it’s almost uniformly red. As if it’s been soaked in dye. “My thoughts are…at odds with each other.”

“In what manner?”

“I…” I swallow hard and when he glances up at my face, he must see my focus on his shirt. He looks down at his torn and bloodied clothing, releases my hand for a moment, then tears his shirt free of his chest with a hard yank. He tosses the bloodied rags against the wall by the bathtub, in a corner I can’t see, then returns to my hands without another word. I can feel him waiting for me, expectantly.

“I um…I was thinking how funny you look sitting on that tiny stool.” He jerks up, then looks down at his stool, his eyebrows high on his forehead. Then I say, voice much softer, “And then I was looking at your bloody clothes and wondering how you planned to punish me.”

He glances over me once more, an unknown expression on his face. He inspects me from the top of my shit-smeared head down to the bottom of my mud-crusted shoes. “Do I look like I intend to punish you?”

I shake my head. “But I feel like you should.”

“Why?”

I bite my bottom lip. It stings and I wince. I struggle to meet his gaze, but force myself to. “I shouldn’t have left the keep.”

“Clearly. But did I command you to stay?”

I shake my head.

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