Page 62 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
“I don’t know,” I said at last. “You can’t miss what you never had.”
Wynnie sucked in a sharp breath. For a heartbeat, I thought she might argue, but she only exhaled slowly, as though choosing her words with care.
“We promised honesty always, Little Sister,” she said. Her voice was soft, but it carried like steel through the quiet. “But you can’t blame me when you lie to yourself. And the male who cradled your broken body like it might just break him too…”
She swallowed, her eyes glistening with an unspoken grief. “That was nowhere close to something you’ve never had.”
Sleep refused to come.
I lay still as long as I could bear, watching the auroras spill their light across the vaulted ceiling while my sister’s breathing rose and fell in steady cadence beside me.
Eventually, when the silence pressed in too tightly, I slipped from the bed, throwing one of the blankets around my shouldersbefore padding across the chamber. My bare feet whispered against the frost-kissed stone toward the large balcony doors.
They were still frozen shut with Draven’s mana, but I could see the sky more clearly from here.
Outside, the night unfurled like ribbons of color. Sapphire, emerald, and amethyst light rippled across the sky, prismatic veils bending and curling like silk caught in the wind.
I pressed my palm to the glass, watching frost bloom in delicate crystals at the edges of the pane.
My gaze drifted east, toward the Wilds and my mother.
I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Draven said she was alive, but how did he know? She might have been that night, but what happened after we left? Was she safe? Was anyone?
And why had she given him her necklace?
My fingers drifted up to my throat, and I traced the shape of Veyr.
Was it some twisted goodbye? A way of letting me know that she wasn’t coming? Or that she was? Was it a message? Some signal I couldn’t understand…
I thought again of the eerie pull I’d felt toward whatever was inside. The raw power that emanated from the crystal and the way it called to some dark, buried part of me.
A shiver racked my spine as I shoved those thoughts away, unwilling to focus on the strange pull any longer.
I leaned closer to the window. Beyond the frosted glass, the auroras shifted, their green glow deepening and sharpening until there was no longer light at all but eyes—his eyes.
The breath caught in my throat.
For a moment, I wasn’t looking at the night sky but staring at Draven’s reflection. Water dripped from his hands as he braced them on a basin, washing his face.
Shadows cut across his features, beneath his aurora gaze and along the sharp lines of his jaw, and the sweep of his white-blond hair falling loose over his brow.
He looked… tired. Mortal, almost, if such a thing could ever be said about the Frostgrave King. The bond between us surged like a rising tide, the tether between us snapping taut like it was trying to drag me toward him.
Then his gaze shifted from his own reflection in the mirror to something else. To me?
The jolt sent me stumbling back from the window, my heart hammering against my ribs.
Could he feel me in his subconscious? I had sure as shards never been able to feel him in mine.
I crept back into bed, curling into the warmth of my sister’s side and wondering what fresh hells the bond would unleash on us tomorrow.
If the blasted thing thought it was being helpful, or if it knew that it was only ever finding new ways for us to hurt ourselves.
Everly
Over the next few days,Wynnie and I moved slowly, picked at the food Mirelda brought us, and traded our broken stories back and forth. My time back in the Unseelie Wilds, or as much of it as I could bring myself to share. And hers of wyverns and the time she’d spent first with my husband, then with the Visionary.
She told me about flying on the back of a griffon, which she swore was not nearly as fun as it sounded. Though her opinion was likely colored by the whole, wyvern knocking them out of the air thing.
