Page 61 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
Mirelda’s features sobered as she looked me over, questions brimming in her eyes that she would never ask when her precious majesty hadn’t deemed to tell her.
Who was she to him, that he had trusted her with the secret of his Hollow wife? But not with my return?
None of it made sense. Nothing he did made sense.
That feeling of unease only grew as the night wore on. Eventually Mirelda excused herself for the evening, though not before a brief tussle with the closet.
“Lady Noerwyn, you should have some clothes now as well,” the maid called from behind the door, her tone brokering no argument.
A rustle of fabric denoted a certain amount of displeasure with that arrangement, but Mirelda pretended not to notice, just as she pretended not to notice the way my sister and I were locked inside of these rooms when she took Batty with her for an evening flight.
By the time dinner was over, I was more than ready to collapse into bed, even if sleep still felt far away.
Wynnie stoked the fire, its glow chasing the chill from the corners of the room. She shoved extra furs onto my side before slipping beneath the covers herself.
For a long while, neither of us spoke. The silence stretched taut, heavier than it should have been with the one person I trusted implicitly.
“Wynnie…” My throat scraped around the words. “You said you took Draven to find me.”
“I did.”
I swallowed and stared up at the ceiling. The auroras had painted my room in hues of green and purple light, I followed the patterns as they danced along the crystal chandelier before asking my next question.
“How did you know where to look?”
She tilted her head, like she was trying to parse out the intent behind the question. “Our father told me once, on one of his many upstanding occasions of stumbling in late smelling like a brothel.”
“And you never told me?” There it was. The feeling niggling at me, scraping at the raw wound of more secrets, like the ones I had walked into torture for the sake of unearthing.
I never expected them from her.
She sucked in a breath. The pillow shifted as she turned her head to look at me. “I wasn’t hiding it, Evy. You never wanted to talk about them, and having a way to find them when you were actively hiding from them didn’t seem relevant. I wasn’t even sure he was telling the truth.”
It made sense.
I turned over to face her, and she wrapped her hand around mine. I could feel the sincerity in her touch, in her moonlit eyes.
Something eased inside of me, and I took my first real breath in days. I nodded.
She entwined our fingers, giving my hand a reassuring squeeze.
“Ask me anything you want to know. Remember, honesty between us, always.”
The words were familiar, a promise we had whispered into the dark as children, when we were all each other had.
“Do you miss your husband?” The question slipped out before I could stop it. I wasn’t even sure why that was the one that clawed its way free.
Wynnie’s free hand stilled where it was smoothing the furs. She stared past me for a long moment, her lips parting, then closing again. I could see the debate flicker in her eyes, the reluctance, the weight of what she didn’t want to admit.
Finally, she said quietly, “No. Yorrick lost my love the day he refused to have our wedding somewhere my sister could attend.” Her mouth pressed flat, and she shook her head. “But…I’m still sad that he’s gone. No one deserved to die like that, and he did protect me in the end.”
Her gaze flicked to mine. “Do you miss your husband?”
She was always more perceptive than I wanted her to be. More relentless, too.
Did some part of me miss him? Was that why I had asked that particular question?
My jaw clenched. Somewhere underneath the fury I clung to, my mind betrayed me with flashes I hadn’t asked for: the heat of his hands steadying me in the bath, the ghost of tenderness threaded through violence, the look in his eyes when he had torn through monsters to reach me. Moments that sat uncomfortably beside the memory of his cruelty, his ice.
