Page 36 of Shadebound
“She’d want to know.”
“She doesn’t need to.” I huffed and looked back at her, unable to stop myself when I knew she was right.
Maya exhaled slowly, wrapping her arms tighter around herself. “You’re a fool.”
I didn’t argue. She was right. Again.
The night I’d gone to Jinx, bloodied and shaking, I hadn’t planned to touch her. But she let me stay. Held me when I broke. Kissed me like I wasn’t a monster.
And I let her. Just that once.
Then I left before the sun came up. Let her wake up alone. Pretended it hadn’t meant anything—like I hadn’t just carvedsomething real out of a world that never gave me anything but pain.
She spent eight months breaking because of that. Eight months setting the world on fire trying to avenge her sister and give herself a way to channel her anger and grief. I knew what it did to her. I knew I played a part in it.
So I couldn’t do that to her again.
Not even when she smiled, and I wanted to kiss her. Not when she cried, and I wanted to kill whoever made her sad. Not even when I wanted to fall to my knees and beg for one more second of her simply looking at me.
She deserved better than someone who only knew how to ruin things. And I wasn’t going to be the reason she shattered again.
“Zayden,” Maya said, voice sharp enough to cut through my thoughts, tugging me back.
I looked up.
The shadows around us thickened. Like the dark itself was breathing and full of malicious intent.
Like the shadows werealive.
“Let’s go back to the dorm,” I told her, voice low. “We can tell Hightower in the morning. I don’t trust those shadows.”
We headed back to the dorms together, and though Maya tried to make random small talk, I could barely listen. Not when my head was throbbing and my mind was racing.
If it wasn’t bad enough that Jinx had only been sentenced to Mors because she’d gone after the people who she thought murdered her twin—torturing them for months, brutalising them with twisted, sadistic care, until eventually she killed them in the slowest ways she could dream up—it was the fact that she never even got the right ones.
And if she ever found out the real killer might actually have beenhere, at Mors...
I didn’t think she’d survive it. Not because she couldn’t. But because she’d go all in. She’d destroy herself for vengeance.
As much as I loved her for her darkness—as much as I admired it—I knew it would be the end of her. And I knew I would die before I let her kill herself.
Not again.
Field Journal — Entry #062 - Classified
They call it the shadebound plague, but it’s not a sickness. It’s a slipping. A fraying of the mind that begins in silence and ends in screams. The more we use the magic, the more it clings—like shadow to skin, like rot to root. Some call it madness. I call it memory that won’t stay buried. We’re told to ration it. To sleep. To rest. But rest is hard when the dark is louder than your heartbeat. I’ve seen too many who were fine one day and gone the next. Not dead. Just... vanished beneath it.
I wonder how long I have left.
Chapter Twelve, To Be Chosen by a Shadow
Iwoke up to the sound of humming. Not the good kind. Not like a funeral dirge or the low vibrations of a haunted pipe organ. No, this was the chirpy, optimistic hum of someone who had voluntarily chosen to face the day.
Mayawas standing near the fake window, brushing her hair and murmuring to herself like a princess who’d been cursed into sharing a tower with a sleep-deprived misanthrope. The projected morning light spilt across her face in watery patches of green and red. The illusion of sunrise rippled faintly when she moved.
It looked like a real window. But when I poked it last night during the hours I’d been too wired to sleep, the illusion shivered. It really was just an enchanted screen. No fresh air. No breeze. Just scenery, on loop.
I loved windows more than anything. Mine at home were rarely shut. Especially in winter.
