Page 24 of Shadebound
And now I had Draven to protect and no room for tangled feelings. Plus, seeing as that same night with Zayden was right before I first hunted the monsters who killed my twin, I hardly thought it best to put myself in the same situation again. Murderer was already the path I’d chosen, but a new rampage wasn’t part of today’s plan.
Neither was being grossly in love with someone. Least of all someone who ran out into the darkness before his cum had even stopped dripping down my thighs. Or couldn’t leave a note to say why he was going to vanish.
Ah, men. They truly were delightful.
I swore I only checked Zayden out for observational purposes. To see how his black hair was longer than I remembered, messier. There was a streak of purple through the fringe now, half-tucked behind one pierced ear. New tattoos crawled across his chest and arms, sporadic and sharp-edged. I could see faint freckles on his cheeks beneath the shifting torchlight. His silver eyes glowed in the dim, steady and knowing, like stars trapped in dusk. The curve of his mouth hinted at a joke he hadn’t told yet.
He looked the same. Just slightly darker.
My sleepy shadows moved with me, curling along my arms and shoulders like living threads of ink. Desperate to come out and play for real. A few brushed across Zayden’s side when he walked close enough to touch me. He snorted quietly and poked one with a finger. Not afraid.At all. He’d always been like that.
Always thought I was more than just a terrifying monster like the world claimed me to be.
It was why I loved him.
And why I was never going to admit it again. Not just because monsters couldn’t do love, but because I knew how horrid I’d be if he didn’t say it back again.
I much preferred him alive and unaware than on my butcher’s block for breaking my dead heart.
Field Journal, Entry #294 — Classified
Feelings don’t fade when you’re shadebound. They calcify. You carry them in your ribs like splinters. No one tells you that grief has teeth. That love becomes a sickness you can’t sweat out. We don’t get second chances. We get second lifetimes—and we spend them pretending the first one didn’t kill us.
Chapter Nine, Emotions Are A Gift & A Curse
After an age, we reached the bottom of our dorm tower. Thick stone bricks stacked high, weathered by time and scarred by claw marks and burns that hadn’t been cleaned off. A spiral staircase led to the top, each step groaning beneath our boots with a sound like something ancient waking up. The walls were cold and damp, breathing with the wind that funnelled through narrow cracks, carrying the scent of rain.
Vines of carved runes twined along the stone, pulsing faintly as if they were reacting to our presence. Deep somewhere below, the wind howled through the narrow gaps, echoing in bursts that sounded too much like breathing.
I kept sneaking glances at Zayden even when we took a spiral staircase up. He looked older somehow. Less boy, more blade. There was a sharpness to him, in his jawline, in the wayhis gaze flicked to the real shadows as if he expected them to move.
It made my chest ache a little. I remembered the softness he used to carry. I remembered how sweet he was the night after our first kiss at fifteen, when he’d fallen asleep in my lap and whispered that I made the darkness in his head quieter.
The first time we’d forgotten we were just friends.
Then went back right to pretending the morning after.
“The beds are uncomfy as fuck. But they do give us blankets, at least,” Zayden mused, just as my legs started to ache from the effort of so many stairs without my shadows helping me float. “I know you like the cold, but you can have my blanket if you need more. They’re kind of thin.”
With a mumbled thanks, I stared at the cuff embedded in my wrist instead of him. The tiny runes carved into the surface pulsed through colours: green, gold, violet, red.
Now, as I stared, I realised the cuff and my heartbeat were beating in unison. A slow, shared rhythm. Intentional enough to make me frown.
Zayden must have noticed me staring.
“The more runes they give you, the more powerful they think you are,” he said, lifting his own cuff. His had space left to add more. “I know Hightower put you in the top class, but that cuff really should be even more of an indicator of what they think of you.”
Hightower’s torture system feared me already. Part of me was secretly pleased—another confirmation that I was a monster worth fearing. But the rest knew it made everything harder: getting Draven out, staying under the radar, keeping myself off any lists. It was going to be more difficult if I was a hot commodity to a bitch that needed her wings chopped off.
“I presume it was the same reason she got me to fight in her death pit?” I asked as my hand went back into my pocket.
Back to my thorns.
Zayden exhaled a soft laugh. “It’s part of your three-step initiation,” he said. “Hightower wants to test your reaction speed, instincts. The cuffs make it possible to do it without her risking losing a good soldier too soon. It would be pointless to have a military academy that lets students die in training. They’d never have enough soldiers to fight.”
I looked down at mine again—my personal death accessory with mood lighting. Just what every little dead girl dreamt of.
“I could kill all of my inevitable enemies without getting penalised for it?” I asked.
