Page 35 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
I wanted to argue. I tried. But every response died on my blood-soaked lips.
“He will think you’ve run back to your Frostgrave monster. That you chose those Seelie scum over us. Won’t he,Frostling?”
I swallowed back a sob.
He was right. Of course he was.
Maybe my uncle and mother would send out a search party, maybe they would find pieces of my corpse littering the border. But I could see it all playing out so clearly now, how easily the monster in front of me would deflect suspicion.
After all, no one had dragged me from my guarded rooms. No one had forced me to leave the hut. I had done that all on my own.
Kyros made a tutting sound and shook his head. I tried to fight the burning at the back of my eyes, but hopelessness overwhelmed me as he dug the blade into my skin once again, this time deeper into my neck.
Tears streamed down my cheeks.
More memories flashed through my mind, moments in time where all I felt was pain and the looming presence of death waiting in the shadows.
The hot breath of Tharnoks pressing in on me. The whispers of the Voidtouched on the mountains. The bite of thorny bramble against my half-frozen feet as I raced toward a family I didn’t know if I could trust, all while believing my mother had died. Died protecting me.
But this time there was no sister to comfort me and bring me in from the cold. No uncle to stop the mages from going too far. And no husband to slay the monsters that were coming in on every side.
I closed my eyes and swallowed down the plea forming on my lips. It wouldn’t help anyway. All it would do is sate his sadistic desire to hear me beg.
So I went somewhere deep inside of myself, trying to shut out the agony of each slice of his blade, the laughter of the fae around us, and the bone-deep knowledge that cruelty was the same the world over, and always seemed to prey on the weak.
It was all I could do to keep my wings in, the single thing I wouldn’t let him hurt, no matter how hard he tried to taunt and torture me into releasing them. When the darkness finally came for me, I welcomed it. It was the only reprieve I had.
Somewhere past the scent of blood, I caught the faint hint of juniper and fresh snow. Mountain air. Heady, powerful.
Furious.
Like the frostbeasts that roamed the Winter Court.
No,that wasn’t quite right. A monster, but not those…
My monster.
It was the last conscious thought I had before a wave of icy mana swept over the room. Darkness overtook me.
Morta Mea.
Whether it was real or in my head, the words made sense.My death.
Time and time again, every road seemed to lead here.
Draven
I thoughtI had known what it was to feel anger before. To be so consumed by rage that it possessed me as if it were its own being.
I’d felt it once at the Frost Grave Pass… But this, this was so much worse.
“Morta Mea,” the words slipped from my mouth like a prayer and a curse as my gaze landed on my wife.
Her head hung limply over her shoulder, her arms shackled to the wall with iron chains, and her skin was stained a gleaming wet crimson from her own blood.
A growl ripped from my throat. Mana poured out of me, crashing through the cave in a vortex of ice and death.
One of the Unseelie bastards was stupid enough to rush forward, his skin flaying from his bones the closer he came. His scream echoed off the stone walls as another attempted to do the same. She unleashed an arrow that cracked in the frozen air and crumbled to dust at my feet.
