Page 15 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
He had been ruthless before, but he was beyond that now. It made no sense the way the bond still cried out for him, like it didn’t realize that hewasthe danger.
I met her eyes solidly. “Everywhere is enemy territory for me, and my skills with a dagger were hardly enough to protect me when I needed them.”
Not against my uncle, and not against my husband if he decided to kill me after all, Nevara’s visions be damned.
Zerina averted her gaze, shaking her head slightly. “The Thane was trying to help you.”
I scoffed, turning back to the targets. “Well, I suppose you can pray to the Shard Mother you never find yourself in need of hisassistance.”
We didn’t talk after that, just as I had known we wouldn’t. Conversation always came to a halt where my mana, or lack thereof, was concerned. For all the words hurled in my direction these past days, Hollow was never one of them.
Yet every time I tried to bring it up to my mother or uncle, I was met with warning glares and stony silences.
Each night, it frayed a little more at my raw nerves.
I had lived my entire life kept in the dark. My mother had dyed my hair under the pretense of braiding it, had bound my mana before I could remember, and had never once mentioned that I was half Winter until the day she had thrust a blade in my hand and told me to run.
Shards only knew what secrets Draven had kept. And Nevara…
Nevara had known the most of all. Over and over, I turned her words around in my head.
This was the only way I could see.
She must have known that I would come here. She was bound to the Winter Court, and she had never said that I couldn’t die, only that Draven couldn’t kill me. Had she let me be taken to get me out of Draven’s way, to pave the way for a new bride?
Bile rose in my throat, and I swallowed it down.
There was, of course, another possibility. If Winter still needed my mana…maybe there was a way for me to get it back.
One way or another, the secrecy had stretched on long enough. I intended to get answers tonight.
Everly
That evening,I prepared myself to shatter the fragile truce I had been forced into, trying not to wonder what the fallout would be.
Tension hung in the dining room, so thick I could all but see it filling the air around us, like the bloody shards of ice that settled around my sister’s estate with each Tharnok that met its end.
The rest of the clan felt it too.
Each scrape of cutlery dragged through the stillness, each bite taken too cautiously, as though those eating feared the sound might draw the attention of their Thane.
I stared past the haunch of meat resting between us, its charred skin splitting where my uncle had carved away the first slice. The tang of smoke and fat mixed with the faint sweetness of berry-wine, heavy on my tongue.
It was suffocating. I was suffocating.
Or at least, I would, if I had to get through another day pretending that I didn’t want to slowly eviscerate the male across the table every time I looked at him.
“Problems, my niece?” His voice was as condescending as his smile.
My mother’s emerald eyes flared briefly, subtly, though she continued eating her meal in silence.
I gritted my teeth, reminding myself that I had nowhere else to go. I was at his mercy.
Again.
But that didn’t mean I had to be in the dark, too.
I gripped my mug a little tighter and drained the remaining wine as if it would offer either the courage I needed to speak up or perhaps some eloquence at the very least.
