Page 4 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
My stomach twisted in the heartbeat before he spoke.
“The Thane demands your presence in the longhouse.” His soft voice carved through the air and straight through my chest.
My uncle… my Thane and complete shadow-throned sadist, who hadn’t spoken more than a handful of words to me since I was dragged here, was demanding my presence before the sun had even finished her yawn.
I couldn’t do anything but nod. As much as I wanted to hide from my uncle, better yet, to run and never look back, I needed to understand why he had brought me here.
And how long he intended to let me live.
With leaden steps, I turned back to my childhood bedroom, a room full of carved and stitched dragons—the ancestors that were supposed to watch over me in my sleep.
They had brought me comfort once, but there was no solace to be found where my uncle was concerned.
I wasn’t foolish enough to keep him waiting, either. So I pulled on my cloak over my nightgown, twisted my thick hair into a braid, and stepped into boots that still felt like someone else’s.
Then I walked away from the room full of memories and ghosts and the kind of hope only a child can afford. But now I knew the truth.
The dragons had abandoned us long ago. Nothing in this room had protected me when it mattered.
And they sure as hells wouldn’t protect me from whatever my uncle had planned.
Everly
The courtyard buzzedwith the kind of everyday noises that I used to find comforting. The rhythmic scrape of fabric against a washing board, the quiet swirling of the dawnbrew being ladled into cups, and low voices gossiping over their carved mugs.
Of course, back then, the gossip had felt harmless, not edged with words like traitor and monster andwhore.
Perhaps I would have cared less if the words didn’t scrape along the raw edge of all the guilt I carried. After all, they weren’t wrong.
I was a traitor.
As angry as I had been walking into camp that first day, that rage had been harder to cling to when I saw the broken families and hollow expressions of the clan that had been decimated only a decade ago.
By the male I still dreamed about every night.
I forced the thought of the Frostgrave King from my mind as I stretched, wincing at the pull in my shoulders.
My wings burned from the effort, the long-unused muscles trembling. Even the base of my spine ached, every joint stiff, as if my body resented the sky as much as it yearned for it. It hadbeen too long since I’d flown, and the strain still clung to every bone.
Alaric stepped into my periphery. His wings flared, subtly shielding me from the several sets of eyes that flitted between my shimmering wings and my winter-blue hair with disgust.
He held out a steaming mug of dawnbrew like an offering, one I quickly accepted, inhaling the bittersweet tea like it was a lifeline.
I let a bit of my annoyance cloud out the guilt when Tavrik walked by, eyeing me with suspicion like he hadn’t dragged me here himself.
“Have you taken to dosing the dawnbrew with memory loss tonic?” I muttered to Alaric under my breath.
His lips tilted into something that might have been a smile. “Not today, why?”
I took a long sip from my mug, relishing the way it warmed me from the inside out. It wasn’t nearly as cold here as it had been in Winter, yet the bone-deep chill clung to me all the same, like a frosty shadow I couldn’t shake.
“It’s just that they seem so shocked every morning all over again when I emerge,” I replied. “It’s impressive, really.”
Though I supposed it was preferable to the treatment I would have gotten in Winter if I had revealed my wings, since at least here, I was still breathing.
I spread my wings wider as I walked past, posturing like someone who had been granted a weapon instead of a female who was, by all accounts, helpless. Again.
My fingers drifted to my wrist, rubbing the bare skin. It felt wrong without Batty’s weight coiled there, her quiet hum a reminder that I wasn’t entirely alone.
