Page 45 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
But that was before his brother’s blade carved through my skin.
Before the chains.
Before the blood.
My mouth watered even as my gut twisted, my mind not wanting to go back down that road. I lifted the spoon, savoring the rich smell of cooked venison and spiced herbs. The dumpling burst the moment I bit down, and the broth scalded my tongue.
All at once, the rich salt tasted metallic and coppery. Like blood.
Shards damn everything.
My chest clenched, the spoon trembling in my grasp. I forced myself to swallow, though it scraped like glass all the way down.
My vision swam as I set the spoon down on the tray, hunger pains gone just as quickly as they had come.
“You must try to eat,” Amias said softly, watching me with that healer’s calm. “Your body needs it.”
If only my mind would let me.
I stared down at the tray. Instead of lifting the spoon again, my fingers traced those invisible lines along my skin, the exact paths I remembered the dagger carving.
They should be angry and red, puckered with scarring. They should hurt as much as the memories did.
But there was nothing. Not even tenderness. Not even the memory of a bruise…
“You remember what isn’t there,” Healer Amias said quietly, as though he could read the panic stuttering through me. “Our minds carry what the body has forgotten. And sometimes the memory of pain hurts longer than the wounds themselves.”
I swallowed hard and lowered my gaze back to the broth.
“How long was I out?” I asked before he could say anything else. My voice came out sharper than intended.
He smiled faintly, though his green eyes looked shadowed with fatigue. “Three days.”
Three days. The words hit strangely, both too long and not nearly long enough.
“Your wounds would have been faster to heal, had it not been for the poison that kept your blood from clotting,” he added.
Of course, that bastard had also used poison. Kyros had never intended for me to leave that cave. My vision began to swim, my breaths coming a little too short.
“The evidence may not show on your skin,” Amias continued, “but the trauma you endured was very real. Even with my own extensive training, I might not have been able to keep you…stable without the mana from your mate.”
Mate? That was an Unseelie term…
Did he know that? Or was it something they said in Spring Court, as well? I tried to focus on that rather than the panic that swelled in my chest at the certain knowledge of how close I had crept to death.
And that, once again, Draven was the one who had kept me from it.
I swallowed back the lump in my throat.
“Is that why I am here?” I asked, gesturing to the regal sheets and midnight curtains. “In the king’s suites, instead of my own?”
Amias nodded. “Though, His Majesty has instructed that you return to your own rooms once you’re stable enough, and you certainly appear to be.”
I narrowly resisted the urge to ask if that was the same majesty who had frozen me out of said rooms. But it wasn’t worth being barred from returning to my rooms now that the ice had melted. Being trapped here in his space was…lonelier, somehow, than being on my own.
I nodded instead, moving the tray with the unfinished food to get to my feet.
“I do have one final concern,” he said with the kind of gentleness that immediately had me on edge. “I wasn’t able to check your wings.”
