Page 83 of Shadebound
Zayden’s jaw ticked when he took the free chair next to me. Bruises littered his side, purpling already. Maya stared down at her tray, lips pressed in a tight line. Eris held her spoon limply, not tired, but clearly worried about a lack of meals. None of them looked at me with blame. Their frustration was aimed elsewhere.
Alessandro wasn’t so restrained when I caught his eye on the table opposite. He signed across to me with sharp, clipped motions.
I told you not to mess with my deployment.
I didn’t respond. I didn’t have the energy. My hands ached, and I was still trembling. I was wrung out. Hollow and confused, and absolutely shattered.
Alessandro signed something else—faster, more vicious—but Zayden intercepted him with a quick, scathing reply. The dragon’s face darkened. He leant back in his seat, signing something else under the table, something small and subtle that I couldn’t see. Planning something, no doubt. Stewing about my perceived threat to his leaving this place. As though Iwantedhim here longer.
As though I wanted anything but the answer to a riddle or a face and a name.
The noise of the hall pressed in from all sides. Cutlery scraped against plates. Chairs dragged. Students suddenly laughed in the corner, as if the world hadn’t tilted sideways.
I wasn’t sure when dinner ended and how I got back to the dorm. Only that I blinked and it happened.
That night, the second round of sleep deprivation began.
The shrieking never let up. Every screech fractured something deeper, like they were peeling my mind apart with sound alone. The distortion wasn’t just noise anymore—it had embedded itself into my spine, vibrating through nerves already raw from lack of sleep. Someone was dragging shattered glass across bone, over and over, merciless in its infliction. My muscles twitched with each wave, no longer obeying the demands of my brain. I could barely hold a thought in place. Every fragment slipped through my grasp like sand through broken fingers, and I no longer knew how long I’d been lying there, listening to it all break me open from the inside out.
Maya handed me another set of earplugs without a word, to replace the ones that had vanished at sunrise. I took them. Zayden did the same when he leant against the wall beside me, fingers twitching against his thigh.
My bed didn’t feel like a place meant for rest anymore. It had become a hard, unwelcoming surface—nothing more than a slab where I dropped my body after the torturous day, muscles cramping, skin raw from effort, thoughts gnawed to ribbons. The screaming wasn’t background noise anymore. It scraped through my skull, a jagged edge that cut deeper each hour it went on. I couldn’t block it out. Couldn’t push it away. It wormed into my bones, into the soft, dark places of my mind I tried to hide. And I lay there, too drained to move, too stunned to sleep, waiting for the next shriek to peel another piece of me away.
I stared at the ceiling, pulse skittering. My limbs shook from exhaustion. I couldn’t cry. Couldn’t scream. I just waited, wide-eyed and silent, trapped in another endless night.
And somewhere in the mess of it, I realised something.
Mors wasn’t a school. Mors wasn’t about reform. It wasn’t as harmless and beautiful as I thought it was at first.
Itwaspunishment.
And I had to get my brother out of here before it took him the way it was trying to take me.
Field Journal — Entry #479 - Classified
Ghosts linger because they are tethered to what they could not finish.
A promise unkept. A revenge unclaimed. A truth left rotting in silence. Until it is done, they cannot rest—they drift in the in-between, half in this world, half aching for the next. I often think the shadebound are the same. We are just ghosts with blood in our veins, given bodies so we can finish what death interrupted.
Chapter Twenty Five, Menace
The showers in Mors were too quiet. No talking at the sinks about skincare or school drama. No footsteps coming or going. Just the hiss of a few working showerheads and the slow drip from the pipes high in the walls. The sound carried, bouncing off the tiles until it seemed sharper than it should have been.
Enough steam to make my hair frizz filled the room from floor to ceiling, pressing against the walls and clinging to the glass over the sinks. Had I been alive, I would have been annoyed.
Now I was dead. So I was annoyed about other things.
The ceiling lights buzzed with an uneven hum that I could hear. One flickered now and then, quick bursts that made the shadows move along the walls. The sound grated after a while, that faint electrical whine, the kind you could almost imagine boring straight into the back of your skull if you stood there too long.
I was bored with being bored. It was probably the most annoying thing about being dead. Other than you, know... the dead part.
Ignoring my pity party thoughts, I floated to the object of my haunting.
Eris was at the far end under a working shower, her back to the wall. The water streamed over her face and hair, darkening it until it stuck to her neck. She tipped her head back, eyes closed, and ran her fingers slowly through it.
She was humming. It wasn’t a tune I recognised. Just a lazy rise and fall like she wasn’t even thinking about it. She looked comfortable. And yes—she was annoyingly pretty. Even soaked, with her hair plastered to her face, she had that outcast, but hot thing going on. Like she could walk out of here, throw on any clothes, and still look like she’d done it on purpose. It made her obliviousness worse somehow.
Pretty girls should have been extra smart so we could fuck the patriarchy over with a double dose of excellence.
